Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (12 page)

Drew:
“Hot on the Heels of Love” brings us to the question of pleasure. What was your attitude toward disco at the time?

Gen:
I was interested in the repetition, and the trance possibilities of it. This came from Jajouka and music like that that I had heard from Brion Gysin and Burroughs. My main interest was from the point of view of it being maybe accidentally related to Terry Riley and Steve Reich and systems music; was there a way to use systems music and trance music to create a hybrid that was effective and ironic at the same time?

Drew:
As pop music, it’s certainly a “weird” disco song, but it doesn’t come off as purely ironic. At the time, did you listen to the stuff that now gets called “mutant disco”?

Gen:
I was listening to this record called “Dancing Is Dangerous” by Sparks with this other woman under another name. [Noel, b/w “Is There More to Life Than Dancing?” on Virgin/Polydor, 1979] We were listening to Cerrone. Those in particular, those twenty-minute-long improvisations around a disco beat, those were the ones that I listened to for pleasure. I must say that “Hot on the Heels of Love” was done with affection, but it was a dangerous enough crossover area to not deal with more than once.

Gen’s sense that the Noel/Mael brothers song title is correct, that dancing
is
dangerous, points toward the uncomfortable transactions between the bohemian logic of the underground and the marketplace logic of pop. It’s a given that centers and margins require each other, and the history of pop music is a
history of mass markets and subcultures feeding off of and replenishing each other’s vocabularies, but there are occupational hazards involved in such border crossings, in both directions. Pop stars who attempt to redefine themselves as “serious artists” tend to be met with critical ridicule (my apologies if you are currently listening to Sir Paul McCartney’s
Liverpool Oratorio
or the
Fantasies and Delusions
of Billy Joel). For its part, the underground rarely forgives botched attempts at “selling out” (take a bow, S.P.K. and Liz Phair). Beyond these commercial considerations, there are aesthetic risks on both sides as well. If you wholeheartedly attempt to work within pop music as an idiom, you give hostages to fortune and risk a situation in which your music will be evaluated by pop’s tricky entry requirements: high production values, radio-friendly formatting, emphasis upon extramusical charisma and the random injustices of sheer unpredictable caprice. The failure rate is high. On the other hand, if you keep your underground credentials close to your chest and only dabble, your so-called experiment with pop form risks coming off as condescending and rigged—by keeping tongue firmly in cheek, an underground artist who refuses to commit to a full-blooded participation in a genre with mass appeal simply preserves their entitled position on the sidelines serving sour grapes to their coterie. “I wasn’t
really
trying to make
real
disco music, you understand. I was merely
commenting
on it.” Shooting for disco adds another hurdle, for disco is, above all, a functional form of music with objective conditions of satisfaction. If people don’t dance, you’ve failed.

“Hot on the Heels of Love” was not a commercially successful disco song, but it was an aesthetic bullseye. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. It’s the song in which the
furtive pop maneuvers that TG had already gestured toward on their “United” single finally came out of the closet, and it is the dialectical synthesis of the two contrary tendencies on the
20 Jazz Funk Greats
LP as a whole. The tight rhythmic sequences of Chris Carter and the loose, spacey lounge Muzak of Gen and Sleazy are finally brought together in a mutual climax, with Cosey acting as the disco priestess bewitching and binding these elements together. They don’t join in holy matrimony, but they do make for a dangerous liaison. Cosey’s vocal is the crucial element that pushes the song outside the safety zone of pastiche and into a more compromising position. If Sleazy’s vocal on “20 Jazz Funk Greats” was the gesture of a band perched between come-on and threat, a band still in the habit of ironically undercutting itself, Cosey’s vocal on “Hot on the Heels of Love” is the sound of a band enthralled with the musical possibility that they no longer need to put scare quotes around the performance of sexuality, and that they are just as capable of deliberately turning people on as they already were at deliberately turning people off.

As an erotic dancer, Cosey had had plenty of personal experience thinking about music as a fantasy environment and seduction tool. As a former go-go dancer in gay bars myself, I can assure you that strippers have a practical, economic interest in thinking carefully about pacing and mood. It’s simple: stripping to the right song vastly increases your tips. The song that makes you feel sexy is the song that makes you dance with greater investment and greater conviction, and that kind of performance will telegraph to the audience that you are into what you’re doing, which in turn gives them as audience members permission to enter into the scene with you, to come a little bit closer. That’s when the dollar bills wind up in
your G-string. After revisiting some of the mixtapes from the period that accompanied her performances, Cosey emailed me a historically accurate playlist, annotated with the outfits that accompanied each song, and it’s a tellingly inclusive list:

Cosey:
Basically I stripped to two tracks: the first mainly to “dance” to and move around the stage flouting myself to the menfolk and the second was always a slow track to do the final unveiling and sensual floor work, splits, etc.

• PVC outfit: “Hard Working Man”—Captain Beefheart. “Heaven”—Pere Ubu

• School girl outfit: “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”—Ian Dury and the Blockheads. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”—Crystal Gayle

• Pink satin shorts etc: “Easy”—Commodores.

• Some topless dance tracks: “Native New Yorker”—Odyssey, “Instant Replay”—Dan Hartman, “Lady Marmalade”—Labelle, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”—Sylvester, “Disco Inferno”—The Trammps

Cosey wasn’t just putting up with the music on tap at her workplace. She was a sincere fan of what, in issue number three of the
Industrial Newsletter
, she termed “good disco.” Unlike the “disco sucks” meathead brigade who responded with predictable revulsion to the commercialized dross of major label disco cash-in records, Cosey was a discriminating connoisseur of the genre. Cosey’s playlist reference to Sylvester permits the
inclusion of an irresistible nugget of Throbbing Gristle trivia; in the video for “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” shot on location at a UK disco club during Sylvester’s whirlwind Fantasy Records–funded promotional trip to London, Cosey can be seen briefly in (very short) silver hot pants dancing to Sylvester’s high-NRG disco classic, between interplanetary shots of sparkling disco balls and Sylvester shimmying down a staircase in a silver kimono.

In her element on the disco dance floor, Cosey doesn’t just sing on “Hot on the Heels of Love”; she dominates it utterly, works the listener, teasing out the distance between iterations, milking her two lines for all they are worth:

I’m hot on the heels of love

Waiting for help from above

As camp as a row of tents, such lines also risk total banality, were it not for the sheer incongruity of their status as Throbbing Gristle lyrics. These are the same people who sang about cutting off people’s testicles and making them eat them at gunpoint? Such disparity between content and context puts a premium on how the words are delivered, and Cosey’s read is a vindication of Mick Jagger’s nostrum that it’s the singer, not the song. In fact, of course, she doesn’t
sing
at all, but moans the words like a conjurer, and if she’s waiting for help from above, it’s more likely to come from Venus, Aphrodite or Ashteroth than any standard issue monotheistic Heavenly Father. Cosey’s staggered, breathy, effortlessly seductive performance momentarily bends opposed poles into contact; she blows hot and cold, comes off as ironic and sincere, sounds fast yet slow. Thanks
to her brazenly erotic Sprechstimme, “Hot on the Heels of Love” enters the canon of whispered sex anthems that stretches from Jane Birkin’s orgasmic coos on her duet with Serge Gainsbourg, “Je Taime, Moi Non Plus” (1969), to Sylvia Robinson’s breathy moaning on “Pillow Talk” (1973) and on to Baccarat’s “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” (1979), a proud tradition recently gender-flipped by the Ying Yang Twins “Whisper Song” (2003).

Though it clocks in at a relatively trim four and a half minutes, “Hot on the Heels of Love” feels like it could be extended indefinitely, for ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour, without really needing to “go anywhere,” its separate modular synthesizer layers cycling and circling around each other like components of a Calder mobile, turning around the still center of the steady kick drum. The currents of electricity come in waves, and don’t really begin or end at any decisive point. Within disco music, this pursuit of “endlessness” is both an aesthetic principle and an erotic ideal. The extended mixes of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” or “Love to Love You Baby,” with their closely miked groans and frankly sexual moaning mixed upfront atop seemingly endless repetitions of recurrent musical phrases, create the sense that their musical compulsion to repeat and their multiply orgasmic female subject are somehow patched into each other in an endless feedback circuit of stimulus and response. To take a brief detour from sounds to words while still remaining caught in the porno loop, consider Susan Sontag’s description of the formal objections to pornographic literature: “Another common argument, offered by Adorno among others, is that works of pornography lack the beginning-middle-end form characteristic of literature. A piece of pornographic fiction concocts no
better than a crude excuse for a beginning, and once having begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere” (Sontag, p. 135). Such a recipe for erotic textuality also sounds suspiciously like the standard rockist critique of disco: “But it’s not real music, it’s just the same thing over and over and over.” While disco’s happily numerous recent critical champions, such as Peter Shapiro and Tim Lawrence, can point in its defense toward the sophisticated transformations of mood and texture and emotional meaning within a DJ’s set over the course of an evening, there might also be something within these accusations about the repetitive, “formless” (relative to prog, anyway) nature of disco that rings true. Such objections are not in need of contradiction so much as critical transvaluation. The same thing over and over for a long time can be wonderful. Against all odds, in 1979 TG found themselves momentarily in sympathy with disco’s utopian ambitions just as disco’s worldwide ubiquity and collectivist momentum guttered and died. Despite their own mixed emotions and sarcastic misgivings, for at least four minutes and twenty four seconds Throbbing Gristle achieve a mini-eternity. “Hot on the Heels of Love” creates the momentary illusion of an infinite horizon, a smooth plateau pierced by the transient spike of each momentary kick drum, spindled upon the beat but spiraling outward in all directions. Luckily, help from above never arrives.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

George Bernard Shaw,
Man and Superman

In the wake of the majestic disco peak of “Hot on the Heels of Love,” “Persuasion” is a deliberate and pronounced bummer, a long anhedonic bringdown. The steady 4/4 drum machine stomp that anchored the Italo-disco anthem here withers into the faint recording of a rickety-sounding metronome, whose ticking summons the song and drops away. The metronome suggests multiple scenarios: a musician keeping time, a stage magician hypnotizing an assistant plucked from the audience, a psychoanalyst relaxing a patient before probing his unconscious for repressed memories. Then blunt stabs of bass guitar begin, hammering out something almost too crude to call a “bassline”: one note four times up, a second note four times down,
over and over, unrelenting.
Dum Dum Dum Dum Doom Doom Doom Doom
. In the space between strikes, a taped voice cries out: “No.” Gen’s voice, softer and more closely miked than on any previous song on the album, lingers upon the word “Persuaaaaaaasiooooon,” stretching it lazily across the riff. The taped voice returns, insisting, “no, no, no,” muffled cries dissolving into something that could be laughter, or pain. Field recordings as criminological evidence, or harmless playground found sound? Are these children’s voices? A woman under some nameless form of duress? Who are these people and what are they doing to each other? No explanatory rubric is given. Instead, frantic shards/shreds of Cosey’s guitar noise keen and scream in sympathy with the taped voices.

“Persuasion” raises questions of motive and intent. What lies behind the persistent scenes of cruelty and suffering in TG’s work? What are the sexual politics of TG, if any? As this is the song in which the ethics and technics of TG’s representational practices get hammered out most explicitly on
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, I intend to linger upon its lyrical and musical inconsistencies and multiple resonances at some length. “Persuasion” functions as an analysis of mechanisms of control, a critical unpacking of the personality that needs to control others, but it also permits a pleasurable identification with that controlling position, a fantasy scenario in which the affective charge experienced through having power over others is gloated over, wallowed in and recirculated. The song’s found audio constitutes a perverse sonic archive that memorializes anonymous individuals who have been captured and incorporated into a fetishistic collection of “stolen” artifacts. But the song is pointed inward as well as outward, for the
narrative of its creation also maps the interpersonal dynamics of the band, revealing the faultlines, allegiances and tensions within the group’s members as collaborators, lovers, ex-lovers and friends. In all senses, “Persuasion” is a song of profoundly uncomfortable intimacy.