Throbbing Gristle's "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" (33 1/3)

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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.