NO FUTURE AT THE DEATH FACTORY
Trying to explain WHY this record cover, and the trajectory of Genesis P-Orridge’s thinking, is so important to the history of contemporary graphic design (and our popular culture) is very, very tough. Not an easy thing to do. It is too involved and esoteric and it spans too much territory to be easily surmised in a few paragraphs. Entire books have been written about this turf and you have to read them all to even begin to really understand what Genesis has accomplished with (done to) our shared culture, his medium of choice.
Let’s start with the context of this cover. It’s called The Second Annual Report, by his band Throbbing Gristle. When it was released in 1977, the world was all disco chrome, Jamie Reid Sex Pistols punk, Star Wars was in the theaters and Saturday Night Fever was just being released. Jimmy Carter was President in the U.S. and Britain was in an economic nightmare with Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative Party. We still wore bell bottoms and had shag haircuts and drank red wine with our Quaaludes.
Genesis had already made a notorious name for himself with his art collective called COUM. The performance/exhibit he produced at the (ultra cool) ICA in London was called “Prostitution” and attracted the hippest art-punks in town (the Bromley contingent even made an appearance). The London Times slammed it all as abhorrent smut and vile dross. They dubbed Genesis P-Orridge a “wrecker of civilization.”
He formed a new art collective/noise band with his girlfriend Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (Christopherson was a commercial artist, designer, and photographer, and was one of the three partners of the album-cover design group Hipgnosis). They didn’t even try to play their instruments. They used power drills, broken guitars and banged on garbage to make rhythmic din and aggro noise “pop songs” with titles like “Hamburger Lady” (about a woman in an institution who had virtually the entire top half of her body burned off in a terrible accident, yet she lived a long life, trapped in herself).
The group set up living/studio quarters just outside of London and christened their digs The Death Factory, where they went about building an aesthetic that included lightning bolt logos for their armbands and full military uniforms. Their regular performances as Throbbing Gristle were carefully documented and occasionally released. The covers for their self-made 45 releases (on Industrial Records) had poor-quality b&w photos reproduced on the meager covers that depicted bland, uninteresting images of common locations you would see anywhere—like the underpass of a footbridge. It meant nothing until you realized that you’d seen this image before: it was the site of a brutal rape or murder. A commonplace location, innocent and yet horrible beyond imagination.
So that’s the context. This was either art or rock & roll or communal tribal rage or disconnected isolated alienation or perhaps a cult. Maybe it was all of it rolled into one big terrifying glop. They celebrated serial killers and mad cult leaders (the epitome of the dislocated hero) and continued to work in sound until their name had become the force behind a new kind of underground music, outside of the punk movement, but still every bit as influential. One of their collaborators, Monte Cazazza, dubbed their sound “Industrial.” It stuck. Genesis and friends had created a new subculture.
“Industrial Culture” blasted out a shock wave force that is still felt today. It spawned hundreds of bands, art movements, cults, popular entertainments. If you study the impact of this subculture, you might be convinced that its influence is even greater and has spread further than punk itself. A stunning achievement, but only the beginning of a long career by a master culture-jamming manipulator.
Try to picture the world in 1977. In graphic design, it was still Southern California airbrush stylings and precious self-rendered cover work by the likes of Joni Mitchell. Disco chrome and neon lettering for Donna Summer records. If you preferred hard rock, you’d have covers by Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. In the advertising world, the crude beginnings of primitive computer-generated imagery (like those titles for The Late Late Movie that smeared across the TV screen).
In my hometown in the Pacific Northwest, the beautiful organic calligraphy of Tim Girvin was all the rage, appearing on virtually every major design piece in the region. Los Angeles was totally under the grip of cocaine.
Out of the underground punk scene, there were the rumblings of new graphic language emerging to attempt to deal with the change that was brewing musically and culturally. Early NYC Punk still had covers created by design professionals in the language they could control—very un-Punk, but hard enough. The Ramones covers used b&w Xerox and big bold type. Talking Heads used clashing colors and big bold type. Television used the new technology of color Xerox and big bold type. You get the picture. Nice tries, but still within the language of the mainstream. The brash ideas were relying on the technology they knew to create the attitude for them. No new ideas, just new technology. Sorta like today.
Try to imagine the reaction in the midst of the philosophical underground battle being waged in the arty-farty scenes of England. So many kids were forced by the national school testing system to attend “art school” that there was a huge contingent of poor kids on the dole studying art and design and music. They were all keenly aware of what was going on everywhere in the country (England is a small place, after all, unlike America). They bought the records by the Sex Pistols and Throbbing Gristle and the rest. They examined the covers closely. They understood what was being said. Some formed their own bands (like the Buzzcocks and Joy Division). They built their own “scenes” centered around these new underground cultural visions, mixed with a few of their own.
Then they began to attack the stolid stodgy halls of mainstream graphic design. The anarchist political/cultural mayhem of Jamie Reid’s inspiration and the industrial culture dystopia of Genesis P-Orridge were the leading forces. The design kids melded them together into their own vision. The first important designer to blend these ideas together into a potent new style and vision was Malcolm Garrett. The work of Barney Bubbles—an old-school stalwart who had undergone a design epiphany—became yet another huge force in the design thought of the culture in England. Peter Saville’s work out of Northern England was so austere and terrifying that it almost sneaked the crown away from Genesis P. for reserve and subtlety.
Eventually, these ideas came to full fruition in the work of Neville Brody, a former member of the design team of Al McDowell’s Rocking Russian Designs and even a early collaborator with Throbbing Gristle. Vaughn Oliver’s work for 4AD records paved the way for the new mature graphic design language that still dominates the thinking and style of the mainstream design world. Could Stefan Sagmeister or even David Carson ever have emerged without the subculture language discourse/battle launched by Genesis P-Orridge and Jamie Reid? I don’t think so.
This offensively plain, period-shocking cover for Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report (actually their first LP) is likely one of the most profound and disturbing record covers to ever be released. Taken in its context, it could NOT be MORE contrary and negating. It is the ultimate embrace of everything we are trained to hate and avoid. It makes the most outrageous horrifying and nasty punk rock record covers ever created simply wither in comparison. You see, this isn’t a kiss-off joke. It’s a wholehearted passionate embrace of the end of the world. It’s utterly sincere and beautiful. And terrifying in the extreme.