Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (14 page)

Drew:
Like the recordings of children in Cosey’s track “Hometime,” which are quite innocent but which sound like recordings of some kind of crime in progress?

Sleazy:
I suspect that that is what it was. The guy who I’m talking about had to leave the US in a hurry in 1982 and then moved to Amsterdam and then had to leave Amsterdam in a hurry in the late eighties I think.

Drew:
Even though the recording that you used doesn’t constitute a document of pedophilia.

Sleazy:
No, and I wouldn’t have included it if it had. It’s just a context thing. Everything’s to do with context.

Do we know what we are hearing when we listen to “Persuasion”? If the cries and voices within the song show up for us as the sound of violence against women, or the sound of violence against children, is that a reflection of Throbbing Gristle’s intentions or, perhaps, an index of the listener’s own fears and fantasies? Can context take raw sound across a legal boundary, and if so, how? The recent Internet-fueled upsurge in the widespread availability of pornographic media of dubious origin has brought with it a number of high-profile legal
disputes and conceptual tangles about how to determine what does and does not constitute pornography, what does or does not constitute child pornography, and in what sense context determines obscenity. In such cases, criminologists evaluate materials on a spectrum from the “indicative” (material depicting clothed children that suggests a sexual interest in children) to the “indecent” (images of naked children that suggests a sexual interest in children) to the “obscene” (“material which depicts children in explicit sexual acts”); such a spectrum-based approach is said to be useful when attempting to define what will count as evidence, but it begs important questions about how vaguely defined and inclusive the “indicative” category must be in order to allow courts to fairly assess whether or not the possession of a given image already constitutes pedophile behavior (Taylor and Quayle, p. 27). At what “tipping point” do banal images of children in swimsuits morph into pornography? How can an image that is not regarded as erotic by the people depicted in it or by the people who created it somehow become the objective correlative of an erotic intention?

The old judge’s joke about obscenity (“I know it when I see it”) rings hollow here. According to the prevailing legal framework, it is the other way around: it is precisely
not
the case that “we know it when we see it.” Rather, what we see in the first place depends upon who we already are. In a kind of abject parody of the Wittgensteinian “duck-rabbit,” according to the prevailing legal framework the “innocent” person sees only a child in a swimsuit, while the pedophile sees an erotic object. Nor is this simply the occasion for a deconstructive quibble about the nature of perception, for the consequences of error on either side are severe: ignoring warning signs that
lead to abuse or worse; persecuting innocent people falsely accused of a serious crime. Ironically, Sleazy’s insistence as an artist upon the consummate importance of context is also shared by law enforcement agencies, who define the slippery, capacious “indicative” category as “Non-erotic and non-sexualized pictures showing children in their underwear, swimming costumes, etc. from either commercial sources or family albums, or pictures of children playing in normal settings,
in which the context or the organization of pictures by the collector indicates inappropriateness”
(Taylor, p. 32, italics mine). There is a kind of eerie symmetry in place between the freedom to provoke and the freedom to enforce that the flexible vagueness of context-dependent meaning provides for both artists and law enforcement. Keen to flag the inherent slipperiness of the signifier, artists exploit the indeterminacy of images on their end, while law enforcement officers, keen to afford for themselves the maximum amount of discretionary leeway, do the same.

This “duck-rabbit” effect of flickering across legal boundaries (is it or isn’t it porn?) was precisely the dynamic that Throbbing Gristle decided to investigate with the cover photographs and promotional posters for their album
D.o.A
., which features a banal photograph of a little girl sitting in front of some hi-fi stereo equipment, and, in the lower right corner, a smaller close-up photograph of her in her bed with her skirt pulled up and her underpants showing, smiling happily. An even closer look reveals a tarantula on the bed beside her thighs. The image is of a happy child smiling at the camera, but because it appears in the “wrong” context for such an intimate image, i.e., on the record sleeve of a band called Throbbing Gristle, who have a “dark” reputation, the image
of the smiling child flickers unstably between its obvious, manifest content and its perverse alternate valence, becoming a (virtual, potential) document of pedophilia and transgression without, in fact, being any such thing. Worse, in the very act of looking, the viewer is somehow trapped by the image, brought onboard; whether they willed it or not, they are now guilty of “looking up a little girl’s skirt.”

The image obviously baited and intrigued viewers and fans, as we can see from the need for a response in the “Your Questions Asked” section of
Industrial News:

The young girl on the cover of
D.o.A
. is called Kama Brandyk. She is the daughter of a friend of ours who lives in Poland, with whom Gen stayed when he was there. Her mother is called Ewa Zajak and co-wrote the “Weeping” lyrics. Kama, the little girl, was listening to Alice in Wonderland in Russian and it was International Children’s day when the photo was taken. (#3, p. 9)

Taking pains to stress the utterly everyday nature of the image, TG simply confirmed that the cover photograph was an innocent family snapshot by supplying corroborating details; one could almost forget that their latest single was entitled “We Hate You Little Girls”—were it not for the advertisement for that very single on the opposite page. Similarly, the recordings of children’s voices that appear on “Persuasion” are entirely innocent recordings of actions that occurred in public and in which no crimes were committed, but through their positioning in relation to Gen’s lyrics about seedy deeds done “by the canal,” they take on a disturbing valence, and the specter of “indicative” inappropriateness hovers. The song’s power doesn’t lie in Sleazy’s recordings or Gen’s lyrics, but in the differential force field of competing
meanings and scenarios in place between them, which pushes the listener to think for herself and make choices.

Drew:
I’m interested in the lyrics and sonics of “Persuasion” as an example of the “third mind” in place between you and Genesis, in which you propose the topic of “Persuasion” and he writes the lyrics as a kind of comment on Cosey, and the idea circulates across and between all three of you as a kind of group mind at work. Do you remember the context in which the lyrics were invented?

Sleazy:
Well, I don’t remember the specific details of which show it was but that was very often how TG songs would come about. He would ask me for a concept or a title or an idea and that would spin off into a lyric. It sounds bitchy but it’s not meant to be bitchy, but I seem to remember my first reaction when he performed the song for the first time was that his interpretation of the title was a bit on the nose and a bit literal. A bit obvious, really.

Drew:
Well it also heterosexualizes the topic into a dynamic that is female-specific. “Look at me I touch your breast.”

Sleazy:
That didn’t bother me, it’s not that. My reaction at the time was just that people that use their skill to persuade or convince, children especially, well, generally they’re a bit better at it than he was in the song. It seemed a bit straightforward. At the time I was well aware of people who were much more sophisticated in the way that they would get people to take their clothes off or to do things, sexual things, that they might not otherwise have done.

Drew:
Like the personal profile where you say that one of your “likes” is “boys going through things for me”?

Sleazy:
Right. Exactly. That’s still pretty much something I’m interested in.

Drew:
So do you recognize a bit of yourself in the lyric?

Sleazy:
Well, I would like to think that I was a bit more sophisticated, and that I would persuade them to do something a little more interesting than to just take their pants off or whatever.

Drew:
The song seems designed to debunk the thing that it is describing, and takes a slightly moralistic stance about doing that, more so than the typically “neutral” stance that TG tries to take.

Sleazy:
Maybe that’s also why I didn’t like it so much.

To put it mildly, the lyrics to “Persuasion” are both provocative and confusing, and certainly live up to Jon Savage’s blunt liner note observation that TG “were a bunch of evil scumbags with a nasty line in vicious humour which nobody ever quite got.” While there is certainly humor in Throbbing Gristle’s work—Gen chants his list of confiscated undergarments with schoolboy singsong glee—it would be a premature mistake to chalk the song up to bad taste and be done with it. To really “get the joke” being told in the song you must murder to dissect, and treat it as a little bit more than a joke. One can’t quite understand the curious tangle of meanings at work in “Persuasion” without tracing the rhetorical twists and blind spots within its bathroom wall palimpsest of lyrical scenarios. Ignoring standard verse/chorus groupings, the lyrics are organized like a kind of cave system of communicating grottos that each articulates the central idea of persuasion in a slightly different, but connected, manner. They run in full as follows:

Persuasion

You gotta get some

Persuasion

You gotta get some

Look at me I touch your breast

Look at me I touch your knees

And I persuade you

Like always I persuade you

Like always I persuade you

Persuasion

Look at me I touch your head

I say the words and you go to bed

My sister and my mother

My father and my son

Do everything I want them to

With persuasion

One lot of persuasion

Like always persuasion

Now there’s lots of ways to persuade you

I could do it with money

I could look at you

I could show you all that

You might as well do it anyway

You might as well choose to play the game

After all, you’ve seen yourself before

What difference does it make if I take your photograph?

What difference does it make if someone else sees it too?

All your friends do it

I mean nobody will know it’s you

Anybody, it could be any body

I mean, these magazines, you know

They only go to middle aged men

So why don’t you do what I suggest

I persuade you

With words I persuade you

Persuasion

I’ve got a little biscuit tin

To keep your panties in

Soiled panties, white panties, school panties, Y-front panties

By the canal, by the canal

And I persuade you

Like always I persuade you

Look at me

Look at me

There’s a certain word and a certain touch

A certain way and a way too much

There’s a little bit here

And a little bit there

When you’ve done it all it’s too late to care

Oh I persuade you

Like always I persuade you

Look in my eye

Under your covers

I touch you

And tell you what to do

Do it because I tell you

Do it because I love you

And I persuade you

Persuasion

The form, insofar as there is one, is that of the masturbatory catalogue, a free-associative parade of eroticized power relationships morphing into each other and doubling back: parent and child, photographer and model, fetishist and fetish object, seducer and conquest, murderer and murder victim, lover and beloved. We can sense the pressure of fantasy upon these words in the way that they all move in the same direction—a confident narratorial “I” addresses a silent and compliant “you”—even as each localized scene calls forth in the speaker a subtle shift in voice as the “I” takes up the specific sort of patter of persuasion native to that terrain. The lyrics don’t linger upon any of these scenarios, but dissolve them all together, eliding their differences, striving to create an intuitively convincing sense of family resemblance between experiences of domination in contexts that are normally kept separate. Everyday family life, pornographic acting and modeling, sexual abuse and criminal violence are, of course, not “all the same,” and yet the song whispers to us that the same logic of power can be used to explain them all, and that the same rhetorical tricks are used in all of these separate domains to determine who will prevail and who will obey. Like Humpty Dumpty in
Through the Looking Glass
, the narrator of “Persuasion” seems convinced that “The question
is which is to be master, that’s all” (Carroll, p. 112).

Drew:
Tell me about “Persuasion.”

Gen:
Yeah, that’s a good one. [wicked laughter] What do you want to know? How I came up with the story?

Drew:
I know that there was a concert and you asked Sleazy what you should sing about and he said persuasion, and you made it up on the spot.

Gen:
I’d been reading
The Outsider
by Colin Wilson and that fed into it. And I was reading a book on serial killers and that fed into it. But what I was interested in most of all were some of the anecdotes that Cosey told me about when she went on some of her, in inverted quotes, “modeling jobs.” There was one guy in particular who had to go through this whole routine of pretending that it wasn’t sexual, and that every time it was him who persuaded her to get naked in front of him.