20 Jazz Funk Greats
20 Jazz Funk Greats
Customer Review: Seminal stuff
A stunning piece of work! If, like me, you had thought Throbbing Gristle were primarily noise and angst, 20 Jazz Funk Greats introduces a whole new dimension to their sound. A track like Beachy Head is gentle, beautiful and yet unsettling. On the one hand it's a pure instrumental tone-poem, but then the fact that it's named after Beachy Head, the UK's most notorious suicide spot, adds a new level of refined macabre to TG's pallette.
And it's got some of the best cover artwork ever… with a nasty kick for the observant.
Side note: I remember reading that Throbbing Gristle were an influence on Boards of Canada, but couldn't hear the lineage until I got 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Just compare a track like Walkabout on 20 JFG's to early BOC and it's plain to see. Even the cover has similarities to BOC's Music Has the Right to Children.
Customer Review: Throbbing Gristle bring you…
‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’ remains one of the key albums of the late-1970s - predicting most of what was to follow (electronica, industrial, avant-garde, ambient, new wave etc.) & also being one of those varied long-players common to that era (see Can’s ‘Tago Mago’, Faust’s ‘IV’ or Eno’s ‘Another Green World’). The cover is very British, I think - the so-called ‘wreckers of civilisation’ - dressed in standard-dress of the seventies - some members look like they could be in The Fall, another a stock-hippy - while Genesis P-Orridge has a snappy white-blazer on (the white & the ironic title a deliberate move against the fascist-nazi tags being placated on TG due to songs like ‘Zyklon Z. Zombie’). & Cosey Fanni Tutti remains the epitome of cuteness; the smile & the rest is put into context by the reverse of the cover (& the related pic of an abandoned Range Rover, nodding to ‘Beachy Head’)- the band stand in the same way as a corpse lies at their feet. & this is TG’s most approachable album!!!!
The title track opens proceedings- an industrial-groove that was borrowed for Scritti Politti’s ‘The Sweetest Girl’ starts, later followed by P-Orridge’s atonal-violin & some syn-drums (that would later find their way into Joy Division; see ‘Insight’). Someone whispers words like “jazz” and “funk” - the former predicting ‘The Fast Show’ then! TG sang when they felt like it, so ‘Beachy Head’ (named after the popular British suicide-point) drifts toward the ambient - after Eno & capturing the vibe of such a place (a body lies undiscovered at the bottom- no one stops you as you step off - no sound as you are falling…). This is most definitely after-Eno & along with tracks from ‘In the Shadow of the Sun’ & ‘Journey Through a Body’ is TG’s most ambient-work (the violin lulls colliding with ambientelectronica could be seen to influence Silver Mt Zion or The Aphex Twin, say…)’Still Walking’ shudders into life, a spoken-word vocal ups the sinister stakes as violin-drones (after Cale) drift in the background. Various TG-members speak the lyrics - another instrumental track (’Tanith’) pops up next (this is the one that sounds like a Krautrock-vision of ‘Headhunters’ or 70s-Miles!).
A key TG-moment is next- the timeless anthem ‘Convincing People’, which was one of the few older songs TG played on their recent reformation (others included a vastly reworked ‘What a Day’- much better than the one here & ‘Hamburger Lady’)'Convincing People’ I’ve always seen as TG’s defence of art - perhaps rejecting it all with “We don’t want to convince people…” ; then again, it’s probably about the Occult, or cultdom, or brainwashing…who knows? One that would fit on a playlist next to ‘Rocket USA’, ‘Nag Nag Nag’, ‘Being Boiled’ & ‘Kitchen Person’, however…’Exotica’ is another ambient-instrumental exercise - Richard D. James was most definitely aware- it sounds like something from 1994’s ‘Selected Ambient Works II’!!! The classic ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ is next - this featured on Rough Trade’s excellent ‘Electronic 01′ compilation a few years ago (02 would be nice…) & along with ‘Walkabout’ (which also turned up with ‘Hot on the Heels…’ on the recent ‘Taste of TG’ compilation) finds TG in a realm not far from the hallowed Kraftwerk. ‘Hot on the Heels…’ as later tracks like ‘Adrenalin’ & ‘United’, most definitely predicts the so-called rave-culture that would develop in the mid to late 1980s (& people think New Order were electronic-pioneers? Yeah, after TG, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League#1, Kraftwerk, Ultravox!, Silicon Teens/The Normal, Associates, Neu! etc- all of whom were doing that before them!).
Many think this is TG’s nicest LP, well maybe, but the lyrics to ‘Persuasion’ still make me feel ill - especially when set to a dirge (related to ‘Hamburger Lady’) & some screams. They appear to take a killer’s perspective with lines like “I’ve got a little biscuit tin to keep your panties in/Soiled panties, white panties, school panties, Y-front panties…” This pre-empts similarly themed tracks by The Smiths (’Handsome Devil’, ‘Suffer Little Children’) & pretty much pushes taboos as far as most have taken them in popular music. The version of ‘What a Day’ here sounds like the 70s-equivalent of ‘Come to Daddy’ or ‘Temper Temper’; the recent Camber Sands-version (which intergrated ‘Lazy Sunday’ & seemed to rip it out of John Lydon) is much, much greater.
The album ends on the minimal-electro-dirge ‘Six Six Sixties’ - which features suitably terrifying guitar from Cosey Fanni-Tutti & then two-alternate live-takes of ‘Discipline’ - from Berlin and Manchester respectively. These alternate takes, as the many live-albums demonstrate, that the live-realm was particularly TG’s forte - Grateful Dead for the punk-post-punk-industrial-etc.-generation…
‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’ remains a classic, do I sound like a care that the technology has dated? It probably is the most approachable TG-album, but still pushes the envelope with tracks like ‘Discipline’, ‘Persuasion’ & ‘What a Day’. Without this, a lot of other bands and records thereafter may not exist, or in quite the way they are/were. Demented British-artists and their demented art…wonderful-
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