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

by Daniel, Drew

  From outside this corpse of formalized corruption we unite to assassinate all liberal values; to erode all suburban communities; to purge the decaying matter of that lineage once pure. This theory is for those whose trust in any inherently just social system has been sacrilegiously betrayed; whose governments are morally opportunist and ruthlessly axpanded [sic]; whose constitutions and chosen rights are intellectually slandered and violently bypassed; their values ridiculed; their trust in freedom of expression policed; their belief in evolution denied; the very source of their idealistic fervor, criminalized. . .

  Accompanied by the slogan “Freedom Is a Sickness,” Gen’s screed conveys the withering contempt that an entrenched Labour establishment had produced in its alienated opponents, and its references to the policing of freedom of expression is not a crusty-punk catechism but a reflection of Gen’s direct experience of state interference (it is hardly coincidental that this text was written the same year that Gen was prosecuted for disseminating obscene mail art). That said, in openly celebrating the “virility of hatred,” declaring open season on “liberal values” and referring in a vague manner to a “lineage once pure” that has been betrayed, one can also see the source of the mistaken perception that TG were in some nebulous manner articulating a right-wing critique of the welfare state or, as the journalistic cliché goes, irresponsibly “playing with fascist imagery.”

  The rhetorical overlap created by the common enemy of the Labour establishment can only be pressed so far, however. When the chips were down, TG’s transgressive aesthetics were anathema in the coming Conservative era. In her party conference speech on October 13, 1978, immediately preceding the full flowering of the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher said: “For years the British disease has been the ‘us and them’ philosophy. Many in industry are still infected with the virus. They still treat the factory not as a workplace but as a battlefield” (Thatcher, p. 83). Thatcher’s final, arresting image of the factory-as-battlefield neatly articulates the precise reading of the factory as an inhuman space of mechanized death and state oppression implicit in the Industrial Records use of the Auschwitz incineration tower as a promotional corporate logo. Apparently TG were part of the troubling “they” that needed to be re-educated, or pushed out.

  Drew: To what extent did the political climate of May of 1979 affect the meaning/content of the song “Convincing People,” or the album as a whole? How did you feel when the Conservatives came into power?

  Cosey: We were on the front line, because we were on the receiving end of what their party politics were. We were artists, we were anarchists, if you like, and we were poor. So whatever policies were in place affected us.

  Chis: Didn’t matter which government was in . . .

  Cosey: We felt it, either way. And in Hackney, where Gen and I lived in Beck Road, I remember the IRA stuff going on, and the police came down, there was a big police presence, it was when the thing at the Tower of London happened, they arrested the people living next door to us who were squatting, and then they came into our bedroom. It was a police state. They had this special SPG group that was around on the streets, a special patrol unit in vans with no markings, no nothing, no windows. They’d stop you in the street, open the back doors, put you in it, question you and then spit you out further up the road or take you to the station. That’s what it was like in London. So we were very much on the front lines and you felt it every day. So all of this—“Convincing People,” “Persuasion,” “Discipline”—all came out of this, of fighting for survival. And still trying to make your mark in a way that people could take it creatively, artistically, musically, but delivering in a way that was about the reality that we lived. Everybody else did too, but they liked to pretend that it wasn’t like that.

  Drew: But it seems that in a song like “Convincing People” you have some doubts about the context of performers delivering their message to a mass in front of them . . .

  Cosey: You delivered the information for them to then take as knowledge and use it in a way that would make their lives better, or more fulfilled. Hopefully, that’s the ideal, when you do anything like this is that you’re giving something to someone that then feels empowered or inspired by it. And that’s how TG worked and that’s how we have worked ever since.

  Drew: Thatcher was elected in May, and you were recording in August. I know that the Labour government had not been particularly kind to Coum Transmissions or to you, to say the least. What did you expect from the Tories? What was your sense of that election, and of the UK at that time?

  Gen: As you probably know, in 1975 in the summer I was prosecuted for sending “Queen” postcards. And I got a suspended year sentence. I was warned that if they found anything else that was offensive that I did in my art, I would automatically go to jail for a year. I was already on notice that they were watching me and wanted to get me off the street. So when Thatcher came in, I just knew immediately that things were going to get even more polarized and even more self-censoring amongst the art world, that people would be running scared because they would want to protect their little stipends. We were fortunate to be doing Industrial Records because it gave us an ongoing financial independence. It meant that we were going to be able to pursue our concepts and our ideas with a minimum of interference from the surrounding social/cultural context. Having said that, I certainly felt threatened. I think it’s not wrong to suggest that that was really the beginning of the ongoing media war between myself and the authorities in Britain that culminated in me having to leave the country. But it’s also exciting. One way that I would describe it to people at the time, when they didn’t know if it was going to be exciting or frightening, was that when things get as polarized as they were at that time, it’s much easier to see the enemy, but it’s much easier to see your friends as well. When the water level goes down and people go into the cracks who aren’t serious about confronting the status quo, whoever’s left standing on a rock is probably one of your friends. That way you can identify allies much quicker and you know that the allies are going to be much stronger because they are still visible. So it’s a two-edged sword.

  The self-consuming logic of a song called “Convincing People” that tries to convince its listeners that it is not very convincing to tell people that you aren’t trying to convince them is of a piece with a particular political moment in which the participatory logic of democracy stopped allowing for a real debate. One can sense this stance in circulation across the political spectrum (not just in artistic or creative people) disgusted with the entrenched corruption of Labour but fearful of the authoritarianism to come with the Conservative party. The feeling could be summed up in the title of an old Nina Simone song: “Either Way I Lose.” It’s a sensation many American voters are now wearily familiar with. The sleeve design from the XTC album Go 2, designed by Peter Christopherson’s employers Hipgnosis in 1978, models precisely this paradox of the structured, oppressive “freedom of choice” enjoyed by contemporary consumers, offering its viewers a free choice which is no choice at all:

  This writing is trying to pull you in much like an eye-catching picture. It is designed to get you to READ IT. This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM. But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW! because all we are attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you’ll be doing what we tell you, and if you read on you’ll be doing what we’ve wanted all along. And the more you read on the more you’re falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good commercial design works. They’re TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it’s describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you’ve read this far then you’re TRICKED but you wouldn’t have known this unless you’d read this far.

  At first blush, Hipgnosis’ self-deconstructing rhetoric in the Go 2 sleeve seems to closely resemble Throbbing Gristle’s self-canceling lyrical strategy in “Convincing People,” and the Hipgnosis/Sleazy
connection borders upon a “smoking gun” connecting them together. This surface kinship is deceptive, and the act of disentangling these two similar, but disjunctive, approaches to autocritical communication can help to clarify what Throbbing Gristle are, and are not, up to.

  In the case of the XTC sleeve, the reader is presented with a rigged, false choice (read or stop reading; in either case you are being conditioned by the codes already in place); the sleeve seems liberating insofar as it openly anatomizes rhetorical deception, but in fact its “everything is ideological” approach (it’s all a “TRICK”) functions unabashedly on behalf of selling a record, however cutely ironic and indirect its tactics. As such, the Hipgnosis sleeve epitomizes a hip-capitalist stance, consoling us that the best way to disconnect from a meaningless system of false options is to purchase one more commodity that marks one as enlightened, “in on it” and hip to the inherent falsity of modern life. As a mass-marketed form of rebellious individualism, rock and roll culture has always peddled the “won’t be fooled again” consolation prize to its consumers, but by the late seventies, the self-reflexive folds within its inner logic traded the oppositional ambitions (the “counter” in “counterculture”) for a comfy brand of elitist quietism. Such false choices on offer in the shops mirror the false choices on offer at the polls, and in both cases the cynical sense that “nothing matters,” far from arming the subject to better resist ideology, in fact works to ensure that it continues to run smoothly. It is politically useful to circulate the cynically enlightened fiction that domination can never really be contested, that all politicians are corrupt and therefore all are “equally” bad, and that therefore one’s participation (in marketplaces, in electoral politics) is a sham because any attempt to choose between options legitimates the system as a whole. In his Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Peter Sloterdijk contrasted “cynicism,” the retreat of the “enlightened” subject from the political into an Olympian disdain for such shabby matters, with “kynicism,” a specifically working-class mode of mockery in which the hypocritical language of ruling powers was called to account, exposed as fiction and abused accordingly (as cited in Zizek, p. 29). They are both stances of “disbelief,” but mere cynicism is negative, a withdrawal from politics into private tranquility, while “kynicism” is openly antagonistic, a radically engaged reaction to the collapse of meaningful options within the public sphere. Messages such as the Hipgnosis sleeve, which reinforce the notion that our choices don’t make a difference so we might as well buy another record anyway, are in this practical sense cynical, and fundamentally conservative.

  By contrast, I would like to suggest that the stance Throbbing Gristle take up in “Convincing People” is not cynical but “kynical.” By setting in motion a kind of “liar’s paradox” in which the attempt to persuade the listener and the attempt to arm the listener against persuasion are both revealed as equally untrustworthy, “Convincing People” exudes a deep hostility to the rhetorical techniques and weapons of mass persuasion that underlie both pop marketing and party politics. In this sense it shares the “false choice” scenario with the Hipgnosis sleeve. But far from constituting a “message” song, “Convincing People” works at the aural level by inducing a kind of paranoid stance in the listener, an allergic reaction to meaning, a sense that any message, insofar as it is a message at all, is already controlling, dominating and oppressive, and would be best dissolved into a liquid pool of babbling nonsense. The inclusive, generation-gap logic of the hippie catchphrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” here contracts into a grim and paranoid “don’t trust anyone.” “Convincing People” formally embodies its lyrical hostility to ideology and cynically “enlightened” ideology critique by processing Gen’s own voice into an acid-bath of molten electronics that estrange, deform and dissolve even his self-critical words. In so doing, TG reassert a demand first articulated by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in their cut-up slogan: “Rub Out the Word.” Instead of effortlessly furthering the cause of capitalist seduction, words become the raw material for a destructive process of transformation: the song is a factory that processes language into sound, taking aim at the principle means of communication and warping and distorting it in and out of recognition. Neither persuading you nor falsely claiming to free you from the grip of persuasion, the song enacts something else: a concrete auditory experience of transformation through action, an anarchist poetics of deliberate deformity.

  Exotica

  That which is hard is never hard without also being soft.

  Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

  By namedropping a Martin Denny album and an entire school of quasi-Polynesian mood music, Throbbing Gristle add further support to the accusation that 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a series of genre exercises. But those expecting bird calls and cod-Latin percussion will be disappointed. Instead of campy theatrics, “Exotica” leaks a kind of subtly poisonous incense across the stereo field. High oscillator trails with a very fast LFO setting create will-o-wisp flickerings in the upper registers, while low and heavily phased Gizmo guitar tones form a kind of distant jet plane chorale. From out of this miasmic bog, the vibraphone fades into audibility, tinkling in an “Asian” interval that flags the genre for which the song is named. The phased guitar scuttlings are occasionally joined in the thickening background with sour arcs of feedback-like ringing tones, but they are mixed so low that they purr more than they pierce. Two minutes and fifteen seconds in, a distinctly jarring, banging noise violates the relaxation imperative completely, constituting a kind of sonic jerk of tongue into cheek, and after this percussive climax the entire enterprise dissolves into the ether. An improvisatory water-color executed with a bare minimum of gestures, there’s very little there, and yet everything within the evanescent form of “Exotica” earns its place.

  Drew: Did you introduce the music of Martin Denny to the group? Had you heard this music as a kid?

  Gen: Yeah, of course. In cinemas. But it was Scott Armstrong in Los Angeles that actually introduced me to Martin Denny specifically on my first trip to California. Which would be . . . October 1976. Scott Armstrong had been one of my mail art friends; he said to me, “I have come across this amazing musician, you’re going to love it, they’re these really weird kitsch obscure albums.” He played me one that he’d found in a thrift store and the moment I heard the first track I just knew that it was the missing link somehow. Because it had this incredible anti-intellectual, almost chaotic element to it, even though it was done in full seriousness. It had this strange, staggering aesthetic. That’s the only way that I can put it. There was a kind of idiot-savant feeling. I started collecting the albums; I’ve still got twenty-nine albums downstairs by Martin Denny and some by Arthur Lyman. I’ve actually got one Martin Denny album signed by Martin Denny to me: “To Genesis from Martin Denny with love.” Boyd Rice went to see him play live in Hawaii and went up to him afterward and got him to sign a copy of the one that we based Entertainment Through Pain on. I’ve still got it, framed, in my office. For inspiration.

  Drew: So did you write vibe parts or were they improvised?

  Gen: Well, we never wrote anything down. Sleazy, unbeknownst to any of us, took to the vibes like a duck to water. And now Sleazy plays keyboard parts.

  Drew: So which vibes parts are played by you and which are played by Sleazy? Sleazy can’t remember.

  Gen: Sleazy played the vibes on “Hot on the Heels of Love.”

  Drew: And “Exotica”?

  Gen: That’s me.

  Gen’s response to Martin Denny as “staggering” and “chaotic” completely inverts the received idea of Denny’s lush jungle concoction as a sedative sidecar best taken while unwinding with a few mai tais after a long day at the office. Showing up in an instantly recognizable—and thus essentially calming and conservative—format, lounge music isn’t supposed to stagger, but to soothe. Acknowledging the functional imperative of “light music” with disarming candor, Geoffrey Self describes this muc
h maligned category through a structural opposition with the modernist exertions of “serious music”:

  When Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck was first given in London, one respected critic described its effect on him as like losing a pint of blood. Wozzeck is clearly not light music. It is disturbing, disquieting, and carries a powerful electric charge. It is a major, serious work. Light music, in contrast, should divert rather than disturb; entertain rather than disquiet. If it does not, it fails in its purpose. (Self, p. 1)

  The first shall be last and the last shall be first. When heard with Gen’s ears, it is Martin Denny’s own light music that is “disturbing, disquieting, and carries a powerful electric charge” rather than the once radical, now stale compositional gestures of Viennese serialism. One need not comb the Denny back catalogue for very long before finding confirmation of Gen’s perverse reading of exotica as light music that means business; for every slow boat to “Quiet Village,” there are also scorchers, such as “Oro (God of Vengeance),” shot through with eruptions of full-throated screaming and jarring, abrupt tempo changes. “Light music” may not actually be all that comforting. Just mellow enough to hover in the background, but punctuated by pinpricks of unease, TG’s “Exotica” constitutes a kind of antimelodic, improvised Muzak, the perfect soundtrack to losing a pint of blood one slow drop at a time.

  Drew: There’s a noise in “Exotica” about two-thirds of the way in that ruins its ability to be mood music. Can you identify it for me?

  Cosey: In “Exotica”? [“Exotica” plays] That’s Gizmo guitar and synth.

  Drew: Were “Exotica” and “Beachy Head” done at the same session?

  Cosey: I think it was probably done while we were still working with the new toys, the Gizmo, the vibes.