Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (18 page)

Copying a copy, TG’s genre exercise was made in imitation of an “original” that was itself already a kind of put on. “(Do) The Ostrich” was not in fact a Velvet Underground song, but a novelty number written by Lou Reed as a parody of dance craze singles, a studio rush job issued as a single attributed to the Primitives and put out by the Pickwick label. Sensing that the song might have hit potential, a touring form of the Primitives was concocted featuring soon-to-be VU members Lou Reed and John Cale and the sculptor and land artist Walter De Maria. It’s a testament to TG’s uneasy relationship to music per se that the very signature sound that Gen was hoping to duplicate is itself a literally “primitive” approach to guitar technique: the “Ostrich” tuning is not some complicated and arcane harmonic affair, but a literally monotonous one in which every guitar string is tuned to D. If “Six Six Sixties” has a curious, lasting power that beggars explanation, and it does, the secret is certainly not in its formal musical components, which are simple and crude, even blatantly derivative (a preset drum machine pattern, a tuning made familiar by another band). What elevates it beyond the framework of its belated dependence upon musical readymades is the oracular power of Gen’s lyric and performance. His voice mixed far clearer and sharper than on any other track on the record, Gen delivers his words with the clipped enunciation of an emergency broadcaster, but ramps up to the necromantic cadences of a magus delivering an incantation. The fractured poetry of the lyrics live up to the punning title’s esoteric psychedelia:

I am one of the injured

A tear blurs flesh

Dissolving

Like an injured dog

Like wasted limbs

Get smaller

Pain is the stimulus of pain

But then of course nothing is cured

This is the world

Move a fin and the world turns

Sit in a chair and pictures change

Try to eat us

And get trapped

Or injured

Just

Hovering on the border between gobbledygook and genius, these phrases emit a softly grotesque menace worthy of a Francis Bacon painting, and in the image of a tear blurring flesh they faintly echo the Marquis de Sade’s hymn to Virtue in
Justine:
“How sublime does it appear through tears!” (Sade, p. 456). At their center is a portable phrase that still rings true as a summary of mediatized alienation: “Sit in a chair and pictures change” could describe the sliding, oily quality of surfaces viewed through the periscope of LSD, but it just as effortlessly evokes the thinglike passivity of the sitcom addicts of yesterday and the compulsive web surfers of today. I had always assumed that the antistructure of the phrases was the result of a pure cutup, but Gen insists that there is a far more elaborate explanation for their source.

Gen:
In 1967 I was with my friend Spydee and another friend Little Baz, in Solihull, and we were going through a phase of doing séances with a wine glass and an alphabet. You have a circle of cards with the alphabet and numbers from one to ten and you also have yes and no. You put a wine glass in the middle and you put your right hand’s first finger as lightly as possible on the glass and you ask for the spirit to come through and the glass begins to move.

Drew:
So it’s like a Ouija board, but it’s one that you construct yourself?

Gen:
Exactly. We got through to a spirit that called itself Mebar. And Mebar started answering questions. I still have some of the typed up transcripts. I found them in one of my notebooks. During that question and answer session with this spirit, it said, “Move a fin and the world turns.” Those phrases that are in “Six Six Sixties” are from that session.

Drew:
It spoke through all of you?

Gen:
I did as Mebar told me. The whole text of “Six Six Sixties” is a transcript of a séance.

Drew:
Did a core identity for Mebar ever emerge?

Gen:
Yeah. I’ve got drawings of Mebar.

Drew:
I’d like to see one of those.

Spirit communication and recordmaking go together. In his potted history of “dactylomancy,” the practice of spirit communication that includes both modern-day Ouija boards and the more traditional use of cups and letters on a broad wooden board such as that used by Gen and his mates, J. Edgar Cornelius notes that strict recordkeeping of all intercourse between elementals and mediums is an essential component of the emotional bond being built in the space between the worlds:

Drawing of “Mebar” from the notebooks of Genesis P. Orridge

In working a Ouija board and communicating with elementals, the necessity for keeping such a record is apparent. You must know what the elemental had previously said in case contradictions slip into the communications. Remember, the elemental by nature is a lying spirit and learns this trait from you; it’s not inherent in his being. Therefore, if contradictions appear, you must have a previous record to determine what might have inspired the elemental’s answer. However, an elemental, when confronted with the multiplication of lies, will always tell the truth. I highly suggest that in addition to the two people working the triangle and a third asking questions, you employ a fourth who acts solely as the scribe to record everything that is occurring as well as the time. This being his only task, he can focus his mind more intensively on the Magickal Record. (Cornelius, p. 101)

Why make a magical record when you can make a Magickal Record? Suffused with the voice of angelic visitation, “Six Six Sixties” marks the close of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
with a suitably magical transformation, turning primitive, humdrum materials (a bass guitar playing a single note, a drum machine playing a preset, a wineglass sliding across a table) into portals singing of an otherworldly science.

Photograph of the

Now, as I have said, the moment we recognized the existence of the mind parasites, we escaped their cunningly laid trap. For it was nothing less than a
history trap
.

Colin Wilson,
The Mind Parasites

TG were a perverse band, and
20 Jazz Funk Greats
was a perverse record for them to make. Which only begs the question: perverse in relation to what? Perversion is in itself a normative concept: in its root definition it is understood as “an erring, straying, deviation, or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right” (Oxford English Dictionary). Clearly, TG’s perversion cannot consist in their interest in kink and mayhem; given their fanbase and music industry profile, precisely that total package of harsh form and ghoulish content had become normative within the first few years of their existence. As Paul Hegarty notes in
Noise/Music: A History
, “Noise must
also be thought of as constantly failing—failing to stay noise, as it becomes familiar, or acceptable practice” (Hegarty, p. ix). By 1979, TG needed a new way to fail. To continue to dish out ever more distorted soundscapes with ever higher body-counts would have been their expected path, and was in fact the route taken by the four-track-wielding hordes who fleshed out and watered down industrial as a style. Pinning the butterfly, one might say that TG’s “real” perversion expressed itself through their relentless eagerness to consciously violate their own identity, to betray themselves. It is the nature of perverts to swerve to avoid nature, a dynamic Jonathan Dollimore describes as “the paradox of perversion as internal deviation” (Dollimore, p. 124). It’s a phrase that neatly, if inadvertently, describes the vexed question of genre at the heart of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
. These songs are divisive unto themselves and stray from one another, and their collective failure to successfully embody the organic unity of the “well formed album”
is
their success. Teasingly shuttling between mimicry and indifference, each track seems conflicted about whether or not it is really trying to show up for the listener as a legible example of the local style it infringes upon. If each song constitutes a kind of microcosmic dissolution of the contours of specific genres, the album’s overall failure to resolve its internal differences constitutes a macrocosmic attack on the idea of genre as such. Coum Transmissions’ catchy, self-sabotaging slogan, “We guarantee disappointment,” goes double for TG. Guaranteeing disappointment to the end, TG’s calling card is a constitutive hostility to belonging: to a genre, to a gender, to a lifestyle, to a music scene, to a society.

They were repaid in kind. Here are some of the rave reviews that greeted the release of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
in the
winter of 1979: Steve Morley in
NME
decried its “dreary indulgence” and found it “deliberately listless and loveless”; Steve Taylor in
Melody Maker
dismissed its “cheap intentions to menace and alienate” as “an expensive joke which continually threatens to turn nasty (but never delivers the horrors)”; the unkindest cut arrived in the following spring, courtesy of Andrew James Paterson’s review in
Fuse:
“The album is entirely devoid of personality or glamour” (as quoted in Ford, 9.27). To the UK music press,
20 Jazz Funk Greats
was, indeed, dead on arrival. Yet the extended afterlife of the album tells a very different story; for all the bafflement and outright hostility it generated upon its release, it is also the TG album that has tenaciously endured changes in fashion and seems to remain permanently in dialogue with a proliferating series of subsequent musical movements. Neither ahead of its time nor entirely at home in its historical moment, it’s not an album that ever truly arrived. Instead, it seems to keep talking back to the present as components of its tangled aesthetic resurface each decade anew. If the album’s cover artwork anticipates the coming loungecore revival of Tipsy and the Mike Flowers Pops, “Beachy Head” predicts the murky sonics of mid-nineties “Ambient Isolationism” and the porous emptiness of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” could be taken for an unacknowledged template of trip hop. An over-the-top house cover version of “Persuasion” by Billy Ray Martin in 1993 transformed TG’s dirge into an unlikely anthem (you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a diva squeal the phrase “Y front pantieeeees”). More recently, the synthetic side of the album has dominated the conversation between past and present: Carl Craig’s 2004 remix of “Hot on the Heels of Love” beefed up its kicks and resutured its snares for big-room techno, and Jonnie Wilkes of
Glaswegian DJ crew Optimo titled a 2007 mix CD
Walkabout
, pushing off from its titular TG track into a hypnotic, stripped-down set of psychedelic electronics. In an ironic stroke of justice, the very diversity that made the album so hard to market has also kept it sturdily afloat in an increasingly fragmented climate of musical microgenres.

Before lapsing into a too pat celebration of the diversity of musical styles on offer within
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, one might also recall Lyotard’s oft-quoted summary judgment of eclectic consumer culture in
The Postmodern Condition:

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. (Lyotard, p. 76)

Ouch. Bracketing the Chicken Little doomsaying and “exotic” examples, which now feel all-too-retro themselves, Lyotard noticeably elides a crucial difference between eclectic consumers and eclectic artworks. The commodities racked up by the eclectic consumer require a certain amount of distance and difference amongst themselves (between old and new, between east and west) precisely in order for the total range of these disparate goods and services and signifiers to show up
as
eclectic. But if eclecticism for consumers is par for the course, eclecticism
within
the commodity is a rather riskier affair. The chances of assembling a range of components that will all work in concert to hit a demographic “target” can slide precipitously toward zero. You can’t please everyone. As Throbbing Gristle learned in the aftermath of marketing
20 Jazz Funk Greats
to a perplexed fanbase who wanted reliable
delivery systems for a defined style,
pace
Lyotard, it
isn’t
all that easy to find a public for eclectic works.