Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (13 page)

Chris:
By the time of
20 Jazz
we all had different lives. It was quite fraught sometimes.

Cosey:
It was a difficult time. There was a lot of pulling in different directions for sure.

Drew:
I have always thought that “Persuasion” was Gen addressing you indirectly yet so obviously.

Cosey:
I’d never thought of that.

Chris:
Didn’t you?

[awkward pause]

Drew:
Well it’s going in a lot of different directions at once. Because it’s also Gen transforming a topic that Sleazy proposed. As I understand it, Gen asked Sleazy what he should sing about one night at a gig and Sleazy said, “Sing a song about persuasion.” And then Gen sings, “Look at me I touch your breast” and the song took off in a mostly heterosexual direction. It’s an interesting transposition of several different things at once.

Cosey:
Which is true, I’d never thought of it that way but now that you mention it, in context of when it happened, I think Sleazy’s approach to persuasion is describing a situation where it was successful, and I think this was unsuccessful. Gen wasn’t able to persuade me to come back.

Drew:
It’s an interesting song. Part of it wants to give the listener the tools to resist persuasion, to expose that it’s not just about pornographic persuasion but any form of
compulsion, so that by the end of the song you are supposed to be suspicious of structures like the family, suspicious of
all
techniques of persuasion. The lyrics seem to be critical of persuasion, and they tell you how to avoid falling for it, and yet the found audio within the song works to do undo that, and instead offers the listener the sound of persuasion enjoyed.

Cosey:
Because some people love that, it’s like a courtship.

Chris:
It’s funny though because I’ve always . . . [pauses] In my mind’s eye, I’ve always thought of those sounds as the sounds of persuasion
not
working. They always sound to me like people that couldn’t be persuaded.

Cosey:
I’ve always thought of them as people that were persuaded, and then they regretted it. They wanted out.

Drew:
A kind of sexual shame after the fact?

Cosey:
It’s about emotional control, on both sides. Sometimes when you’re persuaded you actually turn out to enjoy it. There’s a little bit of guilt there because you shouldn’t have enjoyed it because of the way you were persuaded. It was lascivious and a little bit dodgy.

Chris:
The new vocals that Sleazy uses now, the snippets, we know where those come from. That was someone who was persuaded to do something, and then they realized it was a big mistake and they wanted out. Those sounds, the new ones . . .

Drew:
. . . consensual S&M?

Chris:
. . . it was initially and then it goes too far, like, no, this isn’t a good idea. They work really well.

Drew:
The pop song has always been a vehicle for sexual persuasion and seductive complaint. “Do a little more than Momma thinks you should.” The oldest thing in the book is
the male rock singer asking/begging/pleading for relief. But because it’s you guys representing it, the gloves are off, and you can look at the act of seduction more critically. It’s also one of the songs that prompts the question: what are you doing in presenting these sounds that sound like they are coming from a painful, violent experience?

Cosey:
Well I’d done quite a few porn movies then, and I’d been in situations where this persuasion occurred. I’d been in the situations that are on the tapes that Sleazy used and uses now, the scenarios happened in front of me. So I’d witnessed the persuasion of somebody, getting them to do something that they didn’t want to do, and didn’t enjoy it. Plus I’d been in a situation stripping where that had happened, and I had intervened at that point and put myself between the girl and the guy and said, “All you have to do is say no.”

Chris:
That song had a lot of personal resonance, didn’t it?

Cosey:
It did for me, because I’d been the victim of this sort of persuasion, and I’d seen victims and it hadn’t pleased me and it hadn’t turned me on. It was just suffering.

Chris:
But Sleazy and Gen had always been the persuaders.

Cosey:
As the persuader, you only see the turn-on, you only see the positive side, because you’re the one getting off on this. The other person isn’t; they’re just the vehicle for you to do that. In some ways, it’s quite nice, ’cause you get the balance of me with my guitar. It’s like a scream, shouting, “No.” When I look back at it now, that’s exactly what I’m doing with that guitar.

Drew:
I hadn’t thought of the song as a gesture of sympathy. The received image of TG is that you’re cold, ironic, smirking, distanced . . .

Cosey:
It’s not gratuitous, it’s never been gratuitous in
TG. It’s always been from a genuine interest in, or experience of, a certain situation. I’ve never even spoken about this with Gen and Sleazy, about that track. They knew that I’d been in certain situations but I don’t think they could even begin to imagine what it’s like to be on the other side. It’s not good, it’s really not.

Chris:
Lately, we’ve discussed “Persuasion” more because when we got together we rerecorded it.

Cosey:
We were in our late twenties when we did this, and at that time in your life you’re still on that roll of experience. You’re going through it, you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll try a bit of this, I’ll see if I like that.” So this is a time when we’re going through this ourselves. We’d not gone back and analyzed it yet. Now, this is me with hindsight going back. But then, it’s me doing that in an intuitive way, just unconsciously reacting to the lyrics.

Drew:
Maybe the relationship to genre that you model on this album works that way too. Trying out disco and dub and noise and pop, you’re still receptive, open-minded, rather than locked into one style and one “message.”

Cosey:
It’s all coming in at the same time and being filtered and coming out a different way, the way that I’ve managed to assimilate it and cope with it. All of us, we were all going through really weird times then, so much being thrown at us, on every level.

Much of the disturbing power of “Persuasion” emerges from the way that the field recordings of found voices used within it radiate a powerful aura of authenticity, and yet their precise content and origin can’t be established with any real certainty. The listener doesn’t know what she is hearing, but she nonetheless
“knows” that it is somehow cruel and wrong. This dynamic of partial revelation occurs throughout TG’s work and creates an equally unnerving and intoxicating experience of complicity with their recordings; all manner of obscure possibilities are projected onto the sounds in order to resolve their troubling indeterminacy, magnetizing and drawing out each listener’s own unconscious fears. Far from functioning as some kind of transparent document of an immanent encounter with the sonic real, Throbbing Gristle’s field recordings act as catalysts for fantasy that sneakily implicate the listener. Robbed of context, resolution and standard emotional cues, these raw materials, almost always assembled by Sleazy, are made more powerful by an additional mystery of intent: you can’t really determine his, or the band’s, stance toward these sounds. This effect of “holding out” is exacerbated by the predominance of mysteriously truncated accounts of criminality, particularly in their earliest recordings. Consider the following rough transcript of one of
Second Annual Report
’s darkest found audio exchanges:

A:
Well, my first intentions were to rape her but, um, when I started to, uh, when I grabbed hold of her the sexual, uh, motives just disappeared. I just flipped right out and started strangling her. I pounded her head against the stairs a number of times.

B:
How old was she?

A:
She was ten.

B:
Was it something that you wanted to [unintelligible]?

A:
No, it was, uh, to have sex, was the original motive and I was trying to find someone older, but she was there at the time.

Delivered in the calming tones of workaday journalism, this forensically dispassionate dialogue wafts up out of the mix, at first going to a delay and then heard clean and dry, perched on top of a seasick synthesizer dirge, without explanation, context or apology. Was this a private recording from a psychiatrist’s office? State’s evidence in a murder trial? A particularly tasteless put-on? Who is speaking? Did the girl survive? Did these events happen at all? The mystery of its source and the heavily coded “objectivity” of its delivery, complete with the roomtone resonance of an intimate domestic space and all the
umms
and
ahhs
of off-the-cuff chitchat, keep its suggestive power at a maximum; whatever its true source, it sure sounds “real” and exerts a powerful, deeply disturbing fascination. Apparently, the most horrific violence can be discussed in the same cheerful manner as any other “human interest” story. There is nothing inherently dramatic about extreme behavior once it is just more discourse—and yet this very banality (a moment of ultraviolence recollected in tranquility) intensifies the powerful aura of “the real” that seems to tremble inside these anonymous voices as they slither out of your stereo.

Context is everything. This exchange surfaces and then recedes, as it overlaps with and is then drowned out by an equally calm voice, introducing “Mr. Jack Shea, civil defense coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, with much experience in civil defense training,” who commences a recitation of public safety procedures in case of nuclear attack. As the baton is passed from one authoritative broadcasting voice to another within the same song, this seemingly random juxtaposition of found voices feels charged with menacing associations, but the segue remains tantalizingly vague. The
deadpan deployment of child rape and murder leaves TG open to unsavory accusations (a thuggish quest for the rock bottom of shock value), but the political implications of this transition also makes possible a kind of last-minute leftist resolution of these volatile materials. The political moral of the story runs thus: the State is permitted to do what the individual is not. This redemptive reading is not spelled out in anarchist slogans or politically “right on” liner notes, but is made manifest in the simple crossfading between a shocking description of an individual death and a numbing description of preparations for mass death. If we slide from a sympathetic reaction to individual violence (“that poor ten-year-old girl”) into a rationalized reaction to state violence (civil defense was the fig leaf covering the ongoing Cold War politics of mutually assured destruction), this gearshift from sympathy to resignation brings into uncomfortably acute focus our own alienated relationship to displays of power, whether in the fait accompli of past crimes or the future prognostics of nightmare forecasts. What a pity, but there’s nothing you can do about it, is there? In the process of listening, you are brought face to face with your own fear, alienation and powerlessness.

Sleazy had plenty of previous experience hinting at the unspeakable, having already constructed display environments that appeared to be the last remaining traces of horrible crimes. As John Gill describes them in
Queer Noises:

Christopherson designed the controversial body-part installations that graced the windows of the BOY boutique in London in 1977. These were extremely lifelike bits of a body—a booted foot, part of a hand—that looked as though they had been mutilated, or at least severed, during a fire or
explosion. They drew crowds, until the police removed the exhibit from the window. (Gill, p. 132)

In fashioning the “debris of murder” (to use a phrase later deployed by TG as a song title), Sleazy relied upon his skill as a makeup artist and a participant in casualty and emergency preparedness drills. In his selection and manipulation of the not-so-everyday sounds found within Throbbing Gristle’s recordings and live performances, he elevated the cropping of fragmentary information to a dark art.

Drew:
Where did the taped material that you used in TG come from?

Sleazy:
Most of what I used then came from British television. At the time, certainly with “D.o.A.” I was cultivating—just personally and as a creative thing—relationships with mercenaries and hustlers and all kinds of people. I would record them, bug their rooms, sometimes without them knowing and sometimes with their permission. I would tape interviews with them about particular episodes or incidents or just talking about their desires. I was working with other sound sources besides TV, but TV was the easy one, because at that time, well just as much now I guess, the public has a neverending fascination for voyeuristic documentary and so it was quite easy to get source material. The voices on
Second Annual Report
were all taken from television crime documentaries. But don’t tell the BBC that we’ve been breaching their copyright . . .

Drew:
Oh, don’t worry, it’s only middle-aged men that read books about Throbbing Gristle. So, what about the taped material on “Persuasion”?

Sleazy:
I’d have to listen to it again. There are some recordings that I made of a friend of ours who was a pedophile
in LA, but I don’t think I had them at the time. I don’t think I used them until the first Coil album. Whenever there was something interesting going on I would tape it. Actually I have a feeling that this guy sent me some tapes of him and some ten-year-old boy or something, and the boy was just laughing basically, just giggling and screaming and stuff, but there was nothing sinister about the activity on the tape; it’s just that it became sinister in that context. I was very interested in how people’s perceptions change as a consequence of context.