Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This volume was my first introduction to the 33 1/3 series and will not be my last. It's a wonderful idea really - a small-scale study a classic album with some history, analysis, and criticism. As a musicologist myself, I'm strongly in favor of anything that helps people appreciate the music they love even more.

Drew Daniel (one half of Matmos) does a nice job balancing the analytical portions with the rather juicy sociocultural issues at work in "20 Jazz Funk Greats." On the one hand, we have thorough musical analyses of each song; and on the other, we have interviews and commentary that situate the music in its cultural, or counter-cultural, context.

"20 Jazz Funk Greats" is not the Throbbing Gristle album I would have picked for this series, but over the course of the book, Daniels convinced me that it was necessary because it is so often misunderstood. Where "Second Annual Report" is straightforwardly confrontational, "20JFG" is more subtle - its humor and wit are easily missed if one isn't armed with all the necessary cultural references.

My one criticism is that Daniel's musical analysis can sometimes be a bit unsophisticated; however, if he were to go into too much detail, he would risk alienating the casual reader. Although I would have liked him to go further, I'm sure the amount of detail he provides is just right for someone without a background in music theory.

If you like Throbbing Gristle, or experimental music in general, this is a great read. I guarantee that you will hear new things next time you listen. I'd also like to, one again, voice my admiration for this series of books. Even if Throbbing Gristle isn't your favorite, I would encourage you to find a volume on an album that you like and give it a shot.

Overall, this was a disappointing read and by far my least favorite of the 33 1/3 series. It was a book I wanted to just finish, put down and get it over ; it was not enjoyable in the least.

The author somehow inserts himself into the book as a character - I wanted to read about TG, not Drew Daniel and his opinions. The interviews seem to have more words from the author than the actual band members! Why would I care that the author was once a go-go dancer? Seriously! That fact was inserted in the middle of one of the chapters and left me befuddled as to why the editor of this book wouldn't cut that out in the very first pass!

If you can skim past the filler material (and there is a LOT - this book is approx. double the length of the Beatles' Let it Be), there is an interesting story underneath it about one of the most innovative and challenging musical groups in the last century. That alone gives it two stars from me, but I was close to giving it a one-star rating.

If you've already devoured and digested 'Wreckers of Civilization', 'The Industrial Culture Handbook' and 'England's Hidden Reverse', you will find this valuable reading nonetheless. Dr. Drew Daniel dissects the album in minute detail with the aid of the band member interviews and his considerable analytical acumen. Far from 'taking the wind out of it', his work amplifies ones' appreciation of TG's accomplishments. I've been unable to stay away from it since it arrived.