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

Driving past Nugent Sand company’s storage zones, I turned left down a dirt path to look at a building on River Road I’d never really considered before, a nondescript lot set back from the others and fenced off. A metal roof spanned a huge roll-up garage on one side, and a dark office window peered over a paved parking area. It was a weekend and the place was deserted. No one had locked the fence, and the garage had been left open. The parking lot was edged with metal garbage cans, some empty, some filled nearly to the top with an unsavory pinkish white foam/fat slop, its half-chemical and half-organic smell slow-cooking in the sun. As I walked up to the garage and looked into the dark interior I saw what resembled a giant garbage truck, curiously open at the top. It had once been white, but was now stained a gray-brown with mud and was splashed at its edges with an indescribably ominous ruddy grease. Dangling over the edge was a bloodied leg and hoof. Stunned, I climbed up the side of the truck to investigate and stared down into a Bosch-worthy tangle of flyblown carnage. The truck was filled with the decomposing remains of cows and horses, and the stench burnt my eyes. My heart raced at the doubled excitement of sneaking my way into something and making a truly gruesome discovery on top of that. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends, whom I was sure would be totally impressed. They were, and soon we started to make strategic visits, photographing the curious piles of discarded hooves, examining the chemical biomuck stored in the vats and taking brief, thrilling peeks at the charnel landscapes of dead flesh on display within the truck. A trip to the public
library identified the address, and city records revealed that I had simply wandered into a rendering plant, a processing station in which dead livestock too large to be disposed of privately got carted off by the city and reduced to manageable constituent parts. In other words, it was a Death Factory.

We called it “The Industrial Place” in honor of Throbbing Gristle, more or less our collective favorite band at that point. The name clicked because the rendering plant fulfilled for us the suspicion that Throbbing Gristle’s music and artwork and lyrics and interviews had already generated: the feeling that beneath the smooth surface of ordinary everyday life there was an occulted underside of brutality and ugliness, and that this brutality was not aberrant or exceptional but was in fact a bureaucratically managed and authorized expression of power. The logo of Industrial Records was a banal photograph of a factory building; Throbbing Gristle used this image for several years before Genesis revealed in an interview with Simon Dwyer that the building in the photograph enclosed the ovens used at Auschwitz
(RE/Search
#4/5, p. 63). Drinking the Kool Aid of these histrionic equations, we took Gen’s point to be the assertion that the concentration camp was not a historical memorial to a forty-year-old war but the secret truth of everyday life: the camps had shown that the factory model can be applied to anything, including life and death. Though the political atrocity of the camps could be disavowed, the factory system that enabled it had never stopped running, nor had the administered world that went with it. Here it was just down the street from the powerboat dealership with the
TOYS FOR BIG BOYS
banner: a space dedicated to the industrialization of death that converted the raw material of animal bodies into a gelatinous liquid mass, packed and ready for shipping. We
had found a physical manifestation of the aesthetic that held us in thrall.

Trespassing into the rendering plant gave us controlled bursts of risk, a way to play with our own thresholds of disgust, to figure out what we could take. It felt and looked the way that the Throbbing Gristle of
Second Annual Report
sounded: dark and powerful, deliberately uncomfortable, at once desolately lonely and bursting with rancid life. The sensation of standing so close to recent death made me feel very much alive, aware of my own breath and heartbeat, aware of my gag reflex as I fought back the urge to vomit. Of course now this is all rather embarrassing. At the time I was annoyingly quick to quote the lines of Baudelaire’s “Danse Macabre,” that “the charm of horror tempts only the strong,” but now I see the quest for such sensationalized “strength” as an arrogant and obvious adolescent bid for authenticity, autonomy, self-control: the usual things you feel you lack as a teenager. Others, I imagined, would be revolted by this thing that we found compelling, just as normal people wouldn’t be able to teach themselves to enjoy Throbbing Gristle’s outermost extremes. Other people wouldn’t have the stomach for it, other people were deluding themselves and playing it safe while we brave few were willing to press our faces closer to the putrescent facts of life. I treasured the knowledge of this place, passing the secret of it on to those I trusted most, thinking of it as our little conspiracy. I still remember the betrayal that I felt when, years later, I made a pilgrimage to this site and it had been demolished and paved over. Not a trace now remains but a single out-of-focus photograph. It shows a crescent mound of sawed-off horns.

In a celebrated scene in the Ridley Scott film
Alien
(1979),
the dying android doctor Ash, secretly planted on the starship
Nostromo
in order to protect the murderous entity in their midst, gushes (literally—his severed head is vomiting white slime as he speaks) to the human crew members about the alien’s perverse appeal: “I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Transfixed by the abject and unmusical audiomurk, appalled but fascinated by the murderous scenarios described in the lyrics and found audio snippets within TG’s
Second Annual Report
, I felt the same way about my favorite band, projecting onto them a darkly radiant nimbus of nihilistic purity. They were pure, and hence powerful, and I might take on those qualities by association with them.

I go on at such vulgar length to describe my teenage TG fandom not out of nostalgic pride but because it seems utterly typical. It sounds like standard suburban mall fare. Stuck in circumstances beyond their control and too young to have any real say in things, certain adolescents daydream about adult positions of mastery that they can virtually inhabit, emotionally investing in consolatory scenarios of limitless power and total commitment. From comic books to video games to Hollywood films to pop songs, mass culture formats deal in spectacular wish fulfillment, giving their consumers little fantasy hits of absolute autonomy made perceptible, tactile, portable, immediate but temporary. In speaking with other TG fans about the qualities they admire in TG records, I repeatedly hear the same interests, stances, reactions that I recall: they love the gore/true-crime factor, they dig the vibe of “evil” that it gives off, they like the coldness and intensity. Consider “Slug Bait,” one of the grimmer numbers on
Second Annual Report
, which details a criminal psychopath breaking
into a home and murdering its residents, first castrating a man and then eviscerating his pregnant wife. Some lyrics:

I look at your big heavy stomach

It’s already moving a little bit with your baby

I use the carving knife from your kitchen

I start to perform the operation

You say, “No, no don’t do that!”

I say, “I don’t give a . . . cat’s whiskers.”

The sheer dogged thoroughness with which human sympathies have been repudiated (or repressed) in order to construct this narrative is a big part of the appeal for its audience, because its no-holds-barred hostility taps into a sort of free-form, nonspecific adolescent rage against the entire grownup world of consequences, responsibility, accountability and fair play. And yet the knowledge that those sympathies are only being temporarily suspended is crucial to such art’s effect of moral holiday, and the open secret to the perverse pleasure that such fare provides to the spectator: to do such things in reality would be utterly wrong, and so
therefore
their simulation is exciting, even pleasurable. These visions of remorseless criminality function as a kind of funhouse mirror reflection of the adolescent “innocence” of their typical spectators and fans. Like the android Ash mooning over the deadly alien, the teenage TG fan who listens to “Slug Bait” admires the band, and thereby themselves, for a shared ability to enjoy what they also know is “wrong.” Such a stance is of course completely different from actual psychopathology: the psychopath doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and so the psychopath,
by definition, cannot occupy the pervert’s position of feeling-pleasure-at-the-wrongness-of-doing-wrong. As with St. Augustine’s stolen pears, the sweetness lies not in the fruit but in the knowledge that one has consciously embraced evil.

Such a general picture of the bloodthirsty expectations surrounding a TG record are, hopefully, helpful for framing just how obnoxious and disappointing the peppy, glossy, kitschy, contradictory and, yes,
funky 20 Jazz Funk Greats
was to certain elements within Throbbing Gristle’s fanbase. Such as me. Alive with expectations after my knockout encounter with
Second Annual Report
, I pounced on
20 Jazz Funk Greats
when I saw it for sale at Ear X-tacy in Louisville and brought it home, expecting another burbling blast of improvisatory electronic murk and processed screaming. I was hoping for something really nasty.

Nope.

What I heard instead sounded to me like pop music. Puzzling and perverted pop, yes, but pop all the same. Given the TG that I thought I knew,
20 Jazz Funk Greats
was all wrong. While I was able to slot “Beachy Head” and “Six Six Sixties” into the aesthetic universe of TG as I had previously understood it, most of the songs on the album didn’t just evade me—they offended me. I felt betrayed. What happened to the darkness and evil? This sounded like the work of people who liked to dance, people who listened to disco, people who wanted to make music with a good beat that you could dance to, people who knew their way around a synthesizer and had some creamy chords and catchy riffs up their sleeves, people who might be growing up and feeling a bit bored by serial-killer trivia. Reviewing it in my zine at the age of seventeen I huffed about the “synthy froo froo” fare and speculated that
“Hot on the Heels of Love” had to be a parody designed to infiltrate the subversive TG message into dance clubs (being underage I had only vague ideas of what went on in them). But how could I be sure? If the record was meant to be a sarcastic commentary on synthetic disco and kitsch and jazz funk, why did so much of it actually just sound like primitive attempts at really being exactly those things? It had a clammy, indistinct quality, a curious sourness. I had admired TG’s purity, their remorselessness, only to have that confidence taken away from me by an album that seemed determinedly
impure
from every angle: sound, genre, look, motivation. This record was the sound of TG deforming, drifting off message, flirting with disaster, wandering into dangerous territory. Was it a mistake, or a pisstake? Was it a stiff gag about selling out or a botched attempt to cash in on the crest of post-punk’s crossfade into corporate new wave? Was the music just a deliberately insincere batch of genre exercises and smug, naff knock-offs—or had TG secretly been up to something else all along? If it offended me and didn’t play by the puritanical nihilist rules of engagement as I understood them, why did I, even then, (secretly) start to like it so much? The cover looked like a joke, yes. But then again, to quote Syd Barrett, “What exactly is a joke?”

And this is what happened, the strange thing that happened . . .

Alan Jay Lerner, “Once in the Highlands”

Peter Christopherson’s artwork for the
20 Jazz Funk Greats
LP gleefully violates his own previously strict aesthetic program with a stink bomb of kitsch. Retroactively transforming the corporate austerity of
Second Annual Report’
s stark black-and-white cover and
D.o.A.’s
deadpan photography into modernist wind-ups for a camp punchline, the cheery photograph of the band in leisure wear smiling at the camera on a sunlit, flowery cliffside immediately puts the viewer on the defensive. It seems deliberately forgettable, a bunko product doomed at birth to the Muzak cut-out bin. They can’t be serious. In talking with the band, a sense of the cover artwork as a specifically calibrated, deliberately reactionary gesture emerges. The cover allowed the band to
escape the specific gravity of punk rock and its aftermath, and to break character with their own past.

Chris:
We had this thing about confounding people’s expectations. Because if they feel comfortable with what we’re doing . . . we have this inbuilt trigger when we sense that.

Cosey:
You destroy the comfort zone.

Drew:
And that crystallized in the title for the album and the photo shoot—the idea of rethinking what TG was by showing up in a polyester suit with a smiling face?

Cosey:
People pigeonhole you as if you are having orgies everyday and eating sheep’s heads and all this kind of stuff. Like some sort of overacted goth deviant. And, yeah, okay, we do all sorts of stuff like that, but . . . whatever takes your fancy. And on top of that there’s other things going on. The sun is shining and there’s lots to enjoy.

Drew:
Did the stance change on
20 Jazz Funk Greats
because you’d moved past a position that you had taken on the previous two albums? The relationship to violence seems very different.

Cosey:
There was a huge shift very quickly, even though it was only three years. If you think of TG at the beginning [circa 1975], there quickly came punks who were on the back of it, who also took up the colors of anarchy (red, black and white), who took up swastikas as a fashion accessory not fully understanding what they were doing. They were going to an antiracist rally with a swastika on their jacket, they were that dumb, you know, and that happened at Hackney, down the road from where we were. You saw all these punks turning up for a good day out with the Sex Pistols and they don’t understand . . .