Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Page A

“cynicism,” the retreat of the “enlightened” subject from the political into an Olympian disdain for such shabby matters, with “kynicism,” a specifically working-class mode of mockery in which the hypocritical language of ruling powers was called to account, exposed as fiction and abused accordingly (as cited in Zizek, p. 29). They are both stances of “disbelief,” but mere cynicism is negative, a withdrawal from politics into private tranquility, while “kynicism” is openly antagonistic, a radically engaged reaction to the collapse of meaningful options within the public sphere. Messages such as the Hipgnosis sleeve, which reinforce the notion that our choices don’t make a difference so we might as well buy another record anyway, are in this practical sense cynical, and fundamentally conservative.
    By contrast, I would like to suggest that the stance Throbbing Gristle take up in “Convincing People” is not cynical but “kynical.” By setting in motion a kind of “liar’s paradox” in which the attempt to persuade the listener and the attempt to arm the listener against persuasion are both revealed as equally untrustworthy, “Convincing People”exudes a deep hostility to the rhetorical techniques and weapons of mass persuasion that underlie both pop marketing and party politics. In this sense it shares the “false choice” scenario with the Hipgnosis sleeve. But far from constituting a “message” song, “Convincing People” works at the aural level by inducing a kind of paranoid stance in the listener, an allergic reaction to meaning, a sense that any message, insofar as it is a message at all, is already controlling, dominating and oppressive, and would be best dissolved into a liquid pool of babbling nonsense. The inclusive, generation-gap logic of the hippie catchphrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” here contracts into a grim and paranoid “don’t trust anyone.” “Convincing People” formally embodies its lyrical hostility to ideology and cynically “enlightened” ideology critique by processing Gen’s own voice into an acid-bath of molten electronics that estrange, deform and dissolve even his self-critical words. In so doing, TG reassert a demand first articulated by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in their cut-up slogan: “Rub Out the Word.” Instead of effortlessly furthering the cause of capitalist seduction, words become the raw material for a destructive process of transformation: the song is a factory that processes language into sound, taking aim at the principle means of communication and warping and distorting it in and out of recognition. Neither persuading you nor falsely claiming to free you from the grip of persuasion, the song enacts something else: a concrete auditory experience of transformation through action, an anarchist poetics of deliberate deformity.

Exotica
    That which is hard is never hard without also being soft.
    Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition
    By namedropping a Martin Denny album and an entire school of quasi-Polynesian mood music, Throbbing Gristle add further support to the accusation that
20 Jazz Funk Greats
is a series of genre exercises. But those expecting bird calls and cod-Latin percussion will be disappointed. Instead of campy theatrics, “Exotica” leaks a kind of subtly poisonous incense across the stereo field. High oscillator trails with a very fast LFO setting create will-o-wisp flickerings in the upper registers, while low and heavily phased Gizmo guitar tones form a kind of distant jet plane chorale. From out of this miasmic bog, the vibraphone fades into audibility, tinkling in an “Asian” interval that flags the genre for which the song is named. The phased guitar scuttlings are occasionally joined in the thickening background with sour arcs of feedback-likeringing tones, but they are mixed so low that they purr more than they pierce. Two minutes and fifteen seconds in, a distinctly jarring, banging