Entertainment! looks less like an album sleeve than a political pamphlet that has somehow landed in a record bin. Against a flat red field, the same handshake appears three times: a cowboy and an Indigenous American facing one another in a scene that initially reads as friendship. The captions destroy that reading. The Indigenous man smiles because he thinks the cowboy is his friend; the cowboy smiles because he believes he has fooled him and can exploit him.
The design was created by Gang of Four singer Jon King. Its method is central to the point. Rather than inventing a heroic new image, King took a familiar piece of popular culture and changed its meaning by pairing it with language that exposes the power relationship the original scene asks the viewer to ignore. The source image has been identified as a still from a Winnetou film, part of a popular European Western series.
That collision between image and caption places the sleeve close to the détournement tactics associated with the Situationist International: take material already circulating through mass culture, alter its context, and make it argue against the assumptions it once carried. Entertainment! does this without polish. Faces are reduced to blocks of red and white, the typography feels clipped and assembled, and the explanatory text snakes around the frames like notes added to a classroom diagram.
The joke in the title is that all of this is being sold as entertainment. Gang of Four were making danceable, physical music while writing about work, consumption, sex, class and power. The cover refuses to let the packaging pretend those subjects are separate from the marketplace holding the record. Even the exclamation point feels like advertising language turned back on itself.
The result is one of post-punk's clearest examples of sleeve design functioning as part of the record's argument. Before the needle drops, Entertainment! has already asked the listener to look at an ordinary cultural image, distrust its surface, and ask who benefits from the story being told.
