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

and supporters in the media, as colourless, gratuitous, bleak, industrial, dark, somber, and humourless. So full colour it was.
20 Jazz Funk Greats
it was too. Flowers. Smiles, that proved harder than I expected!
    From here on the development can only be attributed again to chats over tea, one person suggesting, another amending, jokes, irony, practicality. Certainly Chris and/or Cosey were repulsed and attracted to Range Rovers at the time. The royal family had begun to use them. Maggie Thatcher’s son endorsed them. What more fitting for the notorious “wreckers of civilization” than to appear to drive the same car as their arch cultural “enemies”? Once the photo-shoot was arranged a Range Rover was rented for the day. It appears in the back cover image as a deliberate reference to the way that status symbols and money so easily seduce creativity and act as bait for those who first challenge the establishment of pop culture to be absorbed and bribed into impotence. Many people misinterpreted this symbol, including, much to our delight, infuriated fans, as proving we’d made lots of money and “sold-out.” Ah the vagaries of subtlety! One thing TG can be accused of is over-estimating the sophistication and desire to really think and analyze of both the public and critics.
    Once more, in all fairness, I cannot say for sure who first raised the concept of Beachy Head, near Brighton as the perfect locale. These things swirled around us all the time. I recall reading about the regularity of suicides at Beachy Head and considering the implications of why one particular place draws despair and death, another prostitution. Does an inanimate spot, a row of cliffs, a landscape have a memory? A destructive“personality”? Or are we merely primitive primates with pretensions, as controlled by latent and unconscious natural instinct as migrating birds or tumbling lemmings?
    . . .
    To us, Beachy Head encompassed all our fascinations with double meanings, ambiguity and the melancholy of sprawling suburban angst. I myself have never stopped being deeply concerned in my art, even in the present, with the way that a person’s reaction to a neutral image will alter and animate that image, as well as the emotions of the person themselves, based upon what information is given, or withheld from the viewer. Exploring the metaphors of Beachy Head was a logical progression after using the ovens at Auschwitz as a record label logo. Not until we ourselves chose at a later date to increase the information on the image source was a murmur of protest heard, and the symbology of the image forever altered. This technique was, and is, intended to reveal and expose the under-lying exploitation and commodification of metaphor and image by the media and advertising, corporate conglomerates and political agendas. Our intent was sarcastic, caustic and ironic. Most of all this strategy was carefully structured in a knowing way to comment and gradually educate, rather than compound, the hibernation of awareness we felt we battled in the realm of popular music and culture.
    Next, the clothes. All of us had been taken a little off-guard by the rapidity with which our camouflage, anti-fashion, urban genetic terrorist outfits had become yet another stereotype wholly associated at that moment with the genre we had tagged “Industrial Music.” The effectiveness of our lifestyle and attitude symbology was already confounding our intentto contradict and surprise. We needed a tactic to alienate and break all expectations. Instead of uniform non-uniformity, we would embrace cheesiness and the late 50’s aesthetic of the cover. Sickness through conformity. Destruction through seduction. The status quo, even our own unwitting one, no matter how novel it might be, must be destabilized and satirized. Each of us selected our own outfits based upon this premise. Chris was into an Abba 70’s approach; Sleazy a slightly USA tourist leisure wear ideal for living;