Gang of Four / Entertainment! (Remastered) / 1979
Natural's Not In It
cold, clinical, sardonic
A slogan-dense critique of consumer capitalism's colonization of desire, where leisure, sex, and love are recast as products and market relations. Gang of Four deliver this as a series of blunt, aphoristic statements rather than a story, matching the mechanical funk groove to the song's argument about bodies turned into business.
commodification of desire capitalism and leisure power disguised as pleasure alienation ideology critique
Who's speaking
A collective, analytical voice—closer to a pamphlet or lecture than a personal confession—addressing the listener directly about a shared condition rather than a specific person.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as an argument that accumulates: leisure itself becomes a problem to be solved, love and sex are exposed as market transactions, biblical allusion warns against looking back with longing, and the repeated hook drives home that desire is manufactured and sold back to consumers. The song ends where it began, looping rather than resolving, which is itself the point.
How it's built
Built on short, repeated verse blocks that function like theses, interrupted by a stark six-line chant that hammers a single idea through repetition. The return of the opening verses at the end creates a closed loop rather than a resolution, reinforcing the song's claim that there's no escape from the system it describes.
Section by section
Opening verses
“the problem of leisure”
Free time is presented not as a gift but as a dilemma requiring management, immediately reframing pleasure as something engineered and administered rather than spontaneous.
Second verse
“the body is good business”
The body is explicitly named as an economic asset, collapsing intimacy and physical existence into commodities to be maintained for profit.
Third verse
“remember lot's wife”
The biblical warning against looking backward is repurposed as pressure to keep consuming and reinventing rather than questioning the system, while the closing complaint about heaven suggests the promised good life is itself a source of discomfort.
Middle section
“natural is not in it”
Here the song states its thesis most directly: what feels instinctual—desire, sex, love—is actually structured by power and social relations, not nature. This section also introduces the idea that relationships are inherently coercive rather than free.
Repackaged sex chant
“repackaged sex keeps your interest”
The chant strips the song down to a single mechanical idea, using repetition to mimic the numbing, cyclical nature of marketing and consumer desire it critiques.
Craft
- aphorism
- Lines function as detachable, quotable statements rather than connected narrative, mimicking advertising copy or ideological slogans.
- biblical allusion
- The reference to Lot's wife, turned to salt for looking back, is repurposed as a warning against nostalgia for authenticity or resistance to reinvention under capitalism.
- repetition/anaphora
- The six-fold repeated line late in the song functions like a jingle, enacting the very commercial conditioning the lyrics describe.
- paradox
- Framing 'heaven' as something that causes physical discomfort collapses the promise of paradise into complaint, undercutting utopian consumer fantasy.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a Marxist-inflected critique of how capitalism absorbs even intimate and bodily experience into exchange relations, using biblical language to suggest that resistance or nostalgia is punished while conformity is rewarded. An alternative reading could hear it as a more personal complaint about the exhaustion of dating and desire under modern life, but the song's insistently impersonal, aphoristic language and lack of individual characters make the systemic reading stronger.
Context
Gang of Four emerged from Leeds' post-punk scene with explicit ties to Marxist and situationist ideas about ideology and everyday life; Entertainment! (1979) is widely regarded as a landmark for pairing danceable, angular funk-punk with overtly political lyrics. I don't have specific documented biographical detail about the writing of this particular song beyond general knowledge of the album's concerns.
Listen for
- The tension between the funky, danceable groove and the cold, analytical lyrics
- The way the chorus-like repeated line functions almost like an advertising jingle
- The biblical reference and how it's repurposed for a modern critique
- The return of the opening verses at the end, creating a loop with no resolution
- Andy Gill's scratchy, percussive guitar work underscoring the mechanical themes
About Gang of Four
Gang of Four are an English post-punk band, formed in 1976 in Leeds. The original members were singer Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, drummer Hugo Burnham, and bass guitarist Dave Allen.
1977 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue