Gang of Four’s 40-year interrogation of complicity has been so thorough, pretty much anything the UK post-punk band has undertaken—signing to EMI, licensing a song to Microsoft, watching their original bassist join the Artist Relations team at Apple Music—became a sort of praxis. You could even view the band’s middling recent years—during which every original member departed save for guitarist Andy Gill—as a meta-narrative about the kind of brand maintenance required by late-stage capitalism. So when Gill came across a clip of presidential daughter Ivanka Trump parrying a CBS interviewer’s question about complicity regarding her father’s white-nationalist policies, how could he not reappropriate it?
Cannily, Gill made his response the centerpiece of the band’s latest project, the rather thin Complicit EP. The brittly funky “Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)” forswears any legit commentary, settling for that very 21st-century form of discourse: dunking on someone. “Ivanka” feints at inhabiting her headspace, using a quote from the CBS interview (“I don’t know what it means to be complicit”) as a jump-off for some decently snide, but not particularly illuminating barbs. Then, like your Democratic uncle replying to a Chris Hayes tweet, things go off the rails. “In the morning Daddy wants me in his room/It’s where we get together,” winks singer John Sterry, “It’s not true that Daddy calls my name in stormy weather.”
Amazingly, that isn’t the only song on the EP inspired by a television broadcast. Like a Marxist version of Ivanka’s father, Gill has also drawn creative energy from the endless time-fill of cable news. Opening track “Lucky”—the product of Gill watching “six white men in suits arguing about the stock markets”—is a thumping, treble-fuzz indictment of capitalism’s meritocracy myth that lands some glancing blows against its current captain. Gill enlists backing singers to provide the kind of ersatz-funk frisson found on 1982’s Songs of the Free; on the bridge, bassist Thomas McNeice affects some nauseating dubstep wubs. He gets to do some vintage post-punk bell-ringing on “I’m a Liar,” a wind-buffeted slog through our current digital winter. Sterry attempts some prophet-without-honor poignance (“They said I’m a liar/’Cause no one believes when the place is on fire”) before succumbing to the watery vocal processing.
Though the band is planning a full-length follow-up, Complicit doesn’t suggest that we’ll see much of Gang of Four’s particular strengths. In their prime, few acts were better at chronicling the thousands of ways we are induced to sell ourselves—and each other—out. Certainly no one else could make that kind of interrogation sound so crackling and immediate. Complicit, however, is content to thumb its nose at particularly vile actors instead of considering the script they’ve been handed.
