Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Read Free Book Online

awkward position in the aftermath of romantic and creative upheaval. The final irony is that, far from misleading the consumer by promising a musical experience that TG cannot possibly deliver, the image’s owninherent contradiction all too neatly expresses the volatile ambiguity of the musical (dis)contents within. Just as the cover flickers uncomfortably between extroverted, collective celebration and introverted, solitary withdrawal, the eleven songs bound by this cover pinball unpredictably between group creativity and solo outbursts, between glossy pop and hastily scribbled improvisation, alternately firming songs up into solid structures and dissolving them down into a miasma of textures, moving backward into pastiche and forward into futurism. Poised at the edge of the abyss, it’s a record that can’t make up its mind whether to jump or hang on.

20 Jazz Funk Greats
    Banality is bourgeois style.
    Kurt Schwitters, “Chinese Banalities”
    First, an inventory: Drum machine. Bassline. “Yeah.” Synth. Cornet. Drum roll. “Nice.” Panned, high synth on the right channel. Cornet. Drum roll and syndrum snare stab. “Mine.” “Tonight.” “Jazz.” “Yeah.” Delayed cornet. Panned synth returns. “Jazz.” “Jazz.” The palette thickens, grows more crowded and insistent. Fade at 2:38.
    Chalking the sidewalk outline around the corpses of jazz and funk with heavy quotation marks, TG offer not jazz but “jazz,” not funk but “funk.” Instead of giving us chops and feel and sex appeal and feverish commitment,
20 Jazz Funk Greats
offers a deliberate perversion of funk and jazz, a mutant clone, somehow simultaneously flaccid and mechanical—a soft machine. The song seems to model these genres for the listener as received ideas, exhausted forms stalled enroute to their liberatory payoffs. In his
ABC of Reading
, Ezra Pound proclaimed that “music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance,” and the languid tempo of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, more slurred than slinky, offers us such atrophy in (in)action, a wither report from behind the enemy lines of popular music (Pound, 14). It is unclear whether jazz and funk are being set up as senile modes in need of recuperation, or simply as dead weight overripe for satire. In either case—so far, so postmodern.
    Such a reading takes us a few inches into this song, but let’s consider something a little more debatable: that TG’s music could be seriously regarded as a mutation of certain possibilities inherent in the templates of these genres. From jazz, TG take the idea of group improvisation from an agreed starting point and create something flexible enough to accommodate dissonance and the immanent to the moment acceptance of music-as-sound. From funk, TG take the idea of a rhythmic, repetitive music that attempts to evoke a physical response, with an implicit sexual and abject referent (“funk” as bad smell, as aroma of overproductive physicality; funk as what is, above all else,
nasty)
. Neither reference point quite survives as a living presence within the commodified forms that lurch zombielike through the cocktail lounge scenario of this song, but within the practice defined by the album as a whole, you could do far worse than isolate jazz and funk as the Ur-genres from which this piece of music derives its license and cops its moves.
    Cosey: I think what we wanted to do was to bear in mind the theme of it and the cover, so that the first track
would
give you a kind of jazz funk.
    Chris: A false sense of security.
    Drew: Whose voice is it?
    Cosey: It’s Sleazy’s voice, and that’s nice too, because of course that’s what he likes to do most. So it works from that, and then starts to get a bit weird, you think, “What’s that noise there?” and it starts to build to a crescendo.
    Drew: On that vocal take on the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats,” are you speaking “in character”? Is there anyone who you’re trying to sound a little bit