20 Jazz Funk Greats

The title is the joke and the trap: a bright, easy-listening phrase slapped over an album whose cover shows the band smiling on a clifftop notorious for suicides, daring you to relax while everything underneath curdles.

Play "Hot On Heels of Love" and you hear a working proto-techno pulse years before the genre had a name, a whispered vocal riding a sequencer that Berlin and Detroit would later treat as gospel. That easy motion is exactly what makes "Convincing People" so unnerving right after it, its clipped voice and grinding bottom end turning propaganda into a dance floor. Throbbing Gristle understood that menace hides best in pleasant clothing, and they dressed it in cocktail-lounge titles on purpose. What sounds like a prank in 1979 became the blueprint for anyone who wanted their machines to sound both seductive and wrong.