by Daniel, Drew
The killer communicates with the viewer, and that means that he makes him his accomplice. I’m making the viewer an accomplice of the killer, but at the end, I’m reproaching him for this position. It’s a little sarcastic, but I wanted to show how you’re always an accomplice of the killer if you watch this kind of film. Not this kind of self-reflexive film, but films that show violence in an “acceptable” way. We always agree that violence is happening, it’s consumable, and we don’t realize that we’re accomplices in this. . . . If someone stayed to the end, then he needed that torture in order to understand. (Funny Games, 1998)
Such a stance forces us to acknowledge our own participatory location within the unfolding spectacle, and asks that we reconsider the power we wield as consumers within the capitalist entertainment economies of supply and demand. They make what we will pay for, and by sitting through the entirety of Funny Games, or, for that matter, “Very Friendly,” Throbbing Gristle’s album-side-long narration of Ian Brady and Myra Hindeley’s murder of gay teenager Edward Evans, we ratify its status as quality entertainment.
Both Haneke and Throbbing Gristle present ultraviolent scenarios within some of their work, and both insist that when they do so, it is in order to comment upon a broader culture of violence, pushing its logic toward a critical reductio ad absurdum in order to short-circuit its sociopolitical wiring. But such subversive critical agendas also run the risk of collapsing into a hypocritical dodge. What about the artist’s competitive investment in “one-upping” the mainstream by deliberately concocting such extreme, over-the-top material? It certainly cuts a dashing figure to intone that “It’s not I, the artist, who longs for violence and cruelty, but you, hypocrite lecteur,” but after turning upon the consumer with such hostility, ordering them to “pay no attention to the artist behind the curtain” feels like a symptomatic evasion, a telling avoidance of the artist’s own desires, fears and fantasies, and indeed their own complicity in the entertainment industry they seek to shame. Furthermore, by ignoring the extent to which such high-minded authorial intentions may drop out of the equation for an audience already self-aware about, and possibly all too comfortable with, their own bloodthirsty tastes, the very sophistication of this enabling rubric carries an obverse lining of intellectual naiveté all its own. In this case, all the avant-gardist heavy lifting begins to look less like an alternative to a brutal society and more like an experimental R+D wing unwittingly forecasting and prototyping its most craven tendencies. Worse still, there remains another, even more disappointing possibility: that the enlightened consumer, the “with it” fan, might be absorbing the ostensibly critical message at the discursive level, tsk tsking that such violence is indeed most terrible, while cynically getting their rocks off about that very violence at the same time.
Throbbing Gristle were clearly aware of these tradeoffs and difficulties by the time they made 20 Jazz Funk Greats. At that point, it was clear that the bloodyminded true crime recitatives that made up the lyrics and spoken texts within the earliest incarnations of TG (“Very Friendly,” “Slug Bait,” “Maggot Death”) had worked all too well, cementing the association of industrial music with gruesome tales of serial killing, rape, child molestation and child murder. The aesthetic deathgrip of such Grand Guignol fare initially helped to cast a suitably threatening media shadow, amplifying the already plentiful notoriety of Coum’s alumni as nihilistic perverts and “wreckers of civilization.” But it ultimately proved stifling and tedious to the members of the band, who had to watch as their antihumanist gestures were photocopied and distorted endlessly by arrivistes who brought plenty of iron-stomached bloodlust but forgot to pack the critical savoir faire. Gen confessed in RE/Search to being utterly bored by the mounting tide of blowhard fan letters that sang the praises of Charles Manson and Ted Bundy et. al (#6–7, p. 12). The effects of such associations proved more damaging and longlasting than the band predicted.
“Persuasion” has telescoped into history, and its meaning—that is to say, its ability to produce effects upon those who listen to it closely—has not stopped changing in response to the world transforming around it. Culturally speaking, there are certain formerly volatile elements within “Persuasion” that have lost their ability to threaten. What once was creepy now risks sounding quaint. At the level of public relations, the ubiquity of pornography has subtly transformed its moral valence; though it is still subject to titters of embarrassment, comedy routine mockery and continual harassment from tax assessors on suspicions of mob involvement, porn is now an upstanding sector of the global economy. It has become a catechism when discussing the Internet to assert that porn takes up the lion’s share of online user bandwidth. Gen’s cloak-and-dagger scenario of the big city seducer preying upon fresh-from-the-farm innocence feels closer to the erotic fiction of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill than it does to the decentralized, self-exploiting democracy of amateur porn. Statistically, one is now far more likely to drunkenly “cam” one’s self into potentially embarrassing nude notoriety than to be talked into it by a Faginlike emissary from the porn underworld. As a porn star and performance artist, the flawless cool of Cosey’s double life (pinup girl by day, wrecker of civilization by night) has now been replaced by the Hot Topic—styled banality of the Suicide Girls, tattooed and pierced gothettes whose skin-deep subcultural identifications are the primary selling point of their mildly successful commercial packaging. Porn, even and especially “cool” or “weird” porn, is mainstream. Similarly, the premise of collecting panties and underwear, so titillating to the first wave of (mostly straight and male) listeners to TG’s song, now seems more funny than scary. In Japan, vending machines sell “used” schoolgirl’s panties to interested salarymen, and eBay permitted a brisk trade in similiar items, both male and female, until it was shamed into giving the red card to the practice. It simply migrated elsewhere. But Gen’s sense that one might experiment consciously upon one’s personality by “trying out” a fetish has proved prescient, as the chatroom anonymity of the web now provides a more casual and risk-free ambience in which one can virtually remodel one’s own identity. One can voice, act out and recant one’s desires at whim, and the Fortnum and Mason biscuit tin is now a file folder full of jpegs uploaded from a cellphone camera.
Swallowed in one gulp, the lyrics to “Persuasion” tell a simple story: power saturates all relationships, power is everywhere, and therefore any human situation can simply be boiled down to the question of whose orders are being carried out. But TG don’t—or won’t—actually follow through on such paranoid oversimplifications. Far from confirming the absolutist vision that Gen’s narrator chants to himself and the listener, the song itself constitutes an ongoing battle for mastery between the band’s sound and Gen’s lyric, and neither party quite succeeds in dominating the other. Intolerably enough, the song models conflict, and neither party gets to be “master.” What reads on the lyric sheet like a hymn to the will to power comes through the speakers sounding like a cautionary tale about the messy human consequences of fantasy. TG’s perversion lies not in their lyrical frankness about kinky goings on but in their relentless eagerness for formal self-sabotage, and in “Persuasion” that self-sabotage makes for a peculiarly sticky listening experience: you have to work to make it through this song, and you have to work out for yourself exactly where you stand in relation to the pleasures and cruelties the song makes available. To risk a certain rockist shorthand, “Persuasion” is Throbbing Gristle’s “Sympathy for the Devil”: faced with a choice between pretending to critique what it actually celebrates and pretending to celebrate what it actually critiques, it swings both ways.
Walkabout
“Arise and walk about in the land, in the length of it and in the breadth, for I will give it unto thee.”
Genesis 13:17 (Tndale Translation)
Bookended by tiny, granular clouds of chirping noises that wrongfoot the listener into expecting another tentative ambient murkscape, “Walkabout” quickly bursts into bloom
as a florid, faintly Kraftwerkian fantasia for synths. Stripped of any dance-floor-oriented rhythmic underpinning from drum machines, its arpeggiating keyboard parts serve as flying buttresses in support of a soaring tower of major synthetic chords: C-sharp major, B major, A major, B major. It is simple but beautiful and, because of that, rather wrenching as the follow-up to the absolute depths of “Persuasion.” As the “happiest” moment on the record, its placement both continues and exacerbates the sensation of musical and emotional inconsistency in place as the pendulum of 20 Jazz Funk Greats swings in increasingly erratic directions. Presenting the listener with a tightly executed, no-nonsense synth instrumental, “Walkabout” is one of the most sharply realized tracks on the album, and yet also the one most redolent of a genre exercise: its palette recalls the German Kosmische music of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, but its compressed form signals a tactical allegiance to the starvation diet metabolism of pop. In a sense, electronic composition as a utopian futurist gesture was already a dead metaphor by the late seventies and had already been seamlessly integrated into the standard musical production modes used in film and television soundtracks, radio production and mass media. Consider the example of The Scientific Mind, a collection of production music generated by the Omni Music Corporation in Washington, D.C., in 1978: described as “Light industrial moods with an electronic feel,” titles such as “Futuristic,” “Lab Work,” “Memory Circuit” and “Ice Blue” promise the listeners “quick tempo, bright computer-type sounds” and “bubbling synthesizer sounds with rhythm.” A work of immaculate sequencer bonsai that clocks in at under three minutes, “Walkabout” would sit comfortably in such a context, conjuring up a frictionless glide across a neon-drenched, nonspecific urban nightscape, were it not for its curious title.
Drew: Is “Walkabout” a solo Chris Carter composition?
Chris: It is. It wasn’t meant to be. It’s just the way it turned out. It became so dense that we couldn’t figure out what to put in there. It’s just loads of sequencers going.
Cosey: We said, “Chris, you’ve not left us any room to do anything.”
Chris: So I said, “Oh, okay then, we’ll just leave it like it is then.” And everyone was happy to just do that. That was part of the reason that it was left as it was, because it was like nothing else on the album. It’s the only thing like that.
Drew: Were you fan of the Nicholas Roeg film Walkabout? Is that the source of the song’s title?
Chris: I was pretty obsessive about early/mid-1970s Nic Roeg films, and still am, specifically the period of Performance, Don’t Look Now, Walkabout. I know the rest of TG were aware of this so there are bound to be some connections, tenuous, direct or otherwise. I also used samples and snippets of sound from those three movies in some of the TG performances. Also, my synths and SFX on “Walkabout” and “Exotica” were definitely “influenced” by the soundtrack of Walkabout the movie.
With the caveat that title references may be impulsive red herrings, I cannot resist pursuing the possibilities generated by overlaying Roeg’s film onto TG’s album. The film’s title credits provide a curt synopsis: “In Australia, when an Aboriginal man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT.” The film stars Jenny Agutter, Lucien John and David Gumpilil, whose stark identification as Girl, White Boy and Black Boy in the closing credits telegraphs the high stakes of Roeg’s parable of innocence, experience and race. Getting things going with a bang, Girl and White Boy’s father bizarrely fires a gun at his children in the middle of a picnic; his self-immolating death at the beginning of the film is staged as a surrealist farce that creates a festal world without parents. Commencing their meandering, careless jaunt across the parched bush country, the unattended, increasingly sunburnt Girl and White Boy at first stand alone; like Milton’s Adam and Eve, “the world was all before them.” Spoiler alert: their near death from dehydration is averted through the miraculous intervention of Black Boy, who rescues them and teaches them how to survive in the bush; the three form a tentative utopian community until the lure of a return to (white) “civilization” proves too strong for the recidivist Girl, who is spooked by Black Boy’s puberty rituals and courtly advances. As we see in his shots of Aborigines creating hideous plaster lawn sculptures of kangaroos and of themselves in idealized “primitive” form, Roeg’s film is, at least in part, about the problem of kitsch that lies at the heart of any representation of “otherness.” This caustic awareness contaminates equally the shots of Black Boy’s feathered and painted body doing a skeleton dance, and Girl’s speech about her desire for “clean sheets and records and my own clothes.” Society is a place of primness, propriety and property ownership, but Girl, now safe from harm amid watered lawns and locked doors, remains haunted by utopian memories of an encounter with a racial and cultural other who she both fetishized and disavowed. After noting in passing that Chris Carter listed Jenny Agutter as his “favorite actress” in Industrial News, what’s all this got to do with his synth ditty?
At the macro level, there are particular aesthetic tics and habits within the TG playbook that find antecedents in Roeg’s work. Roeg’s films frequently have a kind of surreptitious syllabus of avant-garde and occult references hiding in plain sight within certain shots and sounds: Performance (1970), with its alternately blatant and buried nods to Artaud, Burroughs and Borges, uses the popular medium of film as a way to encrypt references to arcana that clearly find analogues in Throbbing Gristle’s approach toward the insertion of esoteric content into the framework of pop music. It’s a short step from the scene in which Mick Jagger didactically reads aloud the hashish/assassin mythos of Hassan I Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountains, and drawls, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” to TG’s wink wink nudge nudge use of Crowley’s “Love is the law” as a chorus to their pop single “United.” Beyond such fellow traveling, there are obvious overlaps between Walkabout as a narrative about the pathos and impossibility of successfully “going native” and the track record of TG’s members. If we recall that Chris and Cosey later released an album called Techno-Primitiv (1985), and that Genesis and Paula P-Orridge were in the original RE/Search issue number twelve on Modern Primitives, which arguably spearheaded a widespread resurgence of subcultural interest in tattooing, body-piercing and body modification, or note that Sleazy has just released a DVD as the Threshold House Boys Choir of traditional Thai trance-induced piercing rituals, we can see that these kinds of cross-identifications and risky performances of willful, self-consciously constructed “primitivism” are part of the continuing legacy of the TG ethos.
What about Chris Carter’s claim to have been specifically influenced by the sound design of Walkabout? The film is unusually kinetic and inclusive in its range of gestures, and its score bears close examination. The sound editing of “Walkabout” commences with a fever dream collage, offering the viewer a deliberately jarring series of audiovisual hard cuts that are as much sonic as visual: the film starts with searing radio noise, then a French voice, then didgeridoo, then the uncanny breathing exercises of student girls, then the stomping march of soldiers’ boots, watched by a little boy, and then a humming exercise of girl students again. Montage becomes an aggressive act of crosscultural suture, and this prepares the viewer for Roeg’s more argumentative edits later in the film, such as the infamous intercut between the Aboriginal slaughter of a kangaroo and a “civilized” butcher’s stroke. At first blush, John Barry’s syrupy and lush orchestral score doesn’t seem like a plausible touchstone for TG’s musical aesthetic. But it is treacherous and perhaps ironically marked in the context of a film that uses Jenny Agutter’s naked body to re-create Hedy Lamarr’s classic erotic swimming sequence in Ecstasy, only to garnish it with the killing and roasting of live animals—surely an enactment of Cosey’s observation that “nasty things happen in beautiful spots” i
f ever there was one. One could say that Roeg’s use of this “beautiful” orchestral score in the midst of matter-of-fact killing offers a cinematic analogue to the relationship between music and meaning that TG’s album also sets up and knocks down.
Pop music and conventionally “beautiful” orchestral scores act as camouflage, as ideological decoys, as an escapist oasis of pleasurable distraction that compensates for, or falsifies, a grim world of violent predation that is never far from view. Soft rock songs by Rod Stewart and Bob Denver-soundalike Warren Marley call out from Girl’s AM radio as they stagger across a hostile, forbidding landscape. Punctuated by shots of bleached bones and animal carcasses writhing with maggots, these chance transmissions of pop music, instead of offering reassurance or a reminder of community, become increasingly estranged and implausible. It’s not all sweeping strings and pop tones, however: from the synthetic beeps that occasionally interrupt the narrative, to the use in the film’s “snake dream” sequence of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Hymnen,” a musique concrète composition that collages together a polyglot cluster of national anthems into a disorienting stew, to the radio noise and static symphony that accompanies the flaming red images of the sun burning through desert clouds, which comes complete with a clearly audible announcer’s voice intoning the Aleister Crowley slogan that “Every man and every woman is a star,” there are also monstrous, harsh elements to the sound world of “Walkabout.” Loosely, one could correlate the separate zones of Chris Carter’s composition with the discreet ingredients of Roeg’s film: the introductory chirping noises that begin TG’s song align with Stockhausen’s concrete collage (noisy, harsh), while the central, sequenced section stands in for John Barry’s score (melodic, beautiful). But instead of simply reversing the conventional shorthand associations of underground aesthetics (beauty is phony, therefore garish, therefore “ugly”; ugliness is real, therefore true, therefore “beautiful”), a move that would negatively reinforce the hold of the prevailing divisions, the overall dialectical argument between noise and music, beauty and ugliness, within the sound design of Walkabout becomes one of mutual contamination and indifference: the beautiful John Barry score seems to wilt and wither in the sun, while the crispy filters and fragments of Stockhausen seem to light up with an eerie desert glow. Such a dissolve enacts sonically the visual dissolves within Roeg’s cinematography: as urban views of towerblocks are intercut with natural tracking shots of trees and parks, downtown Sydney gets naturalized, and its palm trees start to look like skyscrapers. The nature vs. culture division doesn’t just wiggle, it melts. Similarly, in titling his ultrafuturistic sequencer hymn “Walkabout,” Chris Carter goes beyond a simple gesture of namedropping homage and torques his synthesizer music’s sleek urban modernism off message, pulling away from the ready to hand clichés of the Tokyo–Berlin–London circuitboard metropolis and toward a lush, primeval imaginary. In the context of a Throbbing Gristle album in which form always feels jerryrigged for imminent collapse, the simplicity of this simple, melodic song, well wrought and tidily executed, becomes all the more uncanny. It is music out of place.