Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
What are you talking about? Throbbing Gristle is industrial. Comparing it to "contemporary disco" (do mean contemporary as in now, or contemporaneous as in TG's contemporaries?) seems a strange way to evaluate industrial pioneers sonically.
Yeah, I was talking about disco being made at the time TG were around - sorry should have made that more clear.
I've got two problems with TG. They're lame sonically compared with other late 70s electronic music - Kraftwerk, Moroder, progressive disco, the Sheffield axis of post punk, etc. If the treble-y thinness of thier sound is a deliberate stance, then I'm afraid it's over my head, because it just sounds insubstantial to me.
I also don't get the shock value - it amazes me how anyone can take Genesis P. Orridge seriously. If i didn't know differently, I'd say that Persuasion and Discipline were being played for laughs. In an era of genuinely shamanic performers who were filled with bile and darkness (Rotton/Lydon, Curtis, Mark E Smith, Lydia Lunch), he sounds like the nerdy attention seeking kid in class who's always trying far too hard. No one apart from the tory press ever hated TG (and the tory press, like jazz funk, aren't exactly the most difficult of targets) - the emotion the seemed to generate most was a kind of mild irritation, and these days Genesis is warmly tolerated as a great english eccentric. Which isn't exactly going to wreck civilisation as we know it.
So put both of those together, and you have things like that Dee D Jackson record that got mentioned in the other thread - which is a song about a vibrator, that got to #4 in the charts, sounds amazing, and you can dance to it. Seems way more subversive than anything on 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
I like the idea of TG, and the COUM stuff sounds like good fun, but I'm seriously underwhelmed by the records I've heard from them - 20 Jazz Funk Greats, some tracks on comps and later Chris & Cosey stuff. But if there's anything else I ought to try out, point me at it.