by Daniel, Drew
I am one of the injured
A tear blurs flesh
Dissolving
Like an injured dog
Like wasted limbs
Get smaller
Pain is the stimulus of pain
But then of course nothing is cured
This is the world
Move a fin and the world turns
Sit in a chair and pictures change
Try to eat us
And get trapped
Or injured
Just
Hovering on the border between gobbledygook and genius, these phrases emit a softly grotesque menace worthy of a Francis Bacon painting, and in the image of a tear blurring flesh they faintly echo the Marquis de Sade’s hymn to Virtue in Justine: “How sublime does it appear through tears!” (Sade, p. 456). At their center is a portable phrase that still rings true as a summary of mediatized alienation: “Sit in a chair and pictures change” could describe the sliding, oily quality of surfaces viewed through the periscope of LSD, but it just as effortlessly evokes the thinglike passivity of the sitcom addicts of yesterday and the compulsive web surfers of today. I had always assumed that the antistructure of the phrases was the result of a pure cutup, but Gen insists that there is a far more elaborate explanation for their source.
Gen: In 1967 I was with my friend Spydee and another friend Little Baz, in Solihull, and we were going through a phase of doing séances with a wine glass and an alphabet. You have a circle of cards with the alphabet and numbers from one to ten and you also have yes and no. You put a wine glass in the middle and you put your right hand’s first finger as lightly as possible on the glass and you ask for the spirit to come through and the glass begins to move.
Drew: So it’s like a Ouija board, but it’s one that you construct yourself?
Gen: Exactly. We got through to a spirit that called itself Mebar. And Mebar started answering questions. I still have some of the typed up transcripts. I found them in one of my notebooks. During that question and answer session with this spirit, it said, “Move a fin and the world turns.” Those phrases that are in “Six Six Sixties” are from that session.
Drew: It spoke through all of you?
Gen: I did as Mebar told me. The whole text of “Six Six Sixties” is a transcript of a séance.
Drew: Did a core identity for Mebar ever emerge?
Gen: Yeah. I’ve got drawings of Mebar.
Drew: I’d like to see one of those.
Spirit communication and recordmaking go together. In his potted history of “dactylomancy,” the practice of spirit communication that includes both modern-day Ouija boards and the more traditional use of cups and letters on a broad wooden board such as that used by Gen and his mates, J. Edgar Cornelius notes that strict recordkeeping of all intercourse between elementals and mediums is an essential component of the emotional bond being built in the space between the worlds:
Drawing of “Mebar” from the notebooks of Genesis P. Orridge
In working a Ouija board and communicating with elementals, the necessity for keeping such a record is apparent. You must know what the elemental had previously said in case contradictions slip into the communications. Remember, the elemental by nature is a lying spirit and learns this trait from you; it’s not inherent in his being. Therefore, if contradictions appear, you must have a previous record to determine what might have inspired the elemental’s answer. However, an elemental, when confronted with the multiplication of lies, will always tell the truth. I highly suggest that in addition to the two people working the triangle and a third asking questions, you employ a fourth who acts solely as the scribe to record everything that is occurring as well as the time. This being his only task, he can focus his mind more intensively on the Magickal Record. (Cornelius, p. 101)
Why make a magical record when you can make a Magickal Record? Suffused with the voice of angelic visitation, “Six Six Sixties” marks the close of 20 Jazz Funk Greats with a suitably magical transformation, turning primitive, humdrum materials (a bass guitar playing a single note, a drum machine playing a preset, a wineglass sliding across a table) into portals singing of an otherworldly science.
Photograph of the
20 Jazz Funk Greats mastertape by Chris Carter
Release
Now, as I have said, the moment we recognized the existence of the mind parasites, we escaped their cunningly laid trap. For it was nothing less than a history trap.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites
TG were a perverse band, and 20 Jazz Funk Greats was a perverse record for them to make. Which only begs the question: perverse in relation to what? Perversion is in itself a normative concept: in its root definition it is understood as “an erring, straying, deviation, or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right” (Oxford English Dictionary). Clearly, TG’s perversion cannot consist in their interest in kink and mayhem; given their fanbase and music industry profile, precisely that total package of harsh form and ghoulish content had become normative within the first few years of their existence. As Paul Hegarty notes in Noise/Music: A History, “Noise must also be thought of as constantly failing—failing to stay noise, as it becomes familiar, or acceptable practice” (Hegarty, p. ix). By 1979, TG needed a new way to fail. To continue to dish out ever more distorted soundscapes with ever higher body-counts would have been their expected path, and was in fact the route taken by the four-track-wielding hordes who fleshed out and watered down industrial as a style. Pinning the butterfly, one might say that TG’s “real” perversion expressed itself through their relentless eagerness to consciously violate their own identity, to betray themselves. It is the nature of perverts to swerve to avoid nature, a dynamic Jonathan Dollimore describes as “the paradox of perversion as internal deviation” (Dollimore, p. 124). It’s a phrase that neatly, if inadvertently, describes the vexed question of genre at the heart of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. These songs are divisive unto themselves and stray from one another, and their collective failure to successfully embody the organic unity of the “well formed album” is their success. Teasingly shuttling between mimicry and indifference, each track seems conflicted about whether or not it is really trying to show up for the listener as a legible example of the local style it infringes upon. If each song constitutes a kind of microcosmic dissolution of the contours of specific genres, the album’s overall failure to resolve its internal differences constitutes a macrocosmic attack on the idea of genre as such. Coum Transmissions’ catchy, self-sabotaging slogan, “We guarantee disappointment,” goes double for TG. Guaranteeing disappointment to the end, TG’s calling card is a constitutive hostility to belonging: to a genre, to a gender, to a lifestyle, to a music scene, to a society.
They were repaid in kind. Here are some of the rave reviews that greeted the release of 20 Jazz Funk Greats in the winter of 1979: Steve Morley in NME decried its “dreary indulgence” and found it “deliberately listless and loveless”; Steve Taylor in Melody Maker dismissed its “cheap intentions to menace and alienate” as “an expensive joke which continually threatens to turn nasty (but never delivers the horrors)”; the unkindest cut arrived in the following spring, courtesy of Andrew James Paterson’s review in Fuse: “The album is entirely devoid of personality or glamour” (as quoted in Ford, 9.27). To the UK music press, 20 Jazz Funk Greats was, indeed, dead on arrival. Yet the extended afterlife of the album tells a very different story; for all the bafflement and outright hostility it generated upon its release, it is also the TG album that has tenaciously endured changes in fashion and seems to remain permanently in dialogue with a proliferating series of subsequent musical movements. Neither ahead of its time nor entirely at home in its historical moment, it’s not an album that ever truly arrived. Instead, it seems to keep talking back to the present as components of its tangled aesthetic resurface each decade anew. If the album’s cover artwork anticipates the coming loungecore revival of Tipsy and the Mike Flowers Pops, “
Beachy Head” predicts the murky sonics of mid-nineties “Ambient Isolationism” and the porous emptiness of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” could be taken for an unacknowledged template of trip hop. An over-the-top house cover version of “Persuasion” by Billy Ray Martin in 1993 transformed TG’s dirge into an unlikely anthem (you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a diva squeal the phrase “Y front pantieeeees”). More recently, the synthetic side of the album has dominated the conversation between past and present: Carl Craig’s 2004 remix of “Hot on the Heels of Love” beefed up its kicks and resutured its snares for big-room techno, and Jonnie Wilkes of Glaswegian DJ crew Optimo titled a 2007 mix CD Walkabout, pushing off from its titular TG track into a hypnotic, stripped-down set of psychedelic electronics. In an ironic stroke of justice, the very diversity that made the album so hard to market has also kept it sturdily afloat in an increasingly fragmented climate of musical microgenres.
Before lapsing into a too pat celebration of the diversity of musical styles on offer within 20 Jazz Funk Greats, one might also recall Lyotard’s oft-quoted summary judgment of eclectic consumer culture in The Postmodern Condition:
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. (Lyotard, p. 76)
Ouch. Bracketing the Chicken Little doomsaying and “exotic” examples, which now feel all-too-retro themselves, Lyotard noticeably elides a crucial difference between eclectic consumers and eclectic artworks. The commodities racked up by the eclectic consumer require a certain amount of distance and difference amongst themselves (between old and new, between east and west) precisely in order for the total range of these disparate goods and services and signifiers to show up as eclectic. But if eclecticism for consumers is par for the course, eclecticism within the commodity is a rather riskier affair. The chances of assembling a range of components that will all work in concert to hit a demographic “target” can slide precipitously toward zero. You can’t please everyone. As Throbbing Gristle learned in the aftermath of marketing 20 Jazz Funk Greats to a perplexed fanbase who wanted reliable delivery systems for a defined style, pace Lyotard, it isn’t all that easy to find a public for eclectic works.
To be honest, TG didn’t stand a chance in the world of real pop music circa late 1979/early 1980. The charting UK pop albums of the year remind us that the newly emergent must fight for shelf space with dying movements, unexpected comebacks and hardy weedlike perennials: Rose Royce’s Greatest Hits, the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue, Johnny Mathis’s Tears and Laughter, Genesis’ Duke, Boney M’s The Magic of Boney M, AC/DC’s Back in Black, Deep Purple’s Deepest Purple, Kate Bush’s Never for Ever, David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and Super Creeps and, happily for über-fan Chris Carter, ABBA’s Super Trouper and their Greatest Hits Volume 2 (Brown, p. 1,008). Faced with competition from such forthright and solid citizens of the republic of “real music,” TG’s parasitic and oblique relationship to making music at all would necessarily betray their refugee status. Simply put, when played back to back with real rock music and real disco and real jazz, TG’s curios are, generally speaking, not up to the job. This isn’t always the case. While DJing at a disco in San Francisco, I segued from Bam Bam’s creepy acid techno classic “Where’s Your Child?” into TG’s “Hot on the Heels of Love” and on from there into Chelonis R. Jones’s minimal house stomper “Deer in the Headlights” without killing the dance floor; TG can, after all, work as functional music. But in most cases they simply don’t. Hoping to test their ability to “pass” as jazz funk for casual listeners, I created a “Jazz Funk 101” iTunes play-list and sprinkled some of the funkier moments from 20 Jazz Funk Greats in among Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke and Roy Ayers. Playing it for friends and visitors as background music, the TG tracks didn’t so much stand out as fail to appear; they showed up as a curious lull in volume and presence, their bleached sounds and fitful gestures inevitably triggering a vague unease in my test subjects, a quietness. I should have been disappointed at this failure to pass, but in fact it only triggered an ever more defensive love of this album, recalling Walter Benjamin’s observation about wrinkles on the face of one’s beloved: “It is just here, in what is defective and censurable, that the fleeting darts of admiration nestle” (Benjamin, p. 68). Having been frustrated at seventeen with their ambivalence and inconsistency, nearly twenty years later these same qualities, of compromise and doubt and “softness” and “weakness,” inspire a fiercely protective reflex of devotion.
* * *
In an era when the material circulation of music is ever more dubious and embattled, it is worth attending to the current status of the album’s archival survival. An agreement between Industrial Records and Mute has kept the album in print and available at the cost of a few changes. Though the digital mastering by Chris Carter is a sensitive job and does not overly compress the music, the scanned reproduction of the cover artwork on the Mute CD edition is noticeably dark and grainy and lacking in resolution, and does not compare favorably with early vinyl editions of the album. Another significant deviation is that the back of the CD does not reproduce the solitary Range Rover photograph and lyric layout (which is now inside) but instead presents the viewer with an alternate version of the cover photograph, this time with a nude male corpse in plain view at the feet of the band members. While the addition of two maniacal live versions of “Discipline” on the Mute CD edition keeps the posthumously released “Discipline” twelve-inch single in print, it must be said that its presence immediately after “Six Six Sixties” violates the trajectory of the original album tracklist, and in my opinion compromises its integrity. Taken as a suite, 20 Jazz Funk Greats feels very much like a fully realized studio album in a way that does not resemble any of the other TG albums, and the inclusion of live material on the CD version dilutes this quality.
Now for the mushy part. Quite simply, I wanted to write this book because I believe that Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats offers an exemplary, best-case scenario for truly critical and independent artistic decisionmaking. Specifically, this album’s mutually incongruous simulacrums of jazz and funk and disco and lounge and pop and improv model a relationship toward genre that I find personally inspiring, a stance at once caustically skeptical and promiscuously inclusive. Writing this book has forced me to return to ancient interviews with Throbbing Gristle that I read as a teenager, interviews in which they put forward viewpoints and strategies that I have swallowed more or less in their entirety and now regard as somehow “my own”: ideas about how to be a musician without really caring about whether what you make is or is not music, ideas about how to sequence albums so that the listener is forced to think about genre in a new way, ideas about how to crop and frame information in liner notes and images in order to control and transform the listener’s experience, ideas about how to survive boom/bust cycles of hype and collapse and avoid repetition, models for how to shamelessly flaunt perversity. Emerging from a close call with pure kitsch, TG wound up taking stances that risk, from the least likely of places, a sort of open-hearted curiosity and honesty about how to fail again, fail better. I realize that this wreckers-of-civilization-with-hearts-of-gold scenario may resound like so much fanboy special pleading. There is, furthermore, a risk in treating an album like 20 Jazz Funk Greats as if its every blurt and burble and thump came saturated with stoic intention, rather than simply encountering it as a messy collision between separate agents with occasionally contrary agendas. Gen sternly announced on the next TG album, the live-in-the-studio LP Heathen Earth, that everything one did ought to be planned out with absolute precision, like a military coup. Good prophets as usual, TG’s wish came true. Thanks to extensive market research and consulting-firm tests with focus groups and sample demographics and telephone surveys and algorithmic predictive softw
are modeling environments, most mass-marketed commodities, from political candidates to Hollywood films to major label pop records, are plotted with the precision of a military coup (perhaps now it is only the military coups themselves that are sloppy?). With occasional gems twinkling through the mountains of shit and garbage, one might kindly call the results of this situation mixed. Luckily, TG failed to live up to their own ideal. Had this stated prime directive of total control actually produced a smoothly running propaganda machine for the TG brand, in other words, had TG had the good sense not to make 20 Jazz Funk Greats, they would be a far less interesting proposition. But for every manic onstage chant that “WE NEED SOME DISCIPLINE IN HERE” there was a sloppy jam that happily did without; for every glittering, crystalline pop moment there was a murky, dodgy-sounding aberration. TG’s apparent rage for order must be understood as something born out of bruising encounters with contingency, breakdown and the failures and limitations of planning. Their control freak pretense was wishful thinking, if not a con and a joke.
The most unforeseen subsequent development in their story is that after terminating their mission in 1981 and separating outward into Psychic TV, Coil and Chris and Cosey for twenty-three years, Throbbing Gristle’s four members have now reunited for new recordings and live performances and installations (including a marathon “cover” of Nico’s Desertshore album). Sitting in a box seat at the Astoria and looking over hundreds of worshipful fans who had traveled from across the globe to see a “private” live TG recording session in London on May 16, 2004, I remember grinning stupidly at the sheer stubbornness of the band’s continued existence on the planet. Hearing the band live for the first time after listening to muffled concert recordings since the age of sixteen, my impossibly high hopes were locking horns with my cynically low expectations. After a rocky start with a bass guitar strummed but not plugged in, a distracted onstage manner and a distressingly low overall volume, I quietly despaired. Maybe coming back isn’t such a good idea. But halfway through the set, stark growling notes signaled the start of “Persuasion” and I was gurning, besotted, aglow. By “What a Day,” the bass was overwhelming, bowel-curdling, pushing the PA to the edge, alive with wriggling low-end frequencies spawned in an undersea Lovecraftian trench. Ecstatic and ugly, the inherently awkward spectacle of a TG reunion clawed its way past the risk of cash-grab travesty to hit me between the eyes with unexpectedly righteous power. Guaranteeing disappointment and carrying on anyway, they have not forgotten how to break a promise. I admire their purity.