Read Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) for Free Online

Cosey went suburban cute and in deference to my father (as balance to the influence already of my mother) I went for an interpretation of a Frank Sinatra inspired lounge singing ensemble.
    . . .
    The title lettering for the album title was directly inspired by the genre of disco versions of top twenty hits that used to be sold in Woolworth’s, combined with the lowest common denominator of American disco-funk compilations and of course the inevitable nod to our fetish Martin Denny. The sickly pink lilac colour of the back sleeve was as close as we could get to Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bookends
album. Apart from the original letter that became the basis for
Hamburger Lady
, we had maintained our ambiguity of content by not printing any of my TG lyrics. As
20 Jazz Funk Greats
was drenched in ironic parody, however, we mimicked the print layout of Simon & Garfunkel as well to give the impression of classic pop archetypes of design and consumer friendliness.
    Bracketing their intentions for a moment, did the cover work? If the goal was to deliberately alienate and wrongfoot their audience, it seems to have succeeded in baffling at leastsome of TG’s fans, followers and friends. Val Denham, a painter and visual artist who went on to create album sleeves for Psychic TV, Mark and the Mambas and many other artists associated with the Some Bizarre label, was a close friend of Gen’s who frequently stayed at Beck’s Road in the period immediately following Gen and Cosey’s breakup. Recalling the impact of the cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, Val minces no words:
    Val: I remember Gen showing me the album cover artwork, and I wasn’t very impressed. I thought it looked like such a shit cover.
    Drew: You weren’t into the seaside kitsch look?
    Val: He thought it was really funny. He said, “It’s going to be called
Jazz and Funk Greats.”
He thought it was amusing that people might pick it up in a record store and actually think that it was jazz and funk greats. I didn’t like the cover at all. I thought it looked really bland. Which it was, I guess it was a sort of subversive kitsch, but I didn’t like it. Even though many thought of it as an in-joke, because of the fact that it was on Beachy Head, the top suicide spot in Britain. I didn’t really like it.
    Val’s response suggests a few limitations with the “subversive” agenda of seamlessly reconstructing a familiar image. In a sense, the cover worked a little
too well
at achieving banality. If you didn’t know anything about the band already, and you didn’t know anything about the morbid backstory of this site-specific prank, then the image crumples, and simply presents four people in leisure wear smiling among some flowers, not particularly different from any other generic sleeve for tacky, manufactured mid-60s sunshine-pop combos such as theGroop or the Love Generation. The elements are all there: Cosey’s bright white smile and schoolgirl socks; Chris Carter’s cable-knit sweater and pudding bowl hairdo; Gen’s “nice” narrow-lapel suiting; Sleazy’s boyish, clean-cut grin. This strategy divides the audience into information haves and have-nots. On one side, there stands a generalized record-buying public constituted as outside the joke, a population who were, by 1979, probably not terribly interested in the overly familiar aesthetic on offer. On the other side, there huddles a tiny coterie of followers who are in on the joke, but who, as TG fans presumably drawn to the “dark,” “evil” and “transgressive,” can only snicker at this deliberate attempt to disappoint them. Inside information flattens the image in a different direction: if something is “just” an inside joke, then it’s not particularly difficult or demanding, because the band are not risking any real exposure or self-revelation with such a move. Pop artists carefully manufacture their images, and tend to have meticulously art-directed photoshoots as part of the total package. TG, far