About halfway through 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Continuum, 176 pages, $13.95), author Drew Daniel quotes Jon Savage saying that Throbbing Gristle “were a bunch of evil scumbags with a nasty line in vicious humour which nobody ever quite got.” It’s that kind of received rock encyclopedia wisdom that Daniel, one half of pop-concrète duo Matmos, fights against and around in order to unpack an album loathed even by fans of a band who, by design, only wanted to be loathed.
Formed in late 1975 out of the debris of a performance-art group, Throbbing Gristle folded a century’s worth of avant-garde obsessions (collage, provocation, crime, mock primitivism) into heaving, sloppy, electronic noise wrenched from homemade synthesizers and tape loops. A working band creating music for anti-pleasure was an improbable entity, even in the heyday of UK punk, but by Throbbing Gristle’s third album, they had developed a taste for a whole new realm of perversion — pop music.

As Daniel argues, it wasn’t a sellout move — disco and vibe-smothered exotica were cold commodities by 1979 — but rather a group of artists brimming with ideas and intuiting that their scab-picking hate shtick was a limited tactic about to be usurped by the rise of the unironic 1980s right. But pop music done Throbbing Gristle–style is unlike any other kind, and far from easy pastiche. Smiling out from a retouched seaside photo, everything about the Throbbing Gristle of 20 Jazz Funk Greats is disquietly, imperfectly normal. While the visuals and title may suggest a cheap kitsch joke, the band is perched at England’s most popular suicide spot. Their take on disco (“Hot on the Heels of Love”) is sincere, messy and arch while “Exotica” channels the side of Martin Denny that was closer to Sun Ra than to Les Baxter.

By focusing on the inherent ideas in only the sounds and lyrics of Throbbing Gristle, and avoiding their mythology, Daniel at times ends up having to battle even the band members themselves, whom he interviews at length regarding each track. According to them, 20 Jazz Funk Greats was their attempt to confound their fans. Daniel sees it differently and hears strains of nostalgia and sentimentality as the most compelling and enduring textures of the songs. “Just as the cover flickers uncomfortably between extroverted, collective celebration and introverted solitary withdrawal” he writes, “the eleven songs bound by this cover pinball unpredictably between group creativity and solo outbursts, between glossy pop and hastily scribbled improvisation…. Poised on the edge of the abyss, it’s a record that can’t make up its mind whether to jump or hang on.”

As a professor of English literature by day, Daniel brings erudition and clarity to the 33 1/3 series with writing that’s both meticulous and giddy. Great phrases like “As camp as a row of tents” are judiciously sprinkled. Unafraid of confronting professional confrontationalists, Daniel achieves a fantastic hat trick — a love letter to an unacceptable band about their least-loved album in a book series that, until recently, was reserved only for acceptable albums. Let the wrecking of civilization commence.