Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)

by Daniel, Drew

  One year later . . .

  After my first exposure to the Second Annual Report, I was a devotee of Throbbing Gristle, studiously absorbing the history of the band and the network of industrial music and experimental noise radiating outward from it: reading issues of Search and Destroy and RE/Search magazine for interviews with the band, and tracking down any industrial music I could find in the record shops of Louisville, Kentucky, in the mid-eighties (haphazard). The RE/Search Industrial Culture Handbook was the required text, and came complete with syllabi in the form of the extensive “reference” sections appended to its interviews with Throbbing Gristle and assorted pals: Cabaret Voltaire, Non, S.P.K. and Z’ev, the abject performance artist Johanna Went and the French art/theory fanzine Sordide Sentimentale. In the case of TG, a complete inventory of the contents of Genesis’s personal library was included. Following these copious leads, I dutifully feasted on the laundry list of subcultural touchstones that seemed to come with the territory of industrial fandom, a kind of anti-Parnassus in which Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy and Jim Jones rub shoulders with Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs and the Comte de Lautreamont. Even bracketing the inherent awkwardness involved in asserting one’s individuality through such twice-removed snobbery (admiration for the favorite writers of one’s favorite bands), I can’t honestly say whether my love of Throbbing Gristle triggered me to pursue the morbid and the extreme, or whether my own sulky temperament simply found an imaginary consolation in the violent scenarios and verité audio contained in TG’s work.

  To some extent, the bloodlust-at-a-safe-remove of industrial geekdom just rode piggyback with the macho aggression and intensity that punk rock had already prepared me to enjoy in controlled bursts, but there was a distinction too: compared with the squeaky kiddie pogoing of the Toy Dolls, Throbbing Gristle were colder, more refined. Industrial culture had to be sought out through deliberate research and slow archival accumulation, consumed on record and in print at a scholarly remove, while punk rock and hardcore were living, breathing scenes, entirely within reach in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time. Punk rock was something I actively participated in and strongly identified with. Punk as I saw it—and, occasionally, made it—could be vital and intense, but it could also be sloppy and laughable. Most of all, punk was fun.

  According to the puritanical logic of my teenage extremist self, this was a problem. Fed up with punk’s boneheaded silliness (i.e., the Dickies), I wound up embracing industrial music and noise culture because their fearless pursuit of the ugly and unpleasant seemed to successfully embody nihilism rather than pay inconsistent lip service to it. “No Fun” was a song of complaint from the Stooges, and when the Sex Pistols covered it they ramped up the obnoxiousness and disdain, but they still, essentially, sounded like people in search of fun who were energetically bitching when it didn’t arrive. The clammy, weedy, thin, unpleasant sounds of Throbbing Gristle’s needling high-end and the dull ache inspired by their relentless low-end throb weren’t the sounds of petty gripes about “no fun,” they literally were no fun: after my first encounters with TG, I felt exhausted and oppressed, as if I’d inhaled antimatter. It was a bummer to listen to, but you somehow felt stronger afterward because you could take it. Perversely, in a logic that perhaps only anorexics and straight-edgers can relate to, I desired it because it was anti-pleasure. In the wake of this encounter, punk rock and hardcore came off as essentially just aberrant forms of rock music, albeit faster and more distorted, and rock music was still about pleasure, about the power-chord anthem, the sing-along chorus, the shouted slogan and dancing in a circle with your friends. It was a delivery system for the comforts of belonging to a group, however ostensibly weird. By contrast, the aesthetic stance modeled by TG didn’t promise “teenage kicks all through the night” but “entertainment through pain” (the official title of Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits). Pain was the point.

  Throbbing Gristle were both less than music and more than music at the same time. Because their work, at least circa Second Annual Report, consisted of spontaneously improvised noise-jams recorded in a lo-fi manner, and frequently featured random snippets of found media rather than through-composed material, it sounded crude, impulsive, too raw and undisciplined to count as “real music.” They didn’t sound to me like people who would, or could, do anything so mundane and rule-bound as practice (later I would learn that, of course, some of them did do just that). Yet their work was, paradoxically, more than music. Bristling with references to abnormal psychology, avant-garde literature and the margins of performance art, TG were low on form but high on content; each record was a virus of subcultural info animating a musical host. Everything about TG seemed to me then to be pregnant with import, a coy reference to some esoteric meaning, a possible clue hinting at a darkly significant . . . something.

  For example: could it be mere coincidence that September 3rd marked the official date of the release of Second Annual Report and the recurrent date of issue for their yearly Industrial Newsletter? Coming from a cadre who called for “nothing less than a total war,” it could hardly be accidental that September 3rd marks the anniversary of the formation of the Allied powers and the official declaration of the Second World War in 1939. The premise that Throbbing Gristle were not making anything so mundane as music, but that they were instead opening a door onto an abject reality that others kept repressed, exerted a powerful attraction for me and inspired the passionate devotion of an adolescent convert. Redolent with sinister references to cult leaders, mass crimes and control mechanisms, TG wasn’t music that let you feel any comfort in the idea of belonging; it was a scraping sound that rubbed raw your paranoid suspicion that the need to belong to anything, including a music scene, was a sign of subjection, just one more form of alienated pleasure. Having happened by accident upon the Music from the Death Factory, my love of Throbbing Gristle soon pushed me to discover, or create, deliberately uncomfortable situations for myself. I wanted to see the death factory for myself.

  I didn’t have to look far. River Road ran along the edge of the Ohio, a throughline that connected downtown to the suburbs. Stringing together little-used parks, a waste-water treatment facility and an abandoned factory, River Road was also my daily commute from home to high school and back again. Armed with a driver’s license, a Chevy Nova and nothing much to do, my friends and I skulked around its corners and dead-ends, looking for something—anything—unusual, hoping to trespass our way out of the everyday. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet had promised us that beneath every tranquil American town there lurked an underbelly of perversion, and like goth nerds everywhere, we dutifully went looking. We jumped the fence surrounding the factory complex and wandered through its concrete shell, testing the echo with teenage ape calls, but the stoner graffiti inside proved that we weren’t even pioneer tourists of decay. And then one sticky summer afternoon I found my heart’s desire.

  Driving past Nugent Sand company’s storage zones, I turned left down a dirt path to look at a building on River Road I’d never really considered before, a nondescript lot set back from the others and fenced off. A metal roof spanned a huge roll-up garage on one side, and a dark office window peered over a paved parking area. It was a weekend and the place was deserted. No one had locked the fence, and the garage had been left open. The parking lot was edged with metal garbage cans, some empty, some filled nearly to the top with an unsavory pinkish white foam/fat slop, its half-chemical and half-organic smell slow-cooking in the sun. As I walked up to the garage and looked into the dark interior I saw what resembled a giant garbage truck, curiously open at the top. It had once been white, but was now stained a gray-brown with mud and was splashed at its edges with an indescribably ominous ruddy grease. Dangling over the edge was a bloodied leg and hoof. Stunned, I climbed up the side of the truck to investigate and stared down into a Bosch-worthy tangle of flyblown carnage. The truck was filled with the decomposing remains of cows and horses, and the stench burnt my eyes. My heart raced at th
e doubled excitement of sneaking my way into something and making a truly gruesome discovery on top of that. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends, whom I was sure would be totally impressed. They were, and soon we started to make strategic visits, photographing the curious piles of discarded hooves, examining the chemical biomuck stored in the vats and taking brief, thrilling peeks at the charnel landscapes of dead flesh on display within the truck. A trip to the public library identified the address, and city records revealed that I had simply wandered into a rendering plant, a processing station in which dead livestock too large to be disposed of privately got carted off by the city and reduced to manageable constituent parts. In other words, it was a Death Factory.

  We called it “The Industrial Place” in honor of Throbbing Gristle, more or less our collective favorite band at that point. The name clicked because the rendering plant fulfilled for us the suspicion that Throbbing Gristle’s music and artwork and lyrics and interviews had already generated: the feeling that beneath the smooth surface of ordinary everyday life there was an occulted underside of brutality and ugliness, and that this brutality was not aberrant or exceptional but was in fact a bureaucratically managed and authorized expression of power. The logo of Industrial Records was a banal photograph of a factory building; Throbbing Gristle used this image for several years before Genesis revealed in an interview with Simon Dwyer that the building in the photograph enclosed the ovens used at Auschwitz (RE/Search #4/5, p. 63). Drinking the Kool Aid of these histrionic equations, we took Gen’s point to be the assertion that the concentration camp was not a historical memorial to a forty-year-old war but the secret truth of everyday life: the camps had shown that the factory model can be applied to anything, including life and death. Though the political atrocity of the camps could be disavowed, the factory system that enabled it had never stopped running, nor had the administered world that went with it. Here it was just down the street from the powerboat dealership with the TOYS FOR BIG BOYS banner: a space dedicated to the industrialization of death that converted the raw material of animal bodies into a gelatinous liquid mass, packed and ready for shipping. We had found a physical manifestation of the aesthetic that held us in thrall.

  Trespassing into the rendering plant gave us controlled bursts of risk, a way to play with our own thresholds of disgust, to figure out what we could take. It felt and looked the way that the Throbbing Gristle of Second Annual Report sounded: dark and powerful, deliberately uncomfortable, at once desolately lonely and bursting with rancid life. The sensation of standing so close to recent death made me feel very much alive, aware of my own breath and heartbeat, aware of my gag reflex as I fought back the urge to vomit. Of course now this is all rather embarrassing. At the time I was annoyingly quick to quote the lines of Baudelaire’s “Danse Macabre,” that “the charm of horror tempts only the strong,” but now I see the quest for such sensationalized “strength” as an arrogant and obvious adolescent bid for authenticity, autonomy, self-control: the usual things you feel you lack as a teenager. Others, I imagined, would be revolted by this thing that we found compelling, just as normal people wouldn’t be able to teach themselves to enjoy Throbbing Gristle’s outermost extremes. Other people wouldn’t have the stomach for it, other people were deluding themselves and playing it safe while we brave few were willing to press our faces closer to the putrescent facts of life. I treasured the knowledge of this place, passing the secret of it on to those I trusted most, thinking of it as our little conspiracy. I still remember the betrayal that I felt when, years later, I made a pilgrimage to this site and it had been demolished and paved over. Not a trace now remains but a single out-of-focus photograph. It shows a crescent mound of sawed-off horns.

  In a celebrated scene in the Ridley Scott film Alien (1979), the dying android doctor Ash, secretly planted on the starship Nostromo in order to protect the murderous entity in their midst, gushes (literally—his severed head is vomiting white slime as he speaks) to the human crew members about the alien’s perverse appeal: “I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Transfixed by the abject and unmusical audiomurk, appalled but fascinated by the murderous scenarios described in the lyrics and found audio snippets within TG’s Second Annual Report, I felt the same way about my favorite band, projecting onto them a darkly radiant nimbus of nihilistic purity. They were pure, and hence powerful, and I might take on those qualities by association with them.

  I go on at such vulgar length to describe my teenage TG fandom not out of nostalgic pride but because it seems utterly typical. It sounds like standard suburban mall fare. Stuck in circumstances beyond their control and too young to have any real say in things, certain adolescents daydream about adult positions of mastery that they can virtually inhabit, emotionally investing in consolatory scenarios of limitless power and total commitment. From comic books to video games to Hollywood films to pop songs, mass culture formats deal in spectacular wish fulfillment, giving their consumers little fantasy hits of absolute autonomy made perceptible, tactile, portable, immediate but temporary. In speaking with other TG fans about the qualities they admire in TG records, I repeatedly hear the same interests, stances, reactions that I recall: they love the gore/true-crime factor, they dig the vibe of “evil” that it gives off, they like the coldness and intensity. Consider “Slug Bait,” one of the grimmer numbers on Second Annual Report, which details a criminal psychopath breaking into a home and murdering its residents, first castrating a man and then eviscerating his pregnant wife. Some lyrics:

  I look at your big heavy stomach

  It’s already moving a little bit with your baby

  I use the carving knife from your kitchen

  I start to perform the operation

  You say, “No, no don’t do that!”

  I say, “I don’t give a . . . cat’s whiskers.”

  The sheer dogged thoroughness with which human sympathies have been repudiated (or repressed) in order to construct this narrative is a big part of the appeal for its audience, because its no-holds-barred hostility taps into a sort of free-form, nonspecific adolescent rage against the entire grownup world of consequences, responsibility, accountability and fair play. And yet the knowledge that those sympathies are only being temporarily suspended is crucial to such art’s effect of moral holiday, and the open secret to the perverse pleasure that such fare provides to the spectator: to do such things in reality would be utterly wrong, and so therefore their simulation is exciting, even pleasurable. These visions of remorseless criminality function as a kind of funhouse mirror reflection of the adolescent “innocence” of their typical spectators and fans. Like the android Ash mooning over the deadly alien, the teenage TG fan who listens to “Slug Bait” admires the band, and thereby themselves, for a shared ability to enjoy what they also know is “wrong.” Such a stance is of course completely different from actual psychopathology: the psychopath doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and so the psychopath, by definition, cannot occupy the pervert’s position of feeling-pleasure-at-the-wrongness-of-doing-wrong. As with St. Augustine’s stolen pears, the sweetness lies not in the fruit but in the knowledge that one has consciously embraced evil.

  Such a general picture of the bloodthirsty expectations surrounding a TG record are, hopefully, helpful for framing just how obnoxious and disappointing the peppy, glossy, kitschy, contradictory and, yes, funky 20 Jazz Funk Greats was to certain elements within Throbbing Gristle’s fanbase. Such as me. Alive with expectations after my knockout encounter with Second Annual Report, I pounced on 20 Jazz Funk Greats when I saw it for sale at Ear X-tacy in Louisville and brought it home, expecting another burbling blast of improvisatory electronic murk and processed screaming. I was hoping for something really nasty.

  Nope.

  What I heard instead sounded to me like pop music. Puzzling and perverted pop, yes, but pop all the same. Given the TG that I thought I knew, 20 Jazz Funk Greats was all wrong. While I was
able to slot “Beachy Head” and “Six Six Sixties” into the aesthetic universe of TG as I had previously understood it, most of the songs on the album didn’t just evade me—they offended me. I felt betrayed. What happened to the darkness and evil? This sounded like the work of people who liked to dance, people who listened to disco, people who wanted to make music with a good beat that you could dance to, people who knew their way around a synthesizer and had some creamy chords and catchy riffs up their sleeves, people who might be growing up and feeling a bit bored by serial-killer trivia. Reviewing it in my zine at the age of seventeen I huffed about the “synthy froo froo” fare and speculated that “Hot on the Heels of Love” had to be a parody designed to infiltrate the subversive TG message into dance clubs (being underage I had only vague ideas of what went on in them). But how could I be sure? If the record was meant to be a sarcastic commentary on synthetic disco and kitsch and jazz funk, why did so much of it actually just sound like primitive attempts at really being exactly those things? It had a clammy, indistinct quality, a curious sourness. I had admired TG’s purity, their remorselessness, only to have that confidence taken away from me by an album that seemed determinedly impure from every angle: sound, genre, look, motivation. This record was the sound of TG deforming, drifting off message, flirting with disaster, wandering into dangerous territory. Was it a mistake, or a pisstake? Was it a stiff gag about selling out or a botched attempt to cash in on the crest of post-punk’s crossfade into corporate new wave? Was the music just a deliberately insincere batch of genre exercises and smug, naff knock-offs—or had TG secretly been up to something else all along? If it offended me and didn’t play by the puritanical nihilist rules of engagement as I understood them, why did I, even then, (secretly) start to like it so much? The cover looked like a joke, yes. But then again, to quote Syd Barrett, “What exactly is a joke?”