On Friday, I watched TAYLOR SWIFT, in the very good NETFLIX documentary MISS AMERICANA, wrestle with the decision of whether to break her career-long political silence and publicly support the Democrat in Tennessee's U.S. Senate race, while two older men on her support team did their best to stop her. Your career, they said. Your safety, they warned. As if a 28-year-old woman who had navigated one of the 21st century's most successful pop music careers, and who's a huge DIXIE CHICKS fan to boot, hadn't thought of those things. In the next scene, I watched Swift sit on a couch with two women (her mother and her publicist), the men nowhere in sight, as she hit "share" on the INSTAGRAM post that landed her in the middle of the 2018 midterms, into a thousand cable-news headlines and, soon afterward, into the head of the president. Her candidate didn't win but Swift, we learn, won something else in that moment: her freedom. Which, it isn't hard to believe, is what scared those two men most of all. Two days later, during halftime of the SUPER BOWL, I watched JENNIFER LOPEZ unveil a cape she was wearing to reveal a Puerto Rican flag while her 11-year-old daughter, EMME MARIBEL MUÑIZ, sang a chorus of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's "BORN IN THE USA" and several other children sang from inside cages. The other side of the cape was an American flag. This multilayered protest may have been the most pointed political statement ever made in a half-century-plus of Super Bowl halftime shows, an annual TV spectacle broadcast to 100-million-plus people on behalf of a sports league that's done its best to steer clear of difficult political conversations. And it was done without missing a step of the Latin dance celebration that Lopez and SHAKIRA were brought in by the NFL to deliver. One wonders what the men in the room at *those* meetings said. Or if the men in the room ever quite understood "Born in the USA" in the first place, as so many people did not. Did anyone ask J.Lo to shut up and sing? I like to think someone did, and that she answered by inserting that particular moment into her song "LET'S GET LOUD," which is as good an anthem for pop right now as I can think of: Let's get loud and sing. Kansas City—you know, the one in Missouri—won the football game. Pop won the weekend... There were no rock bands that sounded like GANG OF FOUR before Gang of Four, and a few thousand that did their best to sound exactly like them afterward, but none came all that close because none had a bass player who could do much more than stiffly imitate DAVE ALLEN's deconstructed funk basslines or a guitarist who could honor the trebly abrasion of ANDY GILL's bombed-out amplifier-factory guitar parts while also actually playing them. Gill's guitar sound, which involved rejecting both tube amps and distortion pedals, was one of the great battle cries—battle shrieks really—of the original punk-rock era. What he doesn't get enough credit for is the rhythm guitar mastery with which he deployed that sound, turning scrapes, feedback and what sounded like shards of broken glass into perfect minimalist R&B photonegatives. He was a kind of antimatter JIMMY NOLEN. And like Nolen's boss, JAMES BROWN, he was a musical prime minister who brooked no dissent. "[Singer] Jon [King] and I liked to say that Gang of Four were like a committee and we were all involved," he told LOUDER SOUND. "All bollocks. Me and Jon were running the show. We invented it, but we pretended it was all four of us." So now you know. RIP... Missing from SPOTIFY and all other streaming services: Most of Gang of Four's pre-1983 catalog. Capital, it fails us now, so to speak... LIL WAYNE, unmasked... RIP also HAROLD BEANE, IVAN KRÁL, FRANZ MAZURA and JOSH PAPPE... Best wishes to BLACKALICIOUS' GIFT OF GAB.