'There's No End In Sight, For Hamburger Lady ...'

Here's the second installment of my Halloween hit countdown-of-sorts. "Hamburger Lady" is arguably the most well-known track in the disquieting canon of Throbbing Gristle, the infamous industrial ensemble renowned for their willfully antagonistic and unabashedly antisocial art. However punk rock & confrontational you think you might be, you'll never one-up Throbbing Gristle. Provocative and nightmarish in equal turns, TG's music came specially designed to disturb. And more often than not, it handily succeeded

"Hamburger Lady," a track from their clinically titled second album, DOA: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle isn't your conventional pop song by any stretch of the imagination. Above a slow, oozing pulse, vocalist Genesis P-Orridge (pictured above) spins a harrowing, disjointed yarn about a woman in a hospital burn unit who has been charred from the waist up. Couched in woozy electronic moans and crying, treated guitar, the song is an inescapable dirge of torturous suffering and despair. When I worked two overnight shifts a week at the TIME Magazine newsdesk in the 90's, I used to play this track in the small hours when no one else was around and completely freak myself out. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why. However compelling, it can still give me the willies this many years later.

I'd say "enjoy," but that's not really an applicable verb here.