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

is it compelling because subsequent musical trends proved it prescient, “ahead of the curve” in predicting the revival of lounge culture. It is compelling because it is, to take up the melancholic Marxist parlance of Walter Benjamin, “a dialectical image”: it allegorizes conflict, catching the emergent and the extinct in a compromising embrace. As a deliberate mockery of the falsifying scenario of the band photo, it subverts the inherent corniness of staged authenticity and self-conscious camaraderie that band photos tend to radiate—butit subverts it through an over-the-top, hyperconformist execution of that very mandate. Instead of attempting to look exotic, dangerous, contemporary and “real” (the subterranean imperatives involved in selling punk to the kids), TG took pains to ensure that they look banal, innocuous, dated and fake. As an orchestrated act of comic imposture staged on the site of suicide, Throbbing Gristle don’t just model thrift store chic, but also embody a kind of radically indifferent, collective emotion. Standing on the brink of the ultimate romantic gesture of tortured, solitary self-hood, Throbbing Gristle close ranks with creepy, foolish grins all round. Halfway between glee and sangfroid, they are feeling a lukewarm, mysterious . . . something. What are they doing here? With no blanket and no picnic basket, they obviously don’t intend to stay.
    The reverse of this image of smirking, morbid festivity is the solitary car parked by the same cliff on the opposite side. As a brand with specific class connotations, the Range Rover whispers wealth and entitlement, albeit gilded with faintly sporty pretensions. Perched on the lip of Beachy Head, the car seems to radiate a faint unease, the same despair already implicit in the telling tourist industry phrase “weekend getaway.” Of course, the escapist logic with which such goods and services are marketed to luxury consumers—“use our product to escape your (ugly, polluted, stifling) urban life”—conceals the extent to which the vehicle of escape becomes a prison of its own, extending the range of the very same conditions, reinforcing the fuel-dependence, pollution, aesthetic ugliness and levelled-down sameness of modernity. Written in the early sixties but all too accurate today, Lewis Mumford’s remark in
The Highway and the City
(1963) aptly diagnoses the problem:
    In using the car to flee from the metropolis the motorist finds he has merely transferred congestion to the highway and thereby doubled it. When he reaches his destination, he finds the countryside he sought has disappeared; beyond him, thanks to the motorway, lies only another suburb, as dull as his own. (Mumford as quoted in Rowley, p. 417)
    Fond of the suburban banality of everyday Britain, Throbbing Gristle, with their lyrical references to “dead pence” and “Tesco Disco,” seem uniquely equipped for this particular journey to the end of the line. As the
ne plus ultra
of the motorway system, Beachy Head offers the overwhelmed urbanite the dizzying prospect of an ultimate, permanent getaway. Left hanging like a question mark on the LP’s backside, TG’s rented Range Rover seems to pine for its vanished masters.
    Both “saying cheese” for the camera and soldiering on behind the scenes, by 1979 Throbbing Gristle might have had a few reasons of their own for longing for some kind of escape. In the wake of the interpersonal abyss that was
D.o.A
., an album marked by the dissolution of the actionist performance group Coum Transmissions, Gen’s attempted overdose and suicidal collapse during a gig at the Crypt, the breakup of Gen and Cosey’s relationship, the beginning of Chris and Cosey’s personal and musical alliance and the band’s own increasing critical success and popularity (unwanted and internally divisive), the forced grins now on display for
20 Jazz Funk Greats
offer the viewer a cheap holiday in the midst of Throbbing Gristle’s own painfully