Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)
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"This is afascinating and thought-thorough accompaniment to the album, augmented byinterviews with all the group members, which uncovers a trove of pertinent unfamiliaritiesin songs which feel like longstanding parts of the mental furniture afternearly 30 years." -David Stubbs, The Wire, UK --,
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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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I don't reckon this deserves a one-star review; however I can relate to the first reviewer's sense of disappointment with a great opportunity gone awry.
Drew Daniel is part of the IDM duo Matmos, and from the book blurb we also learn that he is an English professor. This figures, because the text of this book just completely drowns in some of the most florid, verbiose writing I've ever experienced.
There is some great information here, mostly in the amalgamated interviews with each band member; Chris Carter is particularly enlightening on the technical details, and Cosey and Sleazy's oft-underrated contributions get their due. The big problem, and one which had me constantly skipping over some of the most preposterous paragraphs, is Daniel; his fanciful prose tries desperately to drag hidden meanings out of the album's lesser tracks which just aren't there, and his overuse of uncommon latin phrases is REALLY annoying. You may wish to approach this book armed with a very large academic dictionary. 33 1/3 bosses: get issues like this nipped in the bud with some merciless editors in future!
Drew Daniel is part of the IDM duo Matmos, and from the book blurb we also learn that he is an English professor. This figures, because the text of this book just completely drowns in some of the most florid, verbiose writing I've ever experienced.
There is some great information here, mostly in the amalgamated interviews with each band member; Chris Carter is particularly enlightening on the technical details, and Cosey and Sleazy's oft-underrated contributions get their due. The big problem, and one which had me constantly skipping over some of the most preposterous paragraphs, is Daniel; his fanciful prose tries desperately to drag hidden meanings out of the album's lesser tracks which just aren't there, and his overuse of uncommon latin phrases is REALLY annoying. You may wish to approach this book armed with a very large academic dictionary. 33 1/3 bosses: get issues like this nipped in the bud with some merciless editors in future!
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I got quite excited when I heard that this book existed. "20 Jazz" being a great LP and all, but the author of this book seems to have missed all the magic(k) and makes it unreadable. Bored after the third chapter. A shame as it is a great opportunity missed.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Spot on
24 April 2008
Format:Paperback
I have to admit some bias -- I grew up with the author and I am quite familiar with some of the places described in the book's lengthy and personal introduction. It's not often that one sees the themes and places of one's youth detailed and dissected for an audience that is not the people who shared those experiences to begin with. That said, Dr. Daniel does an excellent job dissecting the classic and maligned TG album. Each track gets its own chapter, of course, and the chapters are filled with recent interviews with various members of TG about the songs and their processes of creation. Daniel relies on his own encyclopedic knowledge of music, history, and art -- not to mention an uncanny ability to write clearly and specifically about music for a non-professional audience -- to fully paint the picture of this Throbbing Gristle album.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Facist Groove Things
12 Aug 2008
Format:Paperback
Pop is, by its very nature, glossy and superficial, glancing off complexity and thorny ambivalences with blithe assurance.
With 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle attempt --in their own profoundly warped way-- to make peace with pop music's influence upon them; at the same time, the album plays out with such profound ambivalence --running hot and cold all at once, constantly vacillating between attraction and repulsion and back again-- that its exploration of "pop" becomes heavily weighted --its like a mille-feuille of ironic distance. Upon its release in 1979, TG's third full-length album was received with head-scratching condescension for the most part. Daniel's artfully written little volume makes the case for this strange, unlikable album and its often unpalatable charms.
Alluring and repellent in equal measure, the group's masterwork remains indelible for the ways in which it reworks the last vestiges of 60s optimism (as evinced in psychedelia and prog) with the darker, more ambivalent strains of punk and post-punk. In this way the band doesn't simply straddle genres but whole philosophical, moral and sexual divides. This is what makes their music so enduringly strange and repugnant --yet fascinating.
I fell into this book like Alice down an unfathomably dark rabbit-hole. It reads like a riveting detective novel, so concisely has Daniel (AKA one half of Matmos) woven personal history (both TG's and his own), (un)reliable narration (thanks to the members of TG themselves, contradictory bastards the lot of them), close dissection (a forensic/anatomic tack being particularly appropriate with TG) and overarching pop-cultural critique.
I haven't read Steven Ford's Wreckers of Civilisation, but this tiny volume on only one album in the massive TG oeuvre situates the group so powerfully in the appropriate historical, personal, and musical contexts that I never wanted the book to end. It's a vivid, revealing, and very personal work that is beautifully written from start to finish, and my favorite of the 33 1/3s so far.
With 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle attempt --in their own profoundly warped way-- to make peace with pop music's influence upon them; at the same time, the album plays out with such profound ambivalence --running hot and cold all at once, constantly vacillating between attraction and repulsion and back again-- that its exploration of "pop" becomes heavily weighted --its like a mille-feuille of ironic distance. Upon its release in 1979, TG's third full-length album was received with head-scratching condescension for the most part. Daniel's artfully written little volume makes the case for this strange, unlikable album and its often unpalatable charms.
Alluring and repellent in equal measure, the group's masterwork remains indelible for the ways in which it reworks the last vestiges of 60s optimism (as evinced in psychedelia and prog) with the darker, more ambivalent strains of punk and post-punk. In this way the band doesn't simply straddle genres but whole philosophical, moral and sexual divides. This is what makes their music so enduringly strange and repugnant --yet fascinating.
I fell into this book like Alice down an unfathomably dark rabbit-hole. It reads like a riveting detective novel, so concisely has Daniel (AKA one half of Matmos) woven personal history (both TG's and his own), (un)reliable narration (thanks to the members of TG themselves, contradictory bastards the lot of them), close dissection (a forensic/anatomic tack being particularly appropriate with TG) and overarching pop-cultural critique.
I haven't read Steven Ford's Wreckers of Civilisation, but this tiny volume on only one album in the massive TG oeuvre situates the group so powerfully in the appropriate historical, personal, and musical contexts that I never wanted the book to end. It's a vivid, revealing, and very personal work that is beautifully written from start to finish, and my favorite of the 33 1/3s so far.
Anyone who read Simon Ford's excellent "Wreckers of Civilization" should read this.
15 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I love 33 1/3 books. Love them! To have an entire volume dedicated to one of my favorite records is almost too good to be true. Daniel is a professor at Johns Hopkins in addition to being a musician, so he's well-equipped to offer both informed and formal criticism. He spends 18 pages discussing the cover alone.
It is one of the more deliberate and academic books in the 33 1/3 series. If you're looking for fluffy interviews and and fawning tidbits, look elsewhere.
It is one of the more deliberate and academic books in the 33 1/3 series. If you're looking for fluffy interviews and and fawning tidbits, look elsewhere.
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