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

Puttenham evocatively described in
The Arte of English Poesy
(1589) as “the cuckoo-spell”: “For right as the cuckoo repeats his lay, which is but one manner of note, and don’t insert any other tune betwixt, and sometimes for haste stammers out two or three of them one immediately after the other, as ‘cuck, cuck, cuckoo’” (Vickers, p. 256). The cuckoo is not the only member of the animal kingdom in play: at one point, Gen erupts into full on wolf-howl, then falsettos up for a few high camp coloratura recitations of “there’s never a way,” momentarily becoming his own female choir of backup singers.
    Throbbing Gristle insist that they don’t want to convince people. But do they mean it? How seriously are we supposed to take the renunciation of the will-to-convince expressed within their music? Insofar as Gen’s bass riff shows up for the listener as a big rock gesture, the introduction promises a more anthemic, and more through-composed, song than the band as a whole are really prepared to deliver. For this reason one might argue that “Convincing People” doesn’t quite work, doesn’t quite add up. Literally, it’s not convincing, and feels as if there’s something missing. This could be a consequence of how quiet Chris Carter’s contributions are inthe mix; low-balling the beat makes the song feel top-heavy and cuts off its chances of having the kind of punishing physical impact that TG’s burly custom PA system imposed upon their audiences. A staple of live gigs, one could simply chalk the faint weediness of the album version up to a slightly awkward transposition from spontaneously composed jam to studio recording. It may be that certain songs require the feedback loop of an immediate performer/audience relationship in order to catch fire. All the elements are in place, including a great performance from Gen and some wonderfully frazzled synth and guitar textures, and yet there’s something not quite “right.” Is this, too, intentional? One could align the song’s effect/affect of flaccid self-cancellation with the ambient political climate of liberal Great Britain arriving in 1979 at the end of the line. Unconsciously or deliberately, the song is a reflection of surrounding conditions, and those conditions were deeply negative and conflicted. In a contemporary essay entitled “Englanditis,” the Tory pundit Peter Jay summarizes the sour national mood:
    We in Britain are a confused and unhappy people. . . . We are unhappy because the foundations of our prosperity seem to be eroding faster and faster and because we can neither find nor agree upon any sure remedy for this decay. We are confused because we do not clearly understand why all this is happening to us, whether it is due to the malefactions of subversion groups, the incompetence of governments, defects of national character, the rhythms of history, the luck of the draw, or what. . . . the fissures spread out in all directions like an icefall; disintegration in slow motion. (Tyrell, p. 166)
    Though it remains the work of four unique spirits and not some vague emanation from a kind of abstracted social group, I would like to wager that Throbbing Gristle’s art, music and public statements constitute one way to trace precisely such cracks and fissures in the national psyche of Britain in the late seventies. To go out on a bit of limb, the song “Convincing People” can arguably be read as an allegory in miniature of the public relations problems of the Labour party, reading its implosion in the dismal election results of 1979 as a symptom of its inability on a mass level to make good on its own populist rhetoric and successfully “convince people.” In order to test this fanciful claim, I separately asked all of the members of the band about their sense of how the political climate may have impacted the creation of the album, and of “Convincing People” in particular.
    Drew: What about the political context of London in 1979?