by Daniel, Drew
The image obviously baited and intrigued viewers and fans, as we can see from the need for a response in the “Your Questions Asked” section of Industrial News:
The young girl on the cover of D.o.A. is called Kama Brandyk. She is the daughter of a friend of ours who lives in Poland, with whom Gen stayed when he was there. Her mother is called Ewa Zajak and co-wrote the “Weeping” lyrics. Kama, the little girl, was listening to Alice in Wonderland in Russian and it was International Children’s day when the photo was taken. (#3, p. 9)
Taking pains to stress the utterly everyday nature of the image, TG simply confirmed that the cover photograph was an innocent family snapshot by supplying corroborating details; one could almost forget that their latest single was entitled “We Hate You Little Girls”—were it not for the advertisement for that very single on the opposite page. Similarly, the recordings of children’s voices that appear on “Persuasion” are entirely innocent recordings of actions that occurred in public and in which no crimes were committed, but through their positioning in relation to Gen’s lyrics about seedy deeds done “by the canal,” they take on a disturbing valence, and the specter of “indicative” inappropriateness hovers. The song’s power doesn’t lie in Sleazy’s recordings or Gen’s lyrics, but in the differential force field of competing meanings and scenarios in place between them, which pushes the listener to think for herself and make choices.
Drew: I’m interested in the lyrics and sonics of “Persuasion” as an example of the “third mind” in place between you and Genesis, in which you propose the topic of “Persuasion” and he writes the lyrics as a kind of comment on Cosey, and the idea circulates across and between all three of you as a kind of group mind at work. Do you remember the context in which the lyrics were invented?
Sleazy: Well, I don’t remember the specific details of which show it was but that was very often how TG songs would come about. He would ask me for a concept or a title or an idea and that would spin off into a lyric. It sounds bitchy but it’s not meant to be bitchy, but I seem to remember my first reaction when he performed the song for the first time was that his interpretation of the title was a bit on the nose and a bit literal. A bit obvious, really.
Drew: Well it also heterosexualizes the topic into a dynamic that is female-specific. “Look at me I touch your breast.”
Sleazy: That didn’t bother me, it’s not that. My reaction at the time was just that people that use their skill to persuade or convince, children especially, well, generally they’re a bit better at it than he was in the song. It seemed a bit straightforward. At the time I was well aware of people who were much more sophisticated in the way that they would get people to take their clothes off or to do things, sexual things, that they might not otherwise have done.
Drew: Like the personal profile where you say that one of your “likes” is “boys going through things for me”?
Sleazy: Right. Exactly. That’s still pretty much something I’m interested in.
Drew: So do you recognize a bit of yourself in the lyric?
Sleazy: Well, I would like to think that I was a bit more sophisticated, and that I would persuade them to do something a little more interesting than to just take their pants off or whatever.
Drew: The song seems designed to debunk the thing that it is describing, and takes a slightly moralistic stance about doing that, more so than the typically “neutral” stance that TG tries to take.
Sleazy: Maybe that’s also why I didn’t like it so much.
To put it mildly, the lyrics to “Persuasion” are both provocative and confusing, and certainly live up to Jon Savage’s blunt liner note observation that TG “were a bunch of evil scumbags with a nasty line in vicious humour which nobody ever quite got.” While there is certainly humor in Throbbing Gristle’s work—Gen chants his list of confiscated undergarments with schoolboy singsong glee—it would be a premature mistake to chalk the song up to bad taste and be done with it. To really “get the joke” being told in the song you must murder to dissect, and treat it as a little bit more than a joke. One can’t quite understand the curious tangle of meanings at work in “Persuasion” without tracing the rhetorical twists and blind spots within its bathroom wall palimpsest of lyrical scenarios. Ignoring standard verse/chorus groupings, the lyrics are organized like a kind of cave system of communicating grottos that each articulates the central idea of persuasion in a slightly different, but connected, manner. They run in full as follows:
Persuasion
You gotta get some
Persuasion
You gotta get some
Look at me I touch your breast
Look at me I touch your knees
And I persuade you
Like always I persuade you
Like always I persuade you
Persuasion
Look at me I touch your head
I say the words and you go to bed
My sister and my mother
My father and my son
Do everything I want them to
With persuasion
One lot of persuasion
Like always persuasion
Now there’s lots of ways to persuade you
I could do it with money
I could look at you
I could show you all that
You might as well do it anyway
You might as well choose to play the game
After all, you’ve seen yourself before
What difference does it make if I take your photograph?
What difference does it make if someone else sees it too?
All your friends do it
I mean nobody will know it’s you
Anybody, it could be any body
I mean, these magazines, you know
They only go to middle aged men
So why don’t you do what I suggest
I persuade you
With words I persuade you
Persuasion
I’ve got a little biscuit tin
To keep your panties in
Soiled panties, white panties, school panties, Y-front panties
By the canal, by the canal
And I persuade you
Like always I persuade you
Look at me
Look at me
There’s a certain word and a certain touch
A certain way and a way too much
There’s a little bit here
And a little bit there
When you’ve done it all it’s too late to care
Oh I persuade you
Like always I persuade you
Look in my eye
Under your covers
I touch you
And tell you what to do
Do it because I tell you
Do it because I love you
And I persuade you
Persuasion
The form, insofar as there is one, is that of the masturbatory catalogue, a free-associative parade of eroticized power relationships morphing into each other and doubling back: parent and child, photographer and model, fetishist and fetish object, seducer and conquest, murderer and murder victim, lover and beloved. We can sense the pressure of fantasy upon these words in the way that they all move in the same direction—a confident narratorial “I” addresses a silent and compliant “you”—even as each localized scene calls forth in the speaker a subtle shift in voice as the “I” takes up the specific sort of patter of persuasion native to that terrain. The lyrics don’t linger upon any of these scenarios, but dissolve them all together, eliding their differences, striving to create an intuitively convincing sense of family resemblance between experiences of domination in contexts that are normally kept separate. Everyday family life, pornographic acting and modeling, sexual abuse and criminal violence are, of course, not “all the same,” and yet the song whispers to us that the same logic of power can be used to explain them all, and that the same rhetorical tricks are used in all of these separate domains to dete
rmine who will prevail and who will obey. Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, the narrator of “Persuasion” seems convinced that “The question is which is to be master, that’s all” (Carroll, p. 112).
Drew: Tell me about “Persuasion.”
Gen: Yeah, that’s a good one. [wicked laughter] What do you want to know? How I came up with the story?
Drew: I know that there was a concert and you asked Sleazy what you should sing about and he said persuasion, and you made it up on the spot.
Gen: I’d been reading The Outsider by Colin Wilson and that fed into it. And I was reading a book on serial killers and that fed into it. But what I was interested in most of all were some of the anecdotes that Cosey told me about when she went on some of her, in inverted quotes, “modeling jobs.” There was one guy in particular who had to go through this whole routine of pretending that it wasn’t sexual, and that every time it was him who persuaded her to get naked in front of him.
Drew: And it was conveyed in advance that she was to act out this scenario of seduction, and to pretend that she was an ingénue and didn’t know what was going on?
Gen: Exactly. I thought that was fascinating, this kind of interesting little fetish that this person had developed. And one of his phrases was, “Well, nobody’s going to know, who’s going to see the pictures? It could be anybody.” I just liked the little phrase “It could be anybody,” the double meaning of the phrase, anybody or anybody’s body, you know? I started to twist the different things together, things that I knew. Because when Sleazy asked me I thought, Well, what do I know about persuasion? What are the elements that I can use? What I do with a lot of the lyrics, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll visualize a movie, and then describe it quite literally, as if it is happening. I could do it once I had the various characters: the seedy guy at Victoria Station trying to get people who’ve just come into town to do porno pictures for money, the naïve person persuaded and debauched and corrupted. But also . . . I do have a biscuit tin from Fortnum and Mason. And after I was living on my own in 1978 after D.o.A., I started to collect panties from my various lovers, and each one had a Polaroid of the vagina stapled in the crotch, and I folded them very carefully and kept them in this tin. So I started to experiment with developing a fetish consciously, as if these were talismanic mementos from some serial fetishist.
Drew: So you’re implicated in the song, but you’re also exposing persuasion as a technique.
Gen: So I was both characters, the observer and the protagonist.
One need not look far within The Outsider for elements that might have influenced the lyrics of “Persuasion.” The very first page begins with a quote from Henri Barbusse’s novel L’enfer, which sums up the sexually predatory male gaze:
In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.
Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.
In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed. It is not woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one . . . (Barbusse, as cited in Wilson, Outsider, p. 11)
This quote epitomizes the fetishistic collector: each woman is approached in order to accumulate one more pair of panties for the tin, and the tin is a general set that can never be filled. How many panties would be “enough”? The Outsider was written when Wilson was an alienated young man who lived the marginal life he theorized in his text; spending his days in the reading room of the British library compiling his primer of existentialist crisis, Wilson slept rough at nights in Hampstead Heath. There is a further linkage between The Outsider’s formally loose bundle of excerpts and quotes and the slippery combination of scenarios of pornographic fetishism, domestic abuse and implied violence in “Persuasion”: in his Autobiographical Reflections, Wilson describes his initial plan for the text as a pairing of “intellectual outsiders” such as Dostoyevsky with “physical outsiders,” individuals who express their alienation by violently physical means, either creatively (a dancer such as Nijinsky) or destructively (serial murderers such as Jack the Ripper and Peter Kurten) (Wilson, Autobiographical Reflections, p. 21).
Drew: How do you see the song? I see the link to Cosey’s work and you addressing her, but how do you see yourself responding to Sleazy? There’s a clear sense in which Sleazy, too, is a persuader.
Gen: Oh yeah, of course, everyone’s in there. That’s just how I do it, I bring in lots of bits of my reality and then I reassemble them, hopefully to create something that’s a generalized observation.
Drew: I was interested in “Persuasion” as a kind of turn in the way that you structured TG songs around the so-called “problem of evil,” because I have a pet theory that TG’s take on violence has three evolutionary stages across the three major albums. First, you have the first-person identification with the violent killer in “Slug Bait” on Second Annual Report, and on “Very Friendly” [a kind of murder ballad about the Moors Murderer Ian Brady]. Then, with “Hamburger Lady” on D.o.A., you move from identifying with the agent of violence to meditating on the reality of pain and suffering from the victim’s point of view. Then, with “Persuasion” on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, you return again to a kind of identification with the agent, but at this point it’s been transformed, and it’s handled in a very different way. In a, dare I say it, more critical and “mature” way . . .
Gen: God, I never expected TG to make more than one record, so I didn’t have a particular kind of lineage in mind. I was exploring options, trying to take the lyric to the final level after the Velvet Underground, where the lyric could be journalistic and anecdotal, with Lou Reed using the Andy Warhol Factory and the downtown underground scene as his source. I was very influenced by that possibility, that the lyric had gone beyond just Bob Dylan, who was making lyrics that were poetic and knowingly aware of avant-garde poetry and the beats and the beatniks. Then Lou Reed took it to the street, and I wanted to take it all the way, right down to the gutter. I wanted to say that everything is fair game for the lyric.
Drew: Including the most extreme, the most transgressive, the most unflinching descriptions of cruelty and violence?
Gen: Especially those. It’s the job of the artist to reflect their times and hopefully illuminate some of the dark shadow side of society’s guilt and fear, and expose that for the hypocrisy and danger that it represents.
Drew: You could connect such lyrical subject matter to some very old ballad traditions in English history, going back to the kind of “true crime” descriptions of child murder popular in the sixteenth century. But it seems that by the time of 20 Jazz Funk Greats you had probably also realized that you couldn’t just keep on creating variations of “Slug Bait” forever.
Gen: Well, no. Plus, people like Whitehouse and Come Org were doing that, and it was quite obvious that vicarious, gratuitous use of serial killers as an accessory was not just immature but downright irresponsible. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was trying to discuss motives, the dynamic of how people behave, because ultimately, to this day, I believe that human behavior is the key to change, to evolution. If we don’t behave differently, we’re doomed. Art has to ultimately deal with issues of human behavior, and why we behave in ways that are counterproductive, cruel, destructive, aggressive. Why is it that we keep falling back into the same loops, damaging and hurting ourselves, when anyone in their right mind knows that pain and violence are not good? That’s what I wanted to find out: Why? Why do people keep repeating this aberrant behavior? Why are people titillated and stimulated by second-hand descriptions of other people’s aberrant behavior? What is it that attracts us as beings to this, like flies to a corpse? What is it? If we can find out what that is, what that story is, that has stopped us from evolving with our technology, then maybe, just ma
ybe, we can finally let go of our prehistoric behavior and actually become a species that we can truly be proud of when we look at ourselves. So that was always there and it’s still there to this day. But of course it would change as I got people’s attention. “Here’s the Problem” (Second Annual Report). “This is a big problem, the problem goes down even into personal relationships” (“Weeping” on D.o.A.) and then with 20 Jazz Funk Greats, it’s obviously my responsibility as a writer to try to propose some escapes, some alternatives.
In creating artwork that pulls the listener into an uncomfortable feeling of complicity with acts of cruelty and violence, are TG fashioning a critical analysis of a violent world, or are they simply indulging in and reinforcing its ambient brutality? To take this question seriously one must step outside the ready-to-hand answers that the band provide and assess the TG partyline—if there is one—with a colder eye. The TG dynamic of rigged complicity can be compared with German filmmaker Michael Haneke’s strategy in his second feature Funny Games (1998), an unremittingly sadistic depiction of two psychopathic teenagers torturing and murdering a wealthy family in their country house. In an interview about his intentions that accompanies the DVD release of the film, Haneke reveals that he purposefully created an unbearable film designed to trap its viewers into experiencing their own identification with the film’s villains, intending to expose the audience’s willingness to remain in the theater as a sign of their tacit approval of the ongoing brutality: