Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)
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Gen: “Tanith” is all me. It was named after my dog.
Drew: It’s your bass, your vibes, and your violin. I was wondering about that song in the overall context of your bass playing, because it’s such a different approach to the bass than on Second Annual Report. Were there any bass soloists that you liked?
Gen: Yeah, of course: Charlie Mingus. I was very much influenced by Mingus. And Jimi Hendrix. I was determined to approach the bass as Jimi Hendrix had approached the electric guitar: as a sonic church, as an alchemical sacred sound generator. That was one path, and the other path was Charlie Mingus, a cool jazz approach. I mean, that was a deliberately “jazzy” bit of bass playing. I had just got a new bass. It was the one that we put a Roland sticker on, but it wasn’t actually a Roland. You’d have to ask Chris which one it was, it got broken eventually.
Drew: He set up the Auto-wah that it’s played through?
Gen: No, no, that’s actually played wah. I ran it through a Morley fuzz wah; I still use it to this day. The Morley fuzz wah for lead guitar, not for a bass, they make both, but I always use the lead guitar one for my bass. And a Roland Space Echo, and a Fuzz Face distortion pedal. It was the same setup for guitar and violin.
Drew: And what order was your signal chain in?
Gen: Fuzz face, then Morley fuzz-wah, then Space Echo.
Gen’s bass is slightly distorted and heavily filtered. The sound heats up, then gets cut from its fuller, bottom-heavy range down into a narrow band of midrange. This trimmer silhouette is rendered almost comic by the boinging impact of the wah pedal closing like a mouth around the impact of each note’s attack: the effect resembles the garbled honking of the unintelligible authority figures in animated Peanuts cartoons, their meaning always just out of reach. You can hear the changing depth and rate of the phaser as it shifts across the bass solo, cycling from slow to fast and back again, another range of textural information superimposed above the melodic, contributing to the liquid, slithering effect. Gen’s processed violin constitutes one of the signature TG sounds, a sound remarkably underutilized in subsequent industrial music (though recently re-emphasized in the processed violin/noise hybrid work of C. Spencer Yeh’s American noise project Burning Star Core). Here it is cast in a supporting role, sent to delay until it ping-pongs across the horizon, playing against itself, rebounding in a mirrored pool of sound. The entire signal chain is played as a single instrument binding acoustic source and electronic processing into a unified, fluid gesture. There’s a diorama-like quality to the way that the violin and the bass seem to occupy distinct planes within the mix; they feel almost unrelated, yet thicken in combination. A tentative melody on the vibes pulls the song into alignment with the other “mood” pieces of the album (it is a close cousin to “Exotica”), providing a respite between the manic overload of “Still Walking” and the fuzzy meltdown of “Convincing People.”
Convincing People
By this time you will have gained some insight into the Control Machine and how it operates.
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin,
“Inside the Control Machine”
The arpeggiating synth line starts in medias res, spinning a hamster wheel of six notes over and over, while a 4/4 beat keeps time but goes nowhere: kick (pillowy) and snare (washed out) blink off and on, defining a checkerboard rhythmic grid. Gen’s fuzzed-out bass figure constitutes one of the most straight-up “guitar riff” elements on the album, and chalks up another gesture toward “real music”—but the core of this song is the cumulative delirium caused by the precisely timed overlapping of delayed vocal lines. Gen’s chanted repetition of slightly similar phrases against themselves enacts the self-cancellation that he sings about: “there’s never a way” and “there’s several ways” and “there’s never a day” are superimposed until both affirmation and negation become simultaneous. It’s not exactly dazzling wordplay, but then it’s not intended to show up for the listener as “clever lyrics”; rather, the vocal processing within the song works to mortify language, harrowing it of sense. Gen’s vocal boomerangs back upon itself and triggers changes in his performance, upsetting the standard figure/ground distinction between “lead” and “backup” vocals with a sonic experience of multiple personality disorder. In sharp contrast to the chiaroscuro effect of delayed vocals in dub music production, in which an acoustically original moment descends into an increasingly murky rabbit hole as it repeats over and over with less and less high-end information, Throbbing Gristle’s use of delay in “Convincing People” works to produce a deliberately alienating indifference between natural utterance and prosthetic twin: the delayed signal and the original signal have the same volume and the same EQ, and so there is no immediately appreciable difference in tone and presence between the two. Unlike the dub approach, there is no sense here that the delay is being “played” like an instrument, or that the duration and internal feedback are being modulated over the course of the song; instead, the delay is set to repeat each phrase exactly once and then it cuts cold, with each line functioning as its own refrain. Like the bratty childhood tactic of repeating word for word the increasingly annoyed statements of surrounding adults, the song’s flatly literal repetition of each phrase functions critically, laying open the rhetorical agenda of Gen’s lyrics for (unflattering) inspection. Technology extends poetics.
Drew: Did you ever roll tape of vocals live that Gen would sing against?
Chris: I always delayed his voice. We had various Roland Space Echoes, three different models. I used to keep it on his voice all the time. With those you could use them as echoes or keep them looping. So you could record his voice and it wouldn’t come back for like thirty seconds. It sounded pre-recorded, but it was just what he’d sung before.
Drew: Like on “Spirits Flying”? [a live track from the last TG concert in 1981 that features entire choruses of looped Gen]
Chris: Exactly. As the Space Echoes got more complicated the loops got longer. The last one that we had, which was an SR555, I think you could do a whole minute.
Drew: I asked because of “Convincing People.” The way that it works is based so fundamentally upon how Gen sings against himself.
Chris: It was quite hard to synch it up live; you had to mess around with it and the slightest adjustment could make it all run out of synch and it wouldn’t work so well. But when it works, it works really well.
Drew: What did you play through your Gristle-izer?
Gen: Only my voice. Microphone to Gristle-izer, and then to delays, which Chris would operate.
Drew: So you would route the voice to him so that when you would do “Convincing People” live . . .
Gen: . . . he would set the echo so that it would be doubled. [sings] “There’s always a way, there’s always a way . . .” The second part is played by the echo.
Drew: When you were recording these pieces, did you do vocal overdubs or were the vocals and the processing tracked live together?
Gen: It was almost always tracked live, if it was something that developed live. “Convincing People” was first made up in a finished structure at the Ajanta Cinema in Derby. I remember really distinctly being surprised that I had come up with a bassline that I could play and sing to at the same time. [laughs] It just worked beautifully and everybody sat on it perfectly straightaway, and it was the delay on the voice that inspired the way the song was constructed.
Drew: Because it set up the call and response of the voice and established a tempo for everybody to lock onto?
Gen: The bass duplicated the same thing: I would play “doo doo doo doo doo doo” and it would respond “doo doo doo doo doo doo” and I would go “whoooooh” and slide it. That guitar had the black-covered plastic jazz strings on it. That was one of the big differences with 20 Jazz Funk Greats. I actually put jazz strings on the bass.
Drew: Jazz playing, a jazz influence, and jazz strings on the bass—it sounds like maybe it wasn’t so sarcastic to call this album 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
The Gristle-izer’s sawtooth oscillations notch holes into the sound as it passes through, nibbling serrated edges into the signal, lending a strobelike alternation to the phased plateaus of guitar and synth noise. The multiple Gen-voices bleed into and interrupt each other, producing an effect that resembles the antinarrative glossolalia of sound poetry. One can sense in Gen’s performance, with its mantric loops of tiny syllables (“we don’t want / we don’t want to / we don’t want / we don’t want to . . .”) ramping up in energy and breaking against each other, the results of long practice singing with “himself” in processing-heavy environments. He keens and bends his held tones into recursive self-harmonizing, then cuts into deliberately staccato bursts that percussively play the delay time against the sequenced rhythm. Technically, Gen’s mini-lists of hyperrepetitive fragments are an example of the rhetorical trope of epizeuxis, which the Renaissance literary theorist George Puttenham evocatively described in The Arte of English Poesy (1589) as “the cuckoo-spell”: “For right as the cuckoo repeats his lay, which is but one manner of note, and don’t insert any other tune betwixt, and sometimes for haste stammers out two or three of them one immediately after the other, as ‘cuck, cuck, cuckoo’” (Vickers, p. 256). The cuckoo is not the only member of the animal kingdom in play: at one point, Gen erupts into full on wolf-howl, then falsettos up for a few high camp coloratura recitations of “there’s never a way,” momentarily becoming his own female choir of backup singers.
Throbbing Gristle insist that they don’t want to convince people. But do they mean it? How seriously are we supposed to take the renunciation of the will-to-convince expressed within their music? Insofar as Gen’s bass riff shows up for the listener as a big rock gesture, the introduction promises a more anthemic, and more through-composed, song than the band as a whole are really prepared to deliver. For this reason one might argue that “Convincing People” doesn’t quite work, doesn’t quite add up. Literally, it’s not convincing, and feels as if there’s something missing. This could be a consequence of how quiet Chris Carter’s contributions are in the mix; low-balling the beat makes the song feel top-heavy and cuts off its chances of having the kind of punishing physical impact that TG’s burly custom PA system imposed upon their audiences. A staple of live gigs, one could simply chalk the faint weediness of the album version up to a slightly awkward transposition from spontaneously composed jam to studio recording. It may be that certain songs require the feedback loop of an immediate performer/audience relationship in order to catch fire. All the elements are in place, including a great performance from Gen and some wonderfully frazzled synth and guitar textures, and yet there’s something not quite “right.” Is this, too, intentional? One could align the song’s effect/affect of flaccid self-cancellation with the ambient political climate of liberal Great Britain arriving in 1979 at the end of the line. Unconsciously or deliberately, the song is a reflection of surrounding conditions, and those conditions were deeply negative and conflicted. In a contemporary essay entitled “Englanditis,” the Tory pundit Peter Jay summarizes the sour national mood:
We in Britain are a confused and unhappy people. . . . We are unhappy because the foundations of our prosperity seem to be eroding faster and faster and because we can neither find nor agree upon any sure remedy for this decay. We are confused because we do not clearly understand why all this is happening to us, whether it is due to the malefactions of subversion groups, the incompetence of governments, defects of national character, the rhythms of history, the luck of the draw, or what. . . . the fissures spread out in all directions like an icefall; disintegration in slow motion. (Tyrell, p. 166)
Though it remains the work of four unique spirits and not some vague emanation from a kind of abstracted social group, I would like to wager that Throbbing Gristle’s art, music and public statements constitute one way to trace precisely such cracks and fissures in the national psyche of Britain in the late seventies. To go out on a bit of limb, the song “Convincing People” can arguably be read as an allegory in miniature of the public relations problems of the Labour party, reading its implosion in the dismal election results of 1979 as a symptom of its inability on a mass level to make good on its own populist rhetoric and successfully “convince people.” In order to test this fanciful claim, I separately asked all of the members of the band about their sense of how the political climate may have impacted the creation of the album, and of “Convincing People” in particular.
Drew: What about the political context of London in 1979? I know TG were never a party politics band, but you were making this album right after the collapse of the Labour government and the transfer of power to the Tories.
Sleazy: For myself, at that time I think that the Labour government was seen as the bad guy. They had been the cause of many of the social problems that we had railed against. There had been a long period where garbage wasn’t collected and there were mountains of garbage everywhere. That had been the backdrop to the earlier period of TG. So when the conservatives first got into power, nobody really knew who they were aside from the fact that it was a change from the supposed darkness of the past. All of the negative things that we ascribe to the Conservative or Republican viewpoint now were unknown to us at the time.
Sleazy is referring to the embarrassingly public fallout from a string of union disputes and industrial actions that came to a head at the end of 1978 and which are now known as “The Winter of Discontent.” It badly eroded public trust in the Labour Party and the Callaghan administration.
The Winter of Discontent was a rash of strikes, often unofficial and largely in the public sector, against the Callaghan government’s attempt to impose a 5 percent norm for wage and salary increases. In December 1978 the Ford Motor Company eventually settled a strike at the cost of a 15 percent wage rise, and a similar figure settled a strike of BBC technicians. In the new year, there was an outburst of strikes and militant picketing by lorry drivers, ambulance drivers, oil-tanker drivers and local government manual workers that resulted in the closure of schools, disruption of hospitals and even in one well-publicized case a refusal to bury the dead. (Kavanaugh, p. 131)
An angry British public, already worried by “the English disease” of economic malaise (slow growth in production and wages, accelerating inflation, swiftly rising retail prices, grim unemployment statistics), was further inflamed by tabloid headlines about unburied corpses in the Liverpool morgue as a result of government employee walkouts. The Conservative party exploited this high-profile conflict for all it was worth and dealt a decisive defeat to their enemies in the May election. Though it was about to do even worse in the rout of 1983, the Labour’s party’s share of the vote in 1979 election was its lowest showing in forty-eight years (Callaghan, p. 225). Whatever fragile consensus had underwritten the Labour government’s almost unbroken reign was tested and ultimately shattered by the coming of the Iron Lady.
Sleazy’s sense that Labour was “the bad guy” allows us to see an underacknowledged zone of overlap between the radical critique of Labour as a secretly authoritarian regime and the conservative critique of Labour as insufficiently “tough”: though in the service of distinct agendas, both perspectives foreground the antagonism lurking within the ambient despair of late-seventies Britain. The Tories, perhaps embittered by their own political disenfranchisement and loss of face in the culture wars of the swinging sixties and sybaritic seventies, rail against a society they depict as both permissive and joyless. Such a stance has long roots. The June 1946 issue of The Economist, admonishing the Labour party in a prescient, if coarse, manner, offers a case in point: “The human donkey requires either a carrot in front or a stick behind to goad it into activity. . . . The whole drift of British society for two generations past has been to whittle away at both the carrot and the stick, until now very little of
either is left” (as quoted in Tyrell, p. 4). These cartoonish reductions (the British public as bored, braying pack animals with nothing to live for) find an eerie analogue in TG’s dystopian take on the human end products of the welfare state. Are Gen’s own descriptions of his trailer-dwelling gypsy neighbors in Hackney as “subhumans” who “make me dizzy with [their] disease” (from the TG single “Subhuman”) all that different from The Economist’s “human donkeys”? The same critique of dehumanization animates both, though The Economist does so in the interests of free-market capitalism, while Throbbing Gristle’s members, when pressed to define their politics in the wake of gossip that their use of images from the Third Reich implied a fascist politics, broke their tight-lipped stance to profess a “small a” anarchism.
The most explicit articulation of a TG political stance occurs in a routine entitled “Assume Power Focus” written by Gen during the Coum era in 1975; I quote the version that accompanies a curious bootleg of early TG material (some left intact, and some doctored and reconstructed) released by the Dark Vinyl label:
Every society has within it a corrupt and malignant cabal. A dismal and malevolent bureaucracy that instills fear deeper than any medieval subjugation and illuminates the diminished return of a distressed and pandering economic dictatorship. A moral degeneracy that emasculates an individual’s power of response, and demeans the virility of their hatred.