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

photographer Jim Lee took a photograph entitled “Bikini/Beachy Head,” which frames a distraught couple in midargument on the same site, subtly working the literally edgy implications while also selling the swimwear on view. As art critic Barry Schwabsky put it in a review of Lee’s work, the Beachy Head photographs are full of “little shocks,quite deliberately ambiguous for all their graphic punch. In fact, the ambiguity is at the heart of the shock” (Schwabsky, p. 382). He could easily have been describing Throbbing Gristle’s cover: the image isn’t shocking, nor is the mere fact of a suicide spot per se, yet it rankles. What is a “shock” to the viewer is the very difficulty in determining TG’s stance toward the location. The album cover is aesthetically soft but hermeneutically hard.
    Though Sleazy executed and art directed the cover photograph, there is an alternate explanation for the visual gearshift from other band members. In February of 2001, Genesis wrote an extended text for
MOJO
magazine describing the album’s title, cover photograph and design philosophy; he emailed me his original, longer draft, and it is worth quoting at considerable length because it elaborates upon the specific “family romance” narrative behind the cover strategy, and describes the band’s democratic decision making process:
    From the very beginning an aesthetic of bleak, post-industrial and dehumanizing references to contemporary life were utilized in our graphics. A lot of black and white, anonymous buildings, ambiguous icons and urban nihilism were journalistically sterilized in an anti-commercial design aesthetic. “Sleazy” a.k.a. Peter Christopherson worked as part of Hypgnosis at the time. [They] specialized in lavish, conspicuously expensive and elitist photo-surrealist covers for the likes of Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin and other super-groups. For him to co-develop with TG the antithesis of this in an independent musical project expiated a lot of his frustration and discomfort about his relationship with the established rock world. His job also gave us, as ananarchic and status-quo-challenging cultural unit, access to the highest end of graphic design techniques and labs to execute all our packaging to the same level of quality as his other clients. This is important to remember especially in reference to the finished cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
.
    In fact the title came first, as was often the case with TG. Our general fascination with reanimating and subverting the mundane and occasionally kitsch erupted in a domestic conversation into peals of laughter at the thought of calling our genre “jazz-funk.” Disco had not died, and as aficionados of Martin Denny, film soundtracks and disposability gone mad the definitive sarcasm of the title, with its irrelevant number, was instantly accepted by all as the necessary contradiction of expectation that TG as an entity required.
    Soon after the title appeared from our “third mind” I went home to Shrewsbury in December 1978 to visit my parents. My mother, Muriel, was well aware of the controversial nature of our images and content and the sensationalist reaction of the mass media and most of the music press. In passing I mentioned we were recording a new album and she slightly aggressively, and a little sadly asked me, “Why can’t you make a nice record for once, and use a nice picture for a change?” I asked her, “Like what, for example?” “Something nice, like flowers,” she said, “and why can’t you all smile for a change?”
    For some reason, for all the wrong, contrary reasons, this idea stuck in my head. Why not seem to please mum and the general public’s ideas of good taste and pleasantness and yet still, secretly, maintain our perversity?
    I returned to Hackney and threw the “flowers and smiles” idea on the table for the others. It appealed to everyone. Wewere all tired of being so quickly pigeon-holed, even by our fans