explorations of the “new thing” and the psychedelic excesses of jazz funk blowouts like “Vein Melter” was doomed to end in the drivetime narcotic of the Quiet Storm radio format.
The song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” responds to this historical slide into decadence by deliberately exaggerating the process of deracination already underway in the surrounding culture. Performing a kind of stereotyped gesture of musical “whiteness” by stiffening the slink of funky music into a sequenced grid, the lawnsprinkler hissing of the hi hats and the tricksy drum machine kicks and rolls in the song accent the control freak aspect of electronic funk, advancing a kind of machine-music aesthetic that would ultimately blossom into techno. And yet Chris Carter’s use of CV (controlled voltage) “feedback” within modular systems and his hand-cranked tempo changes on the drum machine fills add an undeniably “funky” quality of looseness and unpredictability to the sequenced material. Just as it slides in and out of alignment with the liquid ideal of “real” funk music, TG’s track toggles both forward and backward in its temporal positioning in music history; the modular synth sweeps and squeals that Chris and Sleazy take turns laying down could conceivably be regarded as “futuristic” signifiers, but they also pay homage to the fluorescent ugliness of the solos from the original jazz funk class of ’73. In particular, one could compare the tones TG generate with the detuned, slightly sour synth motif in Roy Ayers’s fuzak chestnut “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a song with a curiously tenacious holdon the English musical imagination; strands of its musical DNA can be found in acid jazz (the piano riff), downtempo (the drums and vibes) and drum-n-bass (the keening, constant string tone sawing away on the horizon), among others. If this feeling of curdled tonality binds together the synthesizer lines with Cosey’s comet, it also comically undercuts the seductive energies of Sleazy’s vocal—there’s nothing “nice” about the sounds the synth is making.
There is an “untimely” quality to TG’s choice of brass instrument as well. The cornet is, as Sibyl Marcuse’s
Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments
informs us, a “valved brass instrument of medium conical bore, played with a cup mouthpiece, usually built in trumpet form, formerly also in helicon form”; an instrument with old roots in English folk forms and in hunting tradition, the cornet is based upon the coiled “post horn” or rustic horn used from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries (Marcuse, p. 127). Its rustic, clamorous connotations led the Spanish golden age playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca to denounce the “vile cornet” as unfit for courtly ears, but in fact its tone is considered quieter and mellower than its more popular cousin, the trumpet. The cornet was a staple component of New Orleans jazz bands and was played by Joe “King” Oliver, Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong (before he made the switch to trumpet). Ironically, in using a cornet rather than a trumpet, Throbbing Gristle wound up returning anachronistically to a specific instrumental tone found at the very beginning of jazz.
Without intending to signify any particular affiliation with the wellsprings of jazz and funk traditions, Throbbing Gristle’s contribution to jazz funk thus becomes both ersatz
and
echt. In the place of fusion’s florid, almost obscenebusyness, the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is spare, nearly empty—yet, perversely, this restraint brings Throbbing Gristle closer to the original roots of instrumental funk bands such as the Meters, whose bassist George Porter Jr. insisted in a 1994 interview that “There was holes in the music, there was always space. . . . It’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say” (Vincent, p. 67). Similarly, the understatement and restraint of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is the paradoxical
The song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” responds to this historical slide into decadence by deliberately exaggerating the process of deracination already underway in the surrounding culture. Performing a kind of stereotyped gesture of musical “whiteness” by stiffening the slink of funky music into a sequenced grid, the lawnsprinkler hissing of the hi hats and the tricksy drum machine kicks and rolls in the song accent the control freak aspect of electronic funk, advancing a kind of machine-music aesthetic that would ultimately blossom into techno. And yet Chris Carter’s use of CV (controlled voltage) “feedback” within modular systems and his hand-cranked tempo changes on the drum machine fills add an undeniably “funky” quality of looseness and unpredictability to the sequenced material. Just as it slides in and out of alignment with the liquid ideal of “real” funk music, TG’s track toggles both forward and backward in its temporal positioning in music history; the modular synth sweeps and squeals that Chris and Sleazy take turns laying down could conceivably be regarded as “futuristic” signifiers, but they also pay homage to the fluorescent ugliness of the solos from the original jazz funk class of ’73. In particular, one could compare the tones TG generate with the detuned, slightly sour synth motif in Roy Ayers’s fuzak chestnut “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a song with a curiously tenacious holdon the English musical imagination; strands of its musical DNA can be found in acid jazz (the piano riff), downtempo (the drums and vibes) and drum-n-bass (the keening, constant string tone sawing away on the horizon), among others. If this feeling of curdled tonality binds together the synthesizer lines with Cosey’s comet, it also comically undercuts the seductive energies of Sleazy’s vocal—there’s nothing “nice” about the sounds the synth is making.
There is an “untimely” quality to TG’s choice of brass instrument as well. The cornet is, as Sibyl Marcuse’s
Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments
informs us, a “valved brass instrument of medium conical bore, played with a cup mouthpiece, usually built in trumpet form, formerly also in helicon form”; an instrument with old roots in English folk forms and in hunting tradition, the cornet is based upon the coiled “post horn” or rustic horn used from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries (Marcuse, p. 127). Its rustic, clamorous connotations led the Spanish golden age playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca to denounce the “vile cornet” as unfit for courtly ears, but in fact its tone is considered quieter and mellower than its more popular cousin, the trumpet. The cornet was a staple component of New Orleans jazz bands and was played by Joe “King” Oliver, Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong (before he made the switch to trumpet). Ironically, in using a cornet rather than a trumpet, Throbbing Gristle wound up returning anachronistically to a specific instrumental tone found at the very beginning of jazz.
Without intending to signify any particular affiliation with the wellsprings of jazz and funk traditions, Throbbing Gristle’s contribution to jazz funk thus becomes both ersatz
and
echt. In the place of fusion’s florid, almost obscenebusyness, the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is spare, nearly empty—yet, perversely, this restraint brings Throbbing Gristle closer to the original roots of instrumental funk bands such as the Meters, whose bassist George Porter Jr. insisted in a 1994 interview that “There was holes in the music, there was always space. . . . It’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say” (Vincent, p. 67). Similarly, the understatement and restraint of “20 Jazz Funk Greats” is the paradoxical
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