![the gap band let it whip the gap band let it whip](https://bigbloc.com/images/classic/Dazz-Band.jpg)
Born from the death of the sickening “performance art” nuisance COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge’s Throbbing Gristle were, along with Cabaret Voltaire, foremost (if not the most likable) among Britain’s industrial innovators. “We had this idea in mind that someone quite innocently would come along to a record store and see and think they would be getting 20 really good jazz/funk greats, and then they would put it on at home and they would just get decimated,” band member Cosey Fanni Tutti explains. “One slash is all you get,” dancefloor disciplinarian Asha Puthli teases in her 1979 disco curiosity “The Whip,” but here, for those who would taste them, are six flavors of the lash – the cream of the crops!įor the uninitiated, the sociopathic 1979 prank 20 Jazz Funk Greats is not a collection of jazz funk songs, nor are there even twenty tracks. Strategic cracks of the whip would similarly enliven Dolly Parton’s sassy 1970 cover of “Mule Skinner Blues,” and the Rankin-Bass animated production The Return of the King (1980) would even include a disco scourge-march by Glenn Yarbrough, “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way.” With the acceleration of the sexual revolution, the proliferation of pornography, and the advent of electronic music, however – the years that would make stars of Grace Jones, Lynda Carter, and Dyanne Thorne, witness the release of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), and produce the “specific Southampton milieu” sketched by Anthony Haden-Guest in his 1980 New York article “Melonie Haller’s Lost Weekend” – the whip, or its synthetic likeness, would see revival as a percussion effect in records of a sometimes colder, more punishing nature than the lighthearted country-and-western or novelty ditties of bygone days and, as the following selection demonstrates, the subgenre lends itself to a variety of meanings. The 19 renditions of “Sleigh Ride” by the Boston Pops Orchestra and Leroy Anderson, respectively, are decidedly whip-happy realizations, with seven resounding strikes apiece.
![the gap band let it whip the gap band let it whip](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hU0Ydgg7j4Q/hqdefault.jpg)
The imitation of the sound of a whip as percussion has a history going back at least to the classic 1949 recordings of the western favorite “Mule Train” by Frankie Laine and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Laine would also sing Dmitri Tiomkin’s popular lash-licked theme for TV’s Rawhide, which debuted in 1959.