Throbbing Gristle's "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" (33 1/3): 54 - Softcover

Drew Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826427936 ISBN 13: 9780826427939

Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2008

Synopsis

Drew Daniel explores the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, with key concepts, strategies, and contexts.Previous writings about Throbbing Gristle have tended to dissolve into lurid half-truths about deviance on and offstage; their actual recordings, lyrics and images have received comparatively slim analysis. Yet their work informs a broad range of music which draws inspiration from TG's arcane, deliberately misleading example: not just 'industrial' music but also synth-pop, the lounge revival, the noise scene, techno and the English esoteric underground - they can all trace their debts to Throbbing Gristle. "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" (a deliberately 'inconsistent' album) explains why.Drew Daniel creates an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies and contexts. For example, noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition. The book will argue that on Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle modelled a critically new and highly promiscuous way of relating to or inhabiting musical genre - where punk rock was passionate and direct, TG were arch and mysterious, perverse and cold. Drew has interviewed all four members of the band."Thirty-Three and a Third" is a series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music.

About this title

Review:

Drew Daniel employs a very rich lexicon, but chooses his words judiciously. More importantly, he admits right up front to being a huge TG fan boy, and that enthusiasm translates - even when he veers towards head-scratching territory - particularly in some of his interview passages with the band members (all of whom participated in the creation of his book). And by focusing squarely on the group's music, not their sensationalistic trappings, in a song-by-song analysis, he opens up the listening experience, both to neophytes and diehards. I might never have imagined such a thing was possible, but Daniel's musings on 20 Jazz Funk Greats have made me a committed Throbbing Gristle fan. And that kind of connective tissue I can heartily endorse. --Weird at my School Blog, KXEP

Always perverse, Throbbing Gristle was perhaps never more so than on their 1979 release, 20 Jazz Funk Greats. From the cover art, which at first glance appears to your standard 'band outdoors' snap, (but is actually the group assembled at Britain's Beachy Head, a suicide hotspot) to the almost 'normal' synth pop found within, TG deliberately alters reality until it nearly comes back around- nearly. Drew Daniel, one half of the electronic group Matmos, draws on new interviews with the group to craft a look at one of music's most extreme, intense and provocative artists, who delighted here in subtle rearrangements of benign elements into darker statements, such as captured field recordings of young children, mashed against a simple drum machine to create 'Persuasion'. Daniel ably illustrates the sheer brilliance of the record, in which TG turned down the volume but upped the intensity of their message. At nearly 200 pages this is one of the longer '33 1/3' releases, but is such a captivating look at the legendary group of pop culture provocateurs that you won't put it down. --The Big Takeover

About the Author:

Drew Daniel is one half of the acclaimed electronic group Matmos, successful in their own right, and also as collaborators with Bjork. Drew has taught the history of electronic music at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, among other places. He lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0826427936
• ISBN 13: 9780826427939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184