Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (15 page)

Drew:
And it was conveyed in advance that she was to act out this scenario of seduction, and to pretend that she was an ingénue and didn’t know what was going on?

Gen:
Exactly. I thought that was fascinating, this kind of interesting little fetish that this person had developed. And one of his phrases was, “Well, nobody’s going to know, who’s going to see the pictures? It could be anybody.” I just liked the little phrase “It could be anybody,” the double meaning of the phrase, anybody or anybody’s body, you know? I started to twist the different things together, things that I knew. Because when Sleazy asked me I thought, Well, what do I know about persuasion? What are the elements that I can use? What I do with a lot of the lyrics, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll visualize a movie, and then describe it quite literally, as if it is happening.
I could do it once I had the various characters: the seedy guy at Victoria Station trying to get people who’ve just come into town to do porno pictures for money, the naïve person persuaded and debauched and corrupted. But also . . . I do have a biscuit tin from Fortnum and Mason. And after I was living on my own in 1978 after
D.o.A
., I started to collect panties from my various lovers, and each one had a Polaroid of the vagina stapled in the crotch, and I folded them very carefully and kept them in this tin. So I started to experiment with developing a fetish consciously, as if these were talismanic mementos from some serial fetishist.

Drew:
So you’re implicated in the song, but you’re also exposing persuasion as a technique.

Gen:
So I was both characters, the observer and the protagonist.

One need not look far within
The Outsider
for elements that might have influenced the lyrics of “Persuasion.” The very first page begins with a quote from Henri Barbusse’s novel
L’enfer
, which sums up the sexually predatory male gaze:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed. It is not woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one . . . (Barbusse, as cited in Wilson,
Outsider
, p. 11)

This quote epitomizes the fetishistic collector: each woman is approached in order to accumulate one more pair of panties for the tin, and the tin is a general set that can never be filled. How many panties would be “enough”?
The Outsider
was written when Wilson was an alienated young man who lived the marginal life he theorized in his text; spending his days in the reading room of the British library compiling his primer of existentialist crisis, Wilson slept rough at nights in Hampstead Heath. There is a further linkage between
The Outsider’s
formally loose bundle of excerpts and quotes and the slippery combination of scenarios of pornographic fetishism, domestic abuse and implied violence in “Persuasion”: in his
Autobiographical Reflections
, Wilson describes his initial plan for the text as a pairing of “intellectual outsiders” such as Dostoyevsky with “physical outsiders,” individuals who express their alienation by violently physical means, either creatively (a dancer such as Nijinsky) or destructively (serial murderers such as Jack the Ripper and Peter Kurten) (Wilson,
Autobiographical Reflections
, p. 21).

Drew:
How do you see the song? I see the link to Cosey’s work and you addressing her, but how do you see yourself responding to Sleazy? There’s a clear sense in which Sleazy, too, is a persuader.

Gen:
Oh yeah, of course, everyone’s in there. That’s just how I do it, I bring in lots of bits of my reality and then I reassemble them, hopefully to create something that’s a generalized observation.

Drew:
I was interested in “Persuasion” as a kind of turn in the way that you structured TG songs around the so-called “problem of evil,” because I have a pet theory that TG’s take
on violence has three evolutionary stages across the three major albums. First, you have the first-person identification with the violent killer in “Slug Bait” on
Second Annual Report
, and on “Very Friendly” [a kind of murder ballad about the Moors Murderer Ian Brady]. Then, with “Hamburger Lady” on
D.o.A
., you move from identifying with the agent of violence to meditating on the reality of pain and suffering from the victim’s point of view. Then, with “Persuasion” on
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, you return again to a kind of identification with the agent, but at this point it’s been transformed, and it’s handled in a very different way. In a, dare I say it, more critical and “mature” way . . .

Gen:
God, I never expected TG to make more than one record, so I didn’t have a particular kind of lineage in mind. I was exploring options, trying to take the lyric to the final level after the Velvet Underground, where the lyric could be journalistic and anecdotal, with Lou Reed using the Andy Warhol Factory and the downtown underground scene as his source. I was very influenced by that possibility, that the lyric had gone beyond just Bob Dylan, who was making lyrics that were poetic and knowingly aware of avant-garde poetry and the beats and the beatniks. Then Lou Reed took it to the street, and I wanted to take it all the way, right down to the gutter. I wanted to say that everything is fair game for the lyric.

Drew:
Including the most extreme, the most transgressive, the most unflinching descriptions of cruelty and violence?

Gen:
Especially those. It’s the job of the artist to reflect their times and hopefully illuminate some of the dark shadow side of society’s guilt and fear, and expose that for the hypocrisy and danger that it represents.

Drew:
You could connect such lyrical subject matter
to some very old ballad traditions in English history, going back to the kind of “true crime” descriptions of child murder popular in the sixteenth century. But it seems that by the time of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
you had probably also realized that you couldn’t just keep on creating variations of “Slug Bait” forever.

Gen:
Well, no. Plus, people like Whitehouse and Come Org were doing that, and it was quite obvious that vicarious, gratuitous use of serial killers as an accessory was not just immature but downright irresponsible. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was trying to discuss motives, the dynamic of how people behave, because ultimately, to this day, I believe that human behavior is the key to change, to evolution. If we don’t behave differently, we’re doomed. Art has to ultimately deal with issues of human behavior, and why we behave in ways that are counterproductive, cruel, destructive, aggressive. Why is it that we keep falling back into the same loops, damaging and hurting ourselves, when anyone in their right mind knows that pain and violence are not good? That’s what I wanted to find out: Why? Why do people keep repeating this aberrant behavior? Why are people titillated and stimulated by second-hand descriptions of other people’s aberrant behavior? What is it that attracts us as beings to this, like flies to a corpse? What is it? If we can find out what that is, what that story is, that has stopped us from evolving with our technology, then maybe, just maybe, we can finally let go of our prehistoric behavior and actually become a species that we can truly be proud of when we look at ourselves. So that was always there and it’s still there to this day. But of course it would change as I got people’s attention. “Here’s the Problem” (
Second Annual Report)
. “This is a big problem, the problem goes down even
into personal relationships” (“Weeping” on
D.o.A.)
and then with
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, it’s obviously my responsibility as a writer to try to propose some escapes, some alternatives.

In creating artwork that pulls the listener into an uncomfortable feeling of complicity with acts of cruelty and violence, are TG fashioning a critical analysis of a violent world, or are they simply indulging in and reinforcing its ambient brutality? To take this question seriously one must step outside the ready-to-hand answers that the band provide and assess the TG partyline—if there is one—with a colder eye. The TG dynamic of rigged complicity can be compared with German filmmaker Michael Haneke’s strategy in his second feature
Funny Games
(1998), an unremittingly sadistic depiction of two psychopathic teenagers torturing and murdering a wealthy family in their country house. In an interview about his intentions that accompanies the DVD release of the film, Haneke reveals that he purposefully created an unbearable film designed to trap its viewers into experiencing their own identification with the film’s villains, intending to expose the audience’s willingness to remain in the theater as a sign of their tacit approval of the ongoing brutality:

The killer communicates with the viewer, and that means that he makes him his accomplice. I’m making the viewer an accomplice of the killer, but at the end, I’m reproaching him for this position. It’s a little sarcastic, but I wanted to show how you’re always an accomplice of the killer if you watch this kind of film. Not this kind of self-reflexive film, but films that show violence in an “acceptable” way. We always agree that violence is happening, it’s consumable, and we don’t realize that we’re accomplices in this. . . . If someone stayed to
the end, then he needed that torture in order to understand.
(Funny Games
, 1998)

Such a stance forces us to acknowledge our own participatory location within the unfolding spectacle, and asks that we reconsider the power we wield as consumers within the capitalist entertainment economies of supply and demand. They make what we will pay for, and by sitting through the entirety of
Funny Games
, or, for that matter, “Very Friendly,” Throbbing Gristle’s album-side-long narration of Ian Brady and Myra Hindeley’s murder of gay teenager Edward Evans, we ratify its status as quality entertainment.

Both Haneke and Throbbing Gristle present ultraviolent scenarios within some of their work, and both insist that when they do so, it is in order to comment upon a broader culture of violence, pushing its logic toward a critical
reductio ad absurdum
in order to short-circuit its sociopolitical wiring. But such subversive critical agendas also run the risk of collapsing into a hypocritical dodge. What about the artist’s competitive investment in “one-upping” the mainstream by deliberately concocting such extreme, over-the-top material? It certainly cuts a dashing figure to intone that “It’s not I, the artist, who longs for violence and cruelty, but you,
hypocrite lecteur,”
but after turning upon the consumer with such hostility, ordering them to “pay no attention to the artist behind the curtain” feels like a symptomatic evasion, a telling avoidance of the artist’s own desires, fears and fantasies, and indeed their own complicity in the entertainment industry they seek to shame. Furthermore, by ignoring the extent to which such high-minded authorial intentions may drop out of the equation for an audience already self-aware about, and possibly all too comfortable with, their own bloodthirsty tastes, the very sophistication of
this enabling rubric carries an obverse lining of intellectual naiveté all its own. In this case, all the avant-gardist heavy lifting begins to look less like an alternative to a brutal society and more like an experimental R+D wing unwittingly forecasting and prototyping its most craven tendencies. Worse still, there remains another, even more disappointing possibility: that the enlightened consumer, the “with it” fan, might be absorbing the ostensibly critical message at the discursive level,
tsk tsk
ing that such violence is indeed most terrible, while cynically getting their rocks off about that very violence at the same time.

Throbbing Gristle were clearly aware of these tradeoffs and difficulties by the time they made
20 Jazz Funk Greats
. At that point, it was clear that the bloodyminded true crime recitatives that made up the lyrics and spoken texts within the earliest incarnations of TG (“Very Friendly,” “Slug Bait,” “Maggot Death”) had worked all too well, cementing the association of industrial music with gruesome tales of serial killing, rape, child molestation and child murder. The aesthetic deathgrip of such Grand Guignol fare initially helped to cast a suitably threatening media shadow, amplifying the already plentiful notoriety of Coum’s alumni as nihilistic perverts and “wreckers of civilization.” But it ultimately proved stifling and tedious to the members of the band, who had to watch as their antihumanist gestures were photocopied and distorted endlessly by arrivistes who brought plenty of iron-stomached bloodlust but forgot to pack the critical savoir faire. Gen confessed in
RE/Search
to being utterly bored by the mounting tide of blowhard fan letters that sang the praises of Charles Manson and Ted Bundy et. al (#6–7, p. 12). The effects of such associations proved more damaging and longlasting than the band predicted.

“Persuasion” has telescoped into history, and its meaning—that is to say, its ability to produce effects upon those who listen to it closely—has not stopped changing in response to the world transforming around it. Culturally speaking, there are certain formerly volatile elements within “Persuasion” that have lost their ability to threaten. What once was creepy now risks sounding quaint. At the level of public relations, the ubiquity of pornography has subtly transformed its moral valence; though it is still subject to titters of embarrassment, comedy routine mockery and continual harassment from tax assessors on suspicions of mob involvement, porn is now an upstanding sector of the global economy. It has become a catechism when discussing the Internet to assert that porn takes up the lion’s share of online user bandwidth. Gen’s cloak-and-dagger scenario of the big city seducer preying upon fresh-from-the-farm innocence feels closer to the erotic fiction of John Cleland’s
Fanny Hill
than it does to the decentralized, self-exploiting democracy of amateur porn. Statistically, one is now far more likely to drunkenly “cam” one’s self into potentially embarrassing nude notoriety than to be talked into it by a Faginlike emissary from the porn underworld. As a porn star and performance artist, the flawless cool of Cosey’s double life (pinup girl by day, wrecker of civilization by night) has now been replaced by the Hot Topic—styled banality of the Suicide Girls, tattooed and pierced gothettes whose skin-deep subcultural identifications are the primary selling point of their mildly successful commercial packaging. Porn, even and especially “cool” or “weird” porn, is mainstream. Similarly, the premise of collecting panties and underwear, so titillating to the first wave of (mostly straight and male) listeners to TG’s song, now seems more funny than scary. In Japan, vending machines sell
“used” schoolgirl’s panties to interested salarymen, and eBay permitted a brisk trade in similiar items, both male and female, until it was shamed into giving the red card to the practice. It simply migrated elsewhere. But Gen’s sense that one might experiment consciously upon one’s personality by “trying out” a fetish has proved prescient, as the chatroom anonymity of the web now provides a more casual and risk-free ambience in which one can virtually remodel one’s own identity. One can voice, act out and recant one’s desires at whim, and the Fortnum and Mason biscuit tin is now a file folder full of jpegs uploaded from a cellphone camera.