Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (19 page)

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 software 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.

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