By Jeff Chang

Chew on this: Gang of Four - from left, guitarist-vocalist Andy Gill, bassist Dave Allen, drummer Hugo Burnham, and vocalist Jon King - are caught in repose, pre-1982.

The stage light comes up, revealing Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham pounding out a throbbing beat. Andy Gill rips at his guitar, spinning out a run of agitated chords as if he were Wire's Bruce Gilbert interpreting the J.B.'s Jimmy Nolen. "Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you," King snarls. "But I know it's only lust." Then he twists like a stockbroker stumbling drunkenly out of a Broadway peepshow. This is a 25-year-old video, and there can be no doubt that an aspiring guitar hero or heroine is studying this clip somewhere.

It's been 24 years since the original lineup of Gang of Four played together on the same stage, and the timing could not be better for them to return. Rock – having weathered an identity crisis during the past decade, bucked down by an inferiority complex inspired by hip-hop and dance music, drawn into the fashionable but dead-end revivalism of the Strokes and White Stripes, and tucked away into insular post-rock, nu-metal, and emo scenes – has got its groove back by hugging up on its post-punk past. It's a great way to nod sideways to black music, to acknowledge three intervening decades of race, gender, and identity critique, and, most important, to just rock the fuck out.

With John Lydon disappeared, Ari Up still high in the Rasta hills, and Joe Strummer left to be repped only by a growing shelf of books, where better to start the neo-new wave revival than with Go4? Their DNA runs wild through two of the best bands of the moment, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand, as well as pretenders like the Rapture, the Futureheads, and Radio 4. Working with a big bottom borrowed from Burnham and Allen, using moves stolen from King and Gill, these groups are only the most literal-minded of Go4 enthusiasts.

"Gang of Four was absolutely essential to pioneering independent-label bands of the '80s like Mission of Burma, the Minutemen, Big Black, and Fugazi," says Michael Azerrad, who wrote the liner notes for the new Rhino reissue of Go4's 1979 debut, Entertainment! "For people who not only wanted to make a new kind of music but also think and feel in ways not imagined or permitted by rock's old guard, Gang of Four was a godsend. Also, it allowed people who couldn't dance to appreciate James Brown."

McLuhan, Marx, and Mao

Meeting on the campus of Leeds University in 1977, punk's year zero, King and Gill were soon running the school's film society while studying fine arts and Situationism. They could be comfortable in all-night bull sessions about "complicity" and "overdetermination." Their lyrics were like a critical theory seminar, which only then was beginning to become the rage on university campuses. They packed songs with aphorisms that triangulated McLuhan, Marx, and Mao.

Simon Reynolds, whose book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 (Faber) was recently released in the U.K. and will arrive here in 2006, notes that post-punk emerged from a polarized political and intellectual climate not unlike the current North American blue-red divide. Margaret Thatcher's Tories and the racist, ultraright National Front and British Movement were gaining ground. At the same time, cultural studies pioneers like Dick Hebdige were discovering new forms of praxis, while their students joined anarchist, feminist, and Marxist organizations. Reynolds says, "In some ways I see the whole post-punk era as a gigantic riposte to the Rolling Stones' "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll" – the resignation and underachievement represented by the cop-out sentiment of that song, which basically kissed the '60s good-bye. Basically insisting, no, it's not just good-times music; it can be a vessel for all this weightier stuff. Gang of Four would have been in the vanguard of that move to see how much substance rock could carry and still be rock."

Certainly Go4's lyrics read well as text. "Paralysed," on 1981's Solid Gold (Warner Bros.), is still stunning, interlocking haikus on late capitalism's desperately emasculating effects. One of Go4's best songs is called "Why Theory?" Songs like "Damaged Goods" carried on dramatic internal dialogues. Figuratively and literally, they read like theater.

But the music can't be separated from the text. Most rock crits focused on Gill's guitar, and for good reason. Like some pomo Robert Johnson at the crossroads, he brought together two kinds of rock futurism: Jimi Hendrix's explosive caterwaul and Pete Shelley's and Steve Diggle's stinging attack. Zipping from horizontal buzz-drones to vertical wails almost like a turntablist, Gill's is the sound every post-postpunker will sell his or her soul for at the intersection.

Yet too little has been written about the herky-jerky beat-throb precision of Allen and Burnham. Allen came to the group by responding to an ad that read, "fast rivvum & blues band requires fast rivvum & blues bass player." Burnham, a college friend who had marched with King and Gill in rallies against the National Front, became the best Brit drummer of his generation, next to the Clash's Topper Headon and 23 Skidoo's Alex Turnbull.

'Perverted disco'

The band proceeded from the pub-rock antiwar sing-along of "Armalite Rifle" to building-block reggae not far from the Clash's distillation of Lee "Scratch" Perry's "Police and Thieves" to what they came to call "perverted disco" and "angular, metallic, white sexless funk." "I've always loved music which has space in it and has room," Gill told Perfect Sound Forever's Jason Gross. By Entertainment! they had attained an astounding range. "Not Great Men" offered dub logic – sounds attaching then dropping out, the sum and the difference both bringing the tension to a boiling point. On Solid Gold, they brought in American funk producer Jimmy Douglass, who helped sharpen the band's increasingly nuanced rhythmic attack, the fragile "Paralyzed" on one end and the blasting "If I Could Keep It for Myself" on the other. Hedrush's Tahir later pitched up "A Hole in the Wallet" and flipped it for the Roots' Phrenology magnum opus, "Water" (MCA, 2002).

The Another Day/Another Dollar EP (Warner Bros., 1982) tossed up as unlikely an anthem as anything ever released by a major label, the rude and proud "To Hell with Poverty." But by the end of Songs of the Free (Warner Bros., 1982), by which time Allen had left, there was a sense the band that had once summed up "What We All Want" was now like Chic after Risqué, no longer knowing what it wanted. The album opened with three songs exploring more melodic territory – "Call Me Up," the Dance Fever crossover hit "I Love a Man in Uniform," and "We Live As We Dream, Alone" – while pointing toward Depeche Mode-ification.

The 1983 album, Hard (Warner Bros.), and the 1991 full-length, Mall (Polydor), were disappointments, and 1995's Shrinkwrapped (Castle) marked only a partial return to form. With Burnham's departure after Songs of the Free (Allen had left after Solid Gold), the worst of the flaccid, derivative sound was epitomized by Mall's cover of Bob Marley and the Wailers' "Soul Rebel." This was music that might be piped into the elevators rising up to luxury hotel suites, far from what the Delta 5's Ros Allen once called the "spontaneous amateurism" of the original Leeds street scene.

Yet Songs of the Free's "The History of the World" and "Of the Instant" also revealed that King's and Gill's worldviews had cohered. Along with their feminist-influenced dissection of masculinity, they had developed a biting, even prophetic critique of corporate globalization and neoliberalism. This made Go4's failure more than musical: just play Mall's "F.M.U.S.A.," a sharp critique of race, gender, and imperialism set among Vietnam's brothels that tells a story more coherent and haunting than the Clash's "Straight to Hell" but has the sonic impact of a wet towel, next to 2 Live Crew's 1989 cut "Me So Horny." In some ways, the fate of Go4 paralleled the destiny of the radical intellectuals of the late '70s struggling to adapt to the 21st century, confined to a small audience by their inability to continue to master the medium for their message.

Imagining more

So Go4's return – and judging by their set lists, they seem to be focusing largely on their pre-'83 music – occasions a kind of nostalgia for leftist certainty. They had emerged in the context of a street-level feminism and the Rock Against Racism movement, an "identity politics" that was vibrant, funny, dangerous, confrontational, never scurred. The evidence was in the indie music of Delta 5, Essential Logic, the Au Pairs, Kleenex/Lilliput, the Beakers, and the Slits. As late as 1982, Go4's "I Love a Man in Uniform" – with its easy dismissal of big-dick imperialism, "You must be joking, oh man, you must be joking!" – was banned from the BBC when Great Britain launched its adventure in the Falklands. Over a stuttering guitar, King finally spit out the stakes on "Of the Instant": "Who owns what you do? Who owns what you use?" The answer seemed despairing: "We, it seems, can own ourselves in imagination." Perhaps on a hopeful note, they did not take care to add the word "only."

Go4 imagine they might still have something to say in 2005. Two years ago Gill produced those other post-punkers waiting to be rediscovered, Killing Joke, on a new version of their 1980 classic, "Wardance." If "Damaged Goods" was once a song about bad love, it now seems to have Bush-Blair's bad faith beating in its crooked, racing heart, a neoliberal sneer at Iraq and Afghanistan. Here the British supermarket ad pitch – "You know the change will do you good!" – becomes a truism of preemptive neo-imperialism, King's lyric bridging Vietnam and Vietnow.

Greil Marcus once wrote that Entertainment! was an album that illustrated the young first-world collegiate rebel's process of coming to a very uncomfortable realization. As this figure, personified by King, deconstructs his world, he realizes he is indeed complicit with the forces that oppress him and the people he loves. Through his very consuming pleasures, he feeds the capitalist machine that slowly alienates and kills him. Certainly war and globalization – especially as seen in the restless daily spectacle of monopoly media – have made Go4's insights more relevant than ever.

But it also feels like there is more of a sense of hopelessness than there was in 1980, that the change that could do real good is so far away. By now we also know that the responses to that bitter knowledge can often be less than liberating: hipster irony as protection or shield, Napoleon Dynamite-like retreats toward a lost innocence. Jon Savage asked in his liner notes to the 1998 Go4 anthology 100 Flowers Bloom (Rhino), "Could you imagine a contemporary major-label rock group recording a song as critical and vulnerable as 'Paralysed'?" Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, all you aspiring guitar heroes, the question is yours: could you?

Gang of Four play with Radio 4 and Menomena Mon/2-Tues/3, 8 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, S.F. $25 (May 2 show sold out). (415) 346-6000.

Jeff Chang is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin's).