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

by Daniel, Drew

Chris: We did buy a lot of new things for this album, and we had the Gristle-izer.

  Drew: You published an analysis of the Gristle-izer.

  Chris: Melody Maker asked me to write something. There was even a circuit diagram of the whole thing.

  Cosey: With some bits missing.

  Chris: Yeah, I left some bits out intentionally. I put the wrong voltages in. I got loads of people writing in to say, “They’re not working!” I had tutors at university writing to say, “We’ve had our students building Gristle-izers and they’re not working.”

  Cosey: You can’t get something for nothing. They want results without any real work on their end.

  Drew: Well maybe my mp3 isn’t up to the low-end event I’m looking for. [NOISE kicks in] That sound! Is it you stomping near your amp?

  Chris: No, I had a separate spring reverb that was open, and you could just pluck it. You could tap it.

  This anarchic willingness to violate their own immaculately “tasteful” exercise in musical Orientalism bears analysis, for it is this swift kick of noise that separates Throbbing Gristle’s critical approach from the literalism that plagued later generations of historically correct lounge revivals. Provoked by the very success of their electronics and vibes at summoning the requisite atmosphere (beautifully described by David Toop as “an ominous, fugitive vision, like an island glimpsed briefly through sea mist”), Chris Carter can’t resist tugging at the spring reverbed string of discord (Toop, p. 127). It’s a “love tap” gesture, but this slight push has a domino effect. Throbbing Gristle’s deliberate failure to make successfully relaxing background music could be dismissed as a lack of commitment on their part to fully enter into the spirit of the genres they are cruising, a warning sign that old noise habits die hard, and that “guaranteeing disappointment,” to quote an old Coum slogan, can stiffen into its own kind of reflex. But “Exotica” can also be understood as a more ambivalent and complex rendezvous between TG’s methodology and lounge aesthetics. It flags the difference between the alienated and alienating functional imperatives of “light” music and the open and transient practices of what we might term “soft” music. TG may take up the sonic palette of exotica, but they keep their own methodology in place. Transposing the same formal strategies of group improvisation and collective feedback-looped mood summoning already employed on their harsher recordings, on “Exotica” TG reveal that all along their actual songs—qua songs—however texturally hard, are structurally soft.

  Hot on the Heels of Love

  First step, you forget where you are, next step, you forget who you are

  I’ve tried but I can’t break away, as I dance dance to the music . . .

  Noel, “Dancing Is Dangerous”

  The song announces its classical disco architecture through a steady buildup of elements, a middle breakdown, a cumulative reintroduction that peaks with a maximum density, and then a graceful thinning out. It could be drawn graphically as a camel with two humps: intro, buildup, breakdown, buildup, fade. “Hot on the Heels of Love” is built on the foundation of a steady kick drum that beats in 4/4 time at 121.25 beats per minute. On the CD version of the album as digitally remastered by Chris Carter you can also detect tiny bursts of ultra-high-pitched ratcheting noises playing eighth notes in the space between kicks. Unlike the sped-up funk drumming of the first waves of disco songs, the basic rhythm of “Hot on the Heels of Love” feels less like a four bar or eight-bar looping pattern and more like a nonstop quarter-note pulse: not Boom tss Boom chak Boom tss Boom chak but simply Boom tsss over and over and over, forever. In this sense, it formally resembles Italo-disco, the synthetic subgenre of disco pioneered in European discotheques, and anticipates the coming of techno’s reductionist tendencies. Pouncing in the middle of the fifth bar, an arpeggiating synth figure enters, going up and down an endless staircase, as a tangy melodic keyboard line with a faintly vocoder-like quality interjects burbles and rasps in sympathy with the bassline’s Sisyphean labors. Occasionally this is gilded on the upper octave with another, more impressionistic synth line, registering a faint chinoiserie in its scale and slightly detuned feeling. Whipcracking snares jut into the song at curious angles, not simply holding time on the two and the four but smacking accents unpredictably. These harsh intrusions are balanced by soft melodic figures played by Sleazy on the vibraphone, their bell-like long decay stretching languorously across the pulsing framework, suturing together the leisure and exotica signifiers of the instrument with the militant hedonism of Chris Carter’s electronics. Cosey’s ecstatic yet numbed vocal, in combination with the arpeggiation of the bassline, frames the song as a response to the provocative example of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s monumental “I Feel Love,” and thus tags “Hot on the Heels of Love” as a genre exercise, if not a genre exorcism. For cynical music industry observers, and the increasingly weary and reactionary members of the listening public, by 1979 disco was the dying elephant in the room. It was hard to deny the greatness of its greatest moments, but just as hard to ignore the increasingly large mound of crap rushed into the shops in the hopes of turning a fast buck.

  Drew: “Hot on the Heels of Love” brings us to the question of pleasure. What was your attitude toward disco at the time?

  Gen: I was interested in the repetition, and the trance possibilities of it. This came from Jajouka and music like that that I had heard from Brion Gysin and Burroughs. My main interest was from the point of view of it being maybe accidentally related to Terry Riley and Steve Reich and systems music; was there a way to use systems music and trance music to create a hybrid that was effective and ironic at the same time?

  Drew: As pop music, it’s certainly a “weird” disco song, but it doesn’t come off as purely ironic. At the time, did you listen to the stuff that now gets called “mutant disco”?

  Gen: I was listening to this record called “Dancing Is Dangerous” by Sparks with this other woman under another name. [Noel, b/w “Is There More to Life Than Dancing?” on Virgin/Polydor, 1979] We were listening to Cerrone. Those in particular, those twenty-minute-long improvisations around a disco beat, those were the ones that I listened to for pleasure. I must say that “Hot on the Heels of Love” was done with affection, but it was a dangerous enough crossover area to not deal with more than once.

  Gen’s sense that the Noel/Mael brothers song title is correct, that dancing is dangerous, points toward the uncomfortable transactions between the bohemian logic of the underground and the marketplace logic of pop. It’s a given that centers and margins require each other, and the history of pop music is a history of mass markets and subcultures feeding off of and replenishing each other’s vocabularies, but there are occupational hazards involved in such border crossings, in both directions. Pop stars who attempt to redefine themselves as “serious artists” tend to be met with critical ridicule (my apologies if you are currently listening to Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio or the Fantasies and Delusions of Billy Joel). For its part, the underground rarely forgives botched attempts at “selling out” (take a bow, S.P.K. and Liz Phair). Beyond these commercial considerations, there are aesthetic risks on both sides as well. If you wholeheartedly attempt to work within pop music as an idiom, you give hostages to fortune and risk a situation in which your music will be evaluated by pop’s tricky entry requirements: high production values, radio-friendly formatting, emphasis upon extramusical charisma and the random injustices of sheer unpredictable caprice. The failure rate is high. On the other hand, if you keep your underground credentials close to your chest and only dabble, your so-called experiment with pop form risks coming off as condescending and rigged—by keeping tongue firmly in cheek, an underground artist who refuses to commit to a full-blooded participation in a genre with mass appeal simply preserves their entitled position on the sidelines serving sour grapes to their coterie. “I wasn’t really trying to make real disco music, you understand. I was merely commenting on it.” Shooting for disco adds another hurdle, for disco is
, above all, a functional form of music with objective conditions of satisfaction. If people don’t dance, you’ve failed.

  “Hot on the Heels of Love” was not a commercially successful disco song, but it was an aesthetic bullseye. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. It’s the song in which the furtive pop maneuvers that TG had already gestured toward on their “United” single finally came out of the closet, and it is the dialectical synthesis of the two contrary tendencies on the 20 Jazz Funk Greats LP as a whole. The tight rhythmic sequences of Chris Carter and the loose, spacey lounge Muzak of Gen and Sleazy are finally brought together in a mutual climax, with Cosey acting as the disco priestess bewitching and binding these elements together. They don’t join in holy matrimony, but they do make for a dangerous liaison. Cosey’s vocal is the crucial element that pushes the song outside the safety zone of pastiche and into a more compromising position. If Sleazy’s vocal on “20 Jazz Funk Greats” was the gesture of a band perched between come-on and threat, a band still in the habit of ironically undercutting itself, Cosey’s vocal on “Hot on the Heels of Love” is the sound of a band enthralled with the musical possibility that they no longer need to put scare quotes around the performance of sexuality, and that they are just as capable of deliberately turning people on as they already were at deliberately turning people off.

  As an erotic dancer, Cosey had had plenty of personal experience thinking about music as a fantasy environment and seduction tool. As a former go-go dancer in gay bars myself, I can assure you that strippers have a practical, economic interest in thinking carefully about pacing and mood. It’s simple: stripping to the right song vastly increases your tips. The song that makes you feel sexy is the song that makes you dance with greater investment and greater conviction, and that kind of performance will telegraph to the audience that you are into what you’re doing, which in turn gives them as audience members permission to enter into the scene with you, to come a little bit closer. That’s when the dollar bills wind up in your G-string. After revisiting some of the mixtapes from the period that accompanied her performances, Cosey emailed me a historically accurate playlist, annotated with the outfits that accompanied each song, and it’s a tellingly inclusive list:

  Cosey: Basically I stripped to two tracks: the first mainly to “dance” to and move around the stage flouting myself to the menfolk and the second was always a slow track to do the final unveiling and sensual floor work, splits, etc.

  • PVC outfit: “Hard Working Man”—Captain Beefheart. “Heaven”—Pere Ubu

  • School girl outfit: “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”—Ian Dury and the Blockheads. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”—Crystal Gayle

  • Pink satin shorts etc: “Easy”—Commodores.

  • Some topless dance tracks: “Native New Yorker”—Odyssey, “Instant Replay”—Dan Hartman, “Lady Marmalade”—Labelle, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”—Sylvester, “Disco Inferno”—The Trammps

  Cosey wasn’t just putting up with the music on tap at her workplace. She was a sincere fan of what, in issue number three of the Industrial Newsletter, she termed “good disco.” Unlike the “disco sucks” meathead brigade who responded with predictable revulsion to the commercialized dross of major label disco cash-in records, Cosey was a discriminating connoisseur of the genre. Cosey’s playlist reference to Sylvester permits the inclusion of an irresistible nugget of Throbbing Gristle trivia; in the video for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” shot on location at a UK disco club during Sylvester’s whirlwind Fantasy Records–funded promotional trip to London, Cosey can be seen briefly in (very short) silver hot pants dancing to Sylvester’s high-NRG disco classic, between interplanetary shots of sparkling disco balls and Sylvester shimmying down a staircase in a silver kimono.

  In her element on the disco dance floor, Cosey doesn’t just sing on “Hot on the Heels of Love”; she dominates it utterly, works the listener, teasing out the distance between iterations, milking her two lines for all they are worth:

  I’m hot on the heels of love

  Waiting for help from above

  As camp as a row of tents, such lines also risk total banality, were it not for the sheer incongruity of their status as Throbbing Gristle lyrics. These are the same people who sang about cutting off people’s testicles and making them eat them at gunpoint? Such disparity between content and context puts a premium on how the words are delivered, and Cosey’s read is a vindication of Mick Jagger’s nostrum that it’s the singer, not the song. In fact, of course, she doesn’t sing at all, but moans the words like a conjurer, and if she’s waiting for help from above, it’s more likely to come from Venus, Aphrodite or Ashteroth than any standard issue monotheistic Heavenly Father. Cosey’s staggered, breathy, effortlessly seductive performance momentarily bends opposed poles into contact; she blows hot and cold, comes off as ironic and sincere, sounds fast yet slow. Thanks to her brazenly erotic Sprechstimme, “Hot on the Heels of Love” enters the canon of whispered sex anthems that stretches from Jane Birkin’s orgasmic coos on her duet with Serge Gainsbourg, “Je Taime, Moi Non Plus” (1969), to Sylvia Robinson’s breathy moaning on “Pillow Talk” (1973) and on to Baccarat’s “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” (1979), a proud tradition recently gender-flipped by the Ying Yang Twins “Whisper Song” (2003).

  Though it clocks in at a relatively trim four and a half minutes, “Hot on the Heels of Love” feels like it could be extended indefinitely, for ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour, without really needing to “go anywhere,” its separate modular synthesizer layers cycling and circling around each other like components of a Calder mobile, turning around the still center of the steady kick drum. The currents of electricity come in waves, and don’t really begin or end at any decisive point. Within disco music, this pursuit of “endlessness” is both an aesthetic principle and an erotic ideal. The extended mixes of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” or “Love to Love You Baby,” with their closely miked groans and frankly sexual moaning mixed upfront atop seemingly endless repetitions of recurrent musical phrases, create the sense that their musical compulsion to repeat and their multiply orgasmic female subject are somehow patched into each other in an endless feedback circuit of stimulus and response. To take a brief detour from sounds to words while still remaining caught in the porno loop, consider Susan Sontag’s description of the formal objections to pornographic literature: “Another common argument, offered by Adorno among others, is that works of pornography lack the beginning-middle-end form characteristic of literature. A piece of pornographic fiction concocts no better than a crude excuse for a beginning, and once having begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere” (Sontag, p. 135). Such a recipe for erotic textuality also sounds suspiciously like the standard rockist critique of disco: “But it’s not real music, it’s just the same thing over and over and over.” While disco’s happily numerous recent critical champions, such as Peter Shapiro and Tim Lawrence, can point in its defense toward the sophisticated transformations of mood and texture and emotional meaning within a DJ’s set over the course of an evening, there might also be something within these accusations about the repetitive, “formless” (relative to prog, anyway) nature of disco that rings true. Such objections are not in need of contradiction so much as critical transvaluation. The same thing over and over for a long time can be wonderful. Against all odds, in 1979 TG found themselves momentarily in sympathy with disco’s utopian ambitions just as disco’s worldwide ubiquity and collectivist momentum guttered and died. Despite their own mixed emotions and sarcastic misgivings, for at least four minutes and twenty four seconds Throbbing Gristle achieve a mini-eternity. “Hot on the Heels of Love” creates the momentary illusion of an infinite horizon, a smooth plateau pierced by the transient spike of each momentary kick drum, spindled upon the beat but spiraling outward in all directions. Luckily, help from above never arrives.

  Persuasion

  An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
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br />   George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

  In the wake of the majestic disco peak of “Hot on the Heels of Love,” “Persuasion” is a deliberate and pronounced bummer, a long anhedonic bringdown. The steady 4/4 drum machine stomp that anchored the Italo-disco anthem here withers into the faint recording of a rickety-sounding metronome, whose ticking summons the song and drops away. The metronome suggests multiple scenarios: a musician keeping time, a stage magician hypnotizing an assistant plucked from the audience, a psychoanalyst relaxing a patient before probing his unconscious for repressed memories. Then blunt stabs of bass guitar begin, hammering out something almost too crude to call a “bassline”: one note four times up, a second note four times down, over and over, unrelenting. Dum Dum Dum Dum Doom Doom Doom Doom. In the space between strikes, a taped voice cries out: “No.” Gen’s voice, softer and more closely miked than on any previous song on the album, lingers upon the word “Persuaaaaaaasiooooon,” stretching it lazily across the riff. The taped voice returns, insisting, “no, no, no,” muffled cries dissolving into something that could be laughter, or pain. Field recordings as criminological evidence, or harmless playground found sound? Are these children’s voices? A woman under some nameless form of duress? Who are these people and what are they doing to each other? No explanatory rubric is given. Instead, frantic shards/shreds of Cosey’s guitar noise keen and scream in sympathy with the taped voices.

  “Persuasion” raises questions of motive and intent. What lies behind the persistent scenes of cruelty and suffering in TG’s work? What are the sexual politics of TG, if any? As this is the song in which the ethics and technics of TG’s representational practices get hammered out most explicitly on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, I intend to linger upon its lyrical and musical inconsistencies and multiple resonances at some length. “Persuasion” functions as an analysis of mechanisms of control, a critical unpacking of the personality that needs to control others, but it also permits a pleasurable identification with that controlling position, a fantasy scenario in which the affective charge experienced through having power over others is gloated over, wallowed in and recirculated. The song’s found audio constitutes a perverse sonic archive that memorializes anonymous individuals who have been captured and incorporated into a fetishistic collection of “stolen” artifacts. But the song is pointed inward as well as outward, for the narrative of its creation also maps the interpersonal dynamics of the band, revealing the faultlines, allegiances and tensions within the group’s members as collaborators, lovers, ex-lovers and friends. In all senses, “Persuasion” is a song of profoundly uncomfortable intimacy.