An if Musician of Their Cursed Song

Music has been with us since time unremembered. It seems to be an indelible feature of our nature inextricably tied to human nature, with every known culture of our world having music in some form or another. Music without a doubt is a universal feature of our kind that has the power to move us, to change our mood or even our personality, and to have a profound effect upon us.

Yet there have also long been stories of ominous music that goes beyond that, and which is said to be able to infect our minds like a virus and drive us to madness, with there being no shortage of tales of hanted or cursed songs. Here we will look at one such song, which has a murky, mysterious history and which just might be cursed.

## The Incident

 File:DoA The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle.png
In 1975, the English music and visual arts group '*Throbbing Gristle*' came onto the scene in Kingston upon Hull and immediately made an impression, now being widely regarded as the pioneers of the then nascent industrial music genre. Considering that much of their music revolves around mysticism, sinister imagery, the dark under pulse of society and human nature, disturbing visual imagery, and their use of subtle and idiosyncratic manipulation of language and sound, their songs have long been picked apart for mysterious clues or subliminal messages hidden within them and their cover artwork, and although they broke up in 1981 their work has continued to be picked apart and generate conspiracy theories. One of the more ominous of these is that one of their songs is actually cursed, and has the power to drive people insane.

By far the worst is the hamburger lady, and because of a shortage right now of 'qualified technicians', e.g. technicians who can work with her and keep their last meal down, Screwloose Lauritzen and I have been alternating nights with her, unrelievedly. If you put a 250-lb meatloaf in the oven and then burned it and then followed that by propping it up on a potty-chair to greet you at 11pm each night, you would have some description of these past two weeks. Which is to say the worst I seen since viet napalms. When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind cannot retain consciousness, please tell them to write me. In point of fact this lady has not slept more than 3-5 minutes at a stretch since she came to us - that was over two weeks ago and, thanks to medical advances, there is no end in sight; from the waist (waste?) up everything is burned off, ears, nose etc - lower half is untouched and that, I guess, is what keeps her alive. I took one guy in to help me change tubes and he did alright, that is alright till he came out, then he spotted one of the burn nurses (pleasant smiling zombies) eating a can of chile-mac at the desk, and that did it: he flashed on the carpet. It is fucking insane is what it is.

It is spooky as hell, and already disturbing enough as it is, but Throbbing Gristle managed to make it even worse by basing a song on it. To call it a “song” in the traditional sense is perhaps a matter of opinion. The listener is hit by the slow thud of a bass drum, a guitar that churns out arcs of distorted noise, a punctuation of guitar feedback and modular synths, a persistent, mournful whine that is hard to place but which turns out to be a sampling of the cry of a duck, and slow eerie tones and blurred voices swimming about in the background, and although the vocals are distorted to the point that they are hard to make out in the gloom, occasionally something like “burned from the waist up,” “the tubes,” or “she’s dying” will emerge from the murk like a circling shark leaping from a dark sea to take a bite. Since the lyrics are very hard to make out other than those ghostly snippets popping from the noise and so fleeting it is hard to know if you really heard that or your subconscious mind conjured it up from some dark place within yourself, they are provided here for you to read:

>
> By far, worst is the hamburger lady
> We must heal them for the qualified technicians,
> Worse
> Alternating nights, unrelievedly
> She's lying there.Hamburger Lady
> Hamburger Lady
> She's dying
> She is burned from the waist up
> On her arm
> Her ear is burned off,her nose is burned off,her eyelashes are burned,
> her fingers are burned
> She can't hold anything upand with medical advances,
> there's no end in sight
> for the hamburger lady
> When somebody tells you there’s a level of painbeyond the human mind
> The lady on the potty-chair
> Leave her,
> She's not burned from the waist down
> That’s what keeps her aliveThe tubes
> and the nightmares
> Hamburger Lady
> Hamburger Lady
> ”He was okay when he went to go change the tubesTubes in her legs,
> and tubes in her armsand he managed okay
> Then it came out and saw one of the burn nurses
> at the desk, eating a can of chilli-mac
> and he flashed on the carpet,
> and he flashed on the floor
> The hamburger lady,
> She came to rest
> They’re squeamish
> can’t work with her and keep their meal down
> the “qualified technicians”
> Hamburger Lady
> Hamburger Lady
>
>
>
>

Not a good wedding song, then. It is the kind of song that really instils a profound sense of palpable dread, as if something really bad is about to happen but you are not sure what and have no power to stop it. It really is the sort of “song” that you can only really listen to once, and if the rumors are to believed it actually has a spooky ability to worm its way into the mind of listeners and drive them insane or at the very least cause a potent disorientation that is hard to explain.

It is said that to listen to the song invites it into your mind to cause symptoms such as severe depression that will not go away, a feeling of abject terror or panic, suicidal thoughts, mood swings, an inability to think straight or concentrate, and even physical symptoms such as profuse sweating, convulsions, blurriness, headaches, hallucinations, fainting, and vomiting. Some stories have even said that some who have listened to it have run out to disappear without a trace or have turned up dead by their own hand. One Redditor said of their own experience. Hamburger Lady is by far the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard. It immediately put me in a very strange mental state and I started sweating and hyperventilating as if I were having a massive panic attack. I also saw horrific images flash before my eyes like some sort of waking nightmare. I couldn’t even make it all the way through the song, because I seriously felt I would not survive to the end. I don’t know if it was really rewiring my brain or something, but it is definitely a messed up song.

Eerie stuff, indeed, and it is hard to know what to make of it all. This writer has listened to the song, and although it is without a doubt one of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard and not something I look forward to hearing again, I had no particularly violent effects. Could it be that some people are just more prone to the song’s sinister effects? Or is this just maybe an urban legend that has been spun around an undeniably unsettling piece of music to take on a life of its own? It’s hard to even tell if the story about the real Hamburger Lady and the letter are even true or just a part of the spooky lore orbiting the song. Who knows? If after reading all of this, you still really want to hear it for yourself you can listen to it here. Don’t say you weren’t warned.