Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)
Read Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) Online
Authors: Drew Daniel
20 Jazz Funk Greats
Praise for the series:
It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom
Exile on Main Street
or
Electric Ladyland
are as significant and worthy of study as
The Catcher in the Rye
or
Middlemarch
. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—
The New York Times Book Review
Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—
Rolling Stone
One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—
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These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—
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A brilliant series. . . each one a work of real love—
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We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books.—
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For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at
www.continuumbooks.com
and
33third.blogspot.com
Also available in this series:
Dusty in Memphis
by Warren Zanes
Forever Changes
by Andrew Hultkrans
Harvest
by Sam Inglis
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society
by Andy Miller
Meat Is Murder
by Joe Pernice
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
by John Cavanagh
Abba Gold
by Elisabeth Vincentelli
Electric Ladyland
by John Perry
Unknown Pleasures
by Chris Ott
Sign ‘O’ the Times
by Michaelangelo Matos
The Velvet Underground and Nico
by Joe Harvard
Let It Be
by Steve Matteo
Live at the Apollo
by Douglas Wolk
Aqualung
by Allan Moore
OK Computer
by Dai Griffiths
Let It Be
by Colin Meloy
Led Zeppelin IV
by Erik Davis
Armed Forces
by Franklin Bruno
Exile on Main Street
by Bill Janovitz
Grace
by Daphne Brooks
Murmur
by J. Niimi
Pet Sounds
by Jim Fusilli
Ramones
by Nicholas Rombes
Endtroducing. . .
by Eliot Wilder
Kick Out the Jams
by Don McLeese
Low
by Hugo Wilcken
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
by Kim Cooper
Music from Big Pink
by John Niven
Paul’s Boutique
by Dan LeRoy
Doolittle
by Ben Sisario
There’s a Riot Goin’ On
by Miles Marshall Lewis
Stone Roses
by Alex Green
Bee Thousand
by Marc Woodworth
The Who Sell Out
by John Dougan
Highway 61 Revisited
by Mark Polizzotti
Loveless
by Mike McGonigal
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
by Ric Menck
Court and Spark
by Sean Nelson
69 Love Songs
by LD Beghtol
Songs in the Key of Life
by Zeth Lundy
Use Your Illusion I and II
by Eric Weisbard
Daydream Nation
by Matthew Stearns
Trout Mask Replica
by Kevin Courrier
Double Nickels on the Dime
by Michael T. Fournier
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
by Shawn Taylor
Aja
by Don Breithaupt
Rid of Me
by Kate Schatz
Achtung Baby
by Stephen Catanzarite
If You’re Feeling Sinister
by Scott Plagenhoef
Let’s Talk About Love
by Carl Wilson
Swordfishtrombones
by David Smay
Forthcoming in this series:
Pretty Hate Machine
by Daphne Carr
and many more . . .
Drew Daniel
2008
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
33third.blogspot.com
Copyright © 2008 by Drew Daniel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
Album cover appears courtesy of Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Records, copyright © Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Records under exclusive licence to Mute.
www.throbbing-gristle.com
www.mute.com
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daniel, Drew.
Twenty jazz funk greats / Drew Daniel.
p. cm. – (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-1325-2
1. Throbbing Gristle (Musical group) 20 jazz funk greats. I. Title. II. Tide: 20 jazz funk greats. III. Series.
ML421.T554D36 2008
782.42166092’2--dc22
2007047126
Preface
This is the story of a band that could not make up its mind. They made an album about seduction, suicide, boredom, magic, Australia, stripping, rhetoric, plants, disco, Muzak, pornography, calligraphy, dactylomancy, politics, their dog, repetition and underwear. To put it mildly,
20 Jazz Funk Greats
sits askew within a series of books dedicated to classic albums: it doesn’t add up in a stylistically coherent manner, it didn’t sell particularly well when it was released, nor is it widely regarded by fans as the “best” album by Throbbing Gristle, nor did Throbbing Gristle produce work that musicologists and academics can roll easily around their tongue. Though they have proved to be juicy subjects for sensationalism, Throbbing Gristle’s actual musical output resists analysis. In some sense, Throbbing Gristle (hereafter interchangeably referred to as TG) are difficult to write about because of their oblique, even hostile, relationship to music qua music. Rather than improving upon, or mutating, a preexisting genre (think of the technically savvy, culturally predatory
stance of the Rolling Stones toward rhythm & blues) TG’s mythos rests on the claim that they are the founding creators of an entirely new genre, “industrial music.” It’s a rare distinction to be the initiators of a tradition unto itself, and the tenacious hold of the term in record store bins and online newsgroups attests to its enduring success as a meme, despite its claustrophobic circularity: TG play “industrial music.” What’s that? Stuff that sounds like TG. To kick the tires: the rise over the past two decades of an internationally oriented reissue market and the increasingly accessible twentieth-century archive of avant-garde, electronic and improvisatory musicmaking has made the claim that TG’s work is
sui generis
less and less tenable.
To an audience of contemporary
NME
readers who had only closely followed pop, rock and punk, the sounds of early Throbbing Gristle records were unearthly, entirely unexpected, withering comets of strangeness. To a present-day generation of casually eclectic listeners readily familiar with AMM and Stockhausen and Cluster, nursed on filesharing and mp3 weblogs that make one-off disco obscurities, kraut rock, musique concrète and extreme noise available to anyone with some free hard-drive space, Throbbing Gristle now feel like a particularly bewitching pop-experimental hybrid, but undeniably part of a larger canon. Yet even if it is easier today to locate TG’s activity within a broader context of musicmaking, the peculiar impact and endurance of their work is hard to explain, and defining the place of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
within TG’s own catalogue is harder still.
20 Jazz Funk Greats
is the sound of Throbbing Gristle no longer trying to sound like Throbbing Gristle, the sound of people burning off the associative trappings of tabloid scandal and unwanted
acceptance, the sound of people changing their minds. Widely misunderstood as their “pop album,” it’s too perverted, willful and crude to effortlessly pass as “real music,” but too mercurial and sparkly to lie still within the chilly ghetto graveyard of industrial stereotypes. I hope to count the ways I love it, rather than to tame its creepy spell.
Anyone writing a book-length study of Throbbing Gristle in the wake of Simon Ford’s masterful
Wreckers of Civilization
is placed in an enviable position. The definitive big picture of the life and times of Genesis P. Orridge, Chris Carter, Cosey Fanny Tutti and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson as artists and individuals negotiating the shifts from late-sixties freak culture to early-eighties post-punk has been painted, freeing up those in Ford’s wake to illuminate the records themselves. Internationally recognized artists catapulted by the tabloid scandal of their 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA into national prominence as lightning rods for public revulsion, the Coum Transmissions-into-Throbbing Gristle crossfade literally embodies the title of Simon Frith and Howard Home’s landmark sociological music text
Art into Pop
, and Ford’s account strategically balances the early years of extreme actionist body art and transgressive performances by Coum Transmissions with the birth, flowering and death of Throbbing Gristle in thorough detail. The reader interested in late-seventies Britain will encounter an even more prodigious embarrassment of riches than the literate TG fan, for this time and place has been the subject of a great deal of recent documentary reportage and cultural analysis, from Julien Temple’s film
The Filth and the Fury
(2000) to Simon Reynolds’s encyclopedic
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984
(2005). Because these macrohistories and
biographical narratives have already been tackled at length in other texts, I have decided to concentrate rather myopically upon
20 Jazz Funk Greats
itself as a self-contained object, an independent artifact so rich in implication that my own text will focus as strictly as possible upon its nuances, internal relationships and effects. That said, the
hortus conclusus
of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
encrypts a wealth of interconnections drawn from a bewilderingly wide territory: English history and psychogeography, international cinema, polymorphous sexual practices (both within and beyond legality), avant-garde literature and poetics, a global mélange of musical traditions, DIY electronics and homegrown techno-gadgetry, London countercultural gossip and occult and magical lore. I’ve tried to capture as many of these links and networks as I can in the space provided, but inevitably, sometimes the artwork flits butterfly-like through the hermeneutic net.