Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (11 page)

In the case of the XTC sleeve, the reader is presented with a rigged, false choice (read or stop reading; in either case you are being conditioned by the codes already in place); the sleeve seems liberating insofar as it openly anatomizes rhetorical deception, but in fact its “everything is ideological” approach (it’s all a “TRICK”) functions unabashedly on behalf of selling a record, however cutely ironic and indirect its tactics. As such, the Hipgnosis sleeve epitomizes a hip-capitalist stance, consoling us that the best way to disconnect from a meaningless system of false options is to purchase one more commodity that marks one as enlightened, “in on it” and hip to the inherent falsity of modern life. As a mass-marketed form of rebellious individualism, rock and roll culture has always peddled the “won’t be fooled again” consolation prize to its consumers, but by the late seventies, the self-reflexive folds within its inner logic traded the oppositional ambitions (the
“counter” in “counterculture”) for a comfy brand of elitist quietism. Such false choices on offer in the shops mirror the false choices on offer at the polls, and in both cases the cynical sense that “nothing matters,” far from arming the subject to better resist ideology, in fact works to ensure that it continues to run smoothly. It is politically useful to circulate the cynically enlightened fiction that domination can never really be contested, that all politicians are corrupt and therefore all are “equally” bad, and that therefore one’s participation (in marketplaces, in electoral politics) is a sham because any attempt to choose between options legitimates the system as a whole. In his
Critique of Cynical Reason
(1983), Peter Sloterdijk contrasted “cynicism,” the retreat of the “enlightened” subject from the political into an Olympian disdain for such shabby matters, with “kynicism,” a specifically working-class mode of mockery in which the hypocritical language of ruling powers was called to account, exposed as fiction and abused accordingly (as cited in Zizek, p. 29). They are both stances of “disbelief,” but mere cynicism is negative, a withdrawal from politics into private tranquility, while “kynicism” is openly antagonistic, a radically engaged reaction to the collapse of meaningful options within the public sphere. Messages such as the Hipgnosis sleeve, which reinforce the notion that our choices don’t make a difference so we might as well buy another record anyway, are in this practical sense cynical, and fundamentally conservative.

By contrast, I would like to suggest that the stance Throbbing Gristle take up in “Convincing People” is not cynical but “kynical.” By setting in motion a kind of “liar’s paradox” in which the attempt to persuade the listener and the attempt to arm the listener against persuasion are both revealed as equally untrustworthy, “Convincing People”
exudes a deep hostility to the rhetorical techniques and weapons of mass persuasion that underlie both pop marketing and party politics. In this sense it shares the “false choice” scenario with the Hipgnosis sleeve. But far from constituting a “message” song, “Convincing People” works at the aural level by inducing a kind of paranoid stance in the listener, an allergic reaction to meaning, a sense that any message, insofar as it is a message at all, is already controlling, dominating and oppressive, and would be best dissolved into a liquid pool of babbling nonsense. The inclusive, generation-gap logic of the hippie catchphrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” here contracts into a grim and paranoid “don’t trust anyone.” “Convincing People” formally embodies its lyrical hostility to ideology and cynically “enlightened” ideology critique by processing Gen’s own voice into an acid-bath of molten electronics that estrange, deform and dissolve even his self-critical words. In so doing, TG reassert a demand first articulated by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in their cut-up slogan: “Rub Out the Word.” Instead of effortlessly furthering the cause of capitalist seduction, words become the raw material for a destructive process of transformation: the song is a factory that processes language into sound, taking aim at the principle means of communication and warping and distorting it in and out of recognition. Neither persuading you nor falsely claiming to free you from the grip of persuasion, the song enacts something else: a concrete auditory experience of transformation through action, an anarchist poetics of deliberate deformity.

That which is hard is never hard without also being soft.

Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition

By namedropping a Martin Denny album and an entire school of quasi-Polynesian mood music, Throbbing Gristle add further support to the accusation that
20 Jazz Funk Greats
is a series of genre exercises. But those expecting bird calls and cod-Latin percussion will be disappointed. Instead of campy theatrics, “Exotica” leaks a kind of subtly poisonous incense across the stereo field. High oscillator trails with a very fast LFO setting create will-o-wisp flickerings in the upper registers, while low and heavily phased Gizmo guitar tones form a kind of distant jet plane chorale. From out of this miasmic bog, the vibraphone fades into audibility, tinkling in an “Asian” interval that flags the genre for which the song is named. The phased guitar scuttlings are occasionally joined in the thickening background with sour arcs of feedback-like
ringing tones, but they are mixed so low that they purr more than they pierce. Two minutes and fifteen seconds in, a distinctly jarring, banging noise violates the relaxation imperative completely, constituting a kind of sonic jerk of tongue into cheek, and after this percussive climax the entire enterprise dissolves into the ether. An improvisatory water-color executed with a bare minimum of gestures, there’s very little there, and yet everything within the evanescent form of “Exotica” earns its place.

Drew:
Did you introduce the music of Martin Denny to the group? Had you heard this music as a kid?

Gen:
Yeah, of course. In cinemas. But it was Scott Armstrong in Los Angeles that actually introduced me to Martin Denny specifically on my first trip to California. Which would be . . . October 1976. Scott Armstrong had been one of my mail art friends; he said to me, “I have come across this amazing musician, you’re going to love it, they’re these really weird kitsch obscure albums.” He played me one that he’d found in a thrift store and the moment I heard the first track I just knew that it was the missing link somehow. Because it had this incredible anti-intellectual, almost chaotic element to it, even though it was done in full seriousness. It had this strange, staggering aesthetic. That’s the only way that I can put it. There was a kind of idiot-savant feeling. I started collecting the albums; I’ve still got twenty-nine albums downstairs by Martin Denny and some by Arthur Lyman. I’ve actually got one Martin Denny album signed by Martin Denny to me: “To Genesis from Martin Denny with love.” Boyd Rice went to see him play live in Hawaii and went up to him afterward and got him to sign a copy of the one that we based
Entertainment
Through Pain
on. I’ve still got it, framed, in my office. For inspiration.

Drew:
So did you write vibe parts or were they improvised?

Gen:
Well, we never wrote anything down. Sleazy, unbeknownst to any of us, took to the vibes like a duck to water. And now Sleazy plays keyboard parts.

Drew:
So which vibes parts are played by you and which are played by Sleazy? Sleazy can’t remember.

Gen:
Sleazy played the vibes on “Hot on the Heels of Love.”

Drew:
And “Exotica”?

Gen:
That’s me.

Gen’s response to Martin Denny as “staggering” and “chaotic” completely inverts the received idea of Denny’s lush jungle concoction as a sedative sidecar best taken while unwinding with a few mai tais after a long day at the office. Showing up in an instantly recognizable—and thus essentially calming and conservative—format, lounge music isn’t supposed to stagger, but to soothe. Acknowledging the functional imperative of “light music” with disarming candor, Geoffrey Self describes this much maligned category through a structural opposition with the modernist exertions of “serious music”:

When Alban Berg’s opera
Wozzeck
was first given in London, one respected critic described its effect on him as like losing a pint of blood.
Wozzeck
is clearly not light music. It is disturbing, disquieting, and carries a powerful electric charge. It is a major, serious work. Light music, in contrast, should divert rather than disturb; entertain rather than disquiet. If it does not, it fails in its purpose. (Self, p. 1)

The first shall be last and the last shall be first. When heard with Gen’s ears, it is Martin Denny’s own light music that is “disturbing, disquieting, and carries a powerful electric charge” rather than the once radical, now stale compositional gestures of Viennese serialism. One need not comb the Denny back catalogue for very long before finding confirmation of Gen’s perverse reading of exotica as light music that means business; for every slow boat to “Quiet Village,” there are also scorchers, such as “Oro (God of Vengeance),” shot through with eruptions of full-throated screaming and jarring, abrupt tempo changes. “Light music” may not actually be all that comforting. Just mellow enough to hover in the background, but punctuated by pinpricks of unease, TG’s “Exotica” constitutes a kind of antimelodic, improvised Muzak, the perfect soundtrack to losing a pint of blood one slow drop at a time.

Drew:
There’s a noise in “Exotica” about two-thirds of the way in that ruins its ability to be mood music. Can you identify it for me?

Cosey:
In “Exotica”? [“Exotica” plays] That’s Gizmo guitar and synth.

Drew:
Were “Exotica” and “Beachy Head” done at the same session?

Cosey:
I think it was probably done while we were still working with the new toys, the Gizmo, the vibes.

Chris:
We did buy a lot of new things for this album, and we had the Gristle-izer.

Drew:
You published an analysis of the Gristle-izer.

Chris:
Melody Maker
asked me to write something. There was even a circuit diagram of the whole thing.

Cosey:
With some bits missing.

Chris:
Yeah, I left some bits out intentionally. I put the wrong voltages in. I got loads of people writing in to say, “They’re not working!” I had tutors at university writing to say, “We’ve had our students building Gristle-izers and they’re not working.”

Cosey:
You can’t get something for nothing. They want results without any real work on their end.

Drew:
Well maybe my mp3 isn’t up to the low-end event I’m looking for. [NOISE kicks in]
That
sound! Is it you stomping near your amp?

Chris:
No, I had a separate spring reverb that was open, and you could just pluck it. You could tap it.

This anarchic willingness to violate their own immaculately “tasteful” exercise in musical Orientalism bears analysis, for it is this swift kick of noise that separates Throbbing Gristle’s critical approach from the literalism that plagued later generations of historically correct lounge revivals. Provoked by the very success of their electronics and vibes at summoning the requisite atmosphere (beautifully described by David Toop as “an ominous, fugitive vision, like an island glimpsed briefly through sea mist”), Chris Carter can’t resist tugging at the spring reverbed string of discord (Toop, p. 127). It’s a “love tap” gesture, but this slight push has a domino effect. Throbbing Gristle’s deliberate failure to make successfully relaxing background music could be dismissed as a lack of commitment on their part to fully enter into the spirit of the genres they are cruising, a warning sign that old noise habits die hard, and that “guaranteeing disappointment,” to quote an old Coum slogan, can stiffen into its own kind of reflex. But “Exotica” can also be understood as a more ambivalent
and complex rendezvous between TG’s methodology and lounge aesthetics. It flags the difference between the alienated and alienating functional imperatives of “light” music and the open and transient practices of what we might term “soft” music. TG may take up the sonic palette of exotica, but they keep their own methodology in place. Transposing the same formal strategies of group improvisation and collective feedback-looped mood summoning already employed on their harsher recordings, on “Exotica” TG reveal that all along their actual songs—qua songs—however texturally hard, are structurally soft.

First step, you forget where you are, next step, you forget who you are

I’ve tried but I can’t break away, as I dance dance to the music . . .

Noel, “Dancing Is Dangerous”

The song announces its classical disco architecture through a steady buildup of elements, a middle breakdown, a cumulative reintroduction that peaks with a maximum density, and then a graceful thinning out. It could be drawn graphically as a camel with two humps: intro, buildup, breakdown, buildup, fade. “Hot on the Heels of Love” is built on the foundation of a steady kick drum that beats in 4/4 time at 121.25 beats per minute. On the CD version of the album as digitally remastered by Chris Carter you can also detect tiny bursts of ultra-high-pitched ratcheting noises playing eighth notes in the space between kicks. Unlike the sped-up
funk drumming of the first waves of disco songs, the basic rhythm of “Hot on the Heels of Love” feels less like a four bar or eight-bar looping pattern and more like a nonstop quarter-note pulse: not
Boom tss Boom chak Boom tss Boom chak
but simply
Boom tsss
over and over and over, forever. In this sense, it formally resembles Italo-disco, the synthetic subgenre of disco pioneered in European discotheques, and anticipates the coming of techno’s reductionist tendencies. Pouncing in the middle of the fifth bar, an arpeggiating synth figure enters, going up and down an endless staircase, as a tangy melodic keyboard line with a faintly vocoder-like quality interjects burbles and rasps in sympathy with the bassline’s Sisyphean labors. Occasionally this is gilded on the upper octave with another, more impressionistic synth line, registering a faint chinoiserie in its scale and slightly detuned feeling. Whipcracking snares jut into the song at curious angles, not simply holding time on the two and the four but smacking accents unpredictably. These harsh intrusions are balanced by soft melodic figures played by Sleazy on the vibraphone, their bell-like long decay stretching languorously across the pulsing framework, suturing together the leisure and exotica signifiers of the instrument with the militant hedonism of Chris Carter’s electronics. Cosey’s ecstatic yet numbed vocal, in combination with the arpeggiation of the bassline, frames the song as a response to the provocative example of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s monumental “I Feel Love,” and thus tags “Hot on the Heels of Love” as a genre exercise, if not a genre exorcism. For cynical music industry observers, and the increasingly weary and reactionary members of the listening public, by 1979 disco was the dying elephant in the room. It was hard to deny the
greatness of its greatest moments, but just as hard to ignore the increasingly large mound of crap rushed into the shops in the hopes of turning a fast buck.