hamburger lady
as a song based on ostensibly real events, many of hamburger lady's lyrics are directly lifted from ackerman's letter about a severely burned woman in his care. as a result, the written content of both works are from the qualified technician's (or ackerman's) point of view.
hamburger lady details her day-to-day life, what her body looks like, and a medic's reaction to her. he seems fine with her, but upon exiting and seeing a nurse eating chili-mac, vomits on the floor because the food reminded him of her body. the narrator is "alternating nights unrelievedly" (0:40) because unlike the medic, he can physically stand to be around hamburger lady.
transcript of image taken from the inner sleeve of doa: "'...By far the worst is the Hamburger Lady, and because of shortage right now of 'qualified technicians,' e.g. technicians who can work here 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 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 until he came out, then he spotted one of the burn nurses (pleasant smiling zombies) eating a can of chili-mac at the desk, and that did it: he flashed on the carpet. It is fucking insane is what it is.' part of a letter sent by Al Ackerman from Portland, Oregon U.S.A. 1978."
even though ackerman is capable of being around hamburger lady, to him, she still looks (and acts) more like a burned, "250-lb meatloaf" than a person. even with the amount of inspiration throbbing gristle took from ackerman, this glibness is not present in the song itself. rather, p. orridge describes the hamburger lady only in relation to other human beings, and what she looked like before the accident. the lyrics "her ear is burned/her eye is burned" (1:16) might still place her within the realm of the grotesque, but it is a grotesquerie that does not place her in an essential opposition to us. after all, people can't "become" meatloaf, but they can sustain severe burns. changing the description in this way locates what happened to hamburger lady as victim of something that could happen to you, rather than as an outlandish nonhuman figure.regardless of her physical condition, both works still maintain some understanding that she is a conscious being underneath the anguish.
how might taking care of a person in this condition affect someone's mind? how might being in this condition affect a person's mind?
we might not understand someone who has a physical ailment so bad that they cannot move by themselves or respond to stimuli as being at all conscious of the world around them. this can be the case, and recent controversies around the alternative communication methods including rapid prompting and facilitated communication suggest that there are instances where a person really may not be aware enough to understand the world around them. at the same time, augmented and alternative communication often does allow people to communicate with their loved ones. while the american speech-language-hearing association was founded in 1925, the technology used today that has proven to be helpful did not exist for hamburger lady. part of what makes the song harrowing is that she is mentally capable of understanding her situation, and is too physically disempowered to end her suffering.a lyric directly taken from the letter— "when somebody tells you there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind cannot retain consciousness" (1:34) –removes any ambiguity about this. the qualified technician has an affective understanding of her as a conscious being because spending so much time around her allows him to gain some understanding of what she is mentally going through. through this understanding, and centering her body and experiences, the technician 'crips' himself. in his article crip theory and the subject of abledness, disability theorist ryan thorneycroft states that "‘to crip’ is to highlight both non-normative ways of living and being and to challenge dominant assumptions that the abled body is the normal, natural, and better body." while her body might not be presented as normal, natural, or better than those of the hospital staff around her, the fact that both hamburger lady's lyrics and production centralize her experience forces listeners to reconsider their preconceived notions around the minds of people living with severe physical disability.the soundscape adds a layer of sonic anguish to already heavy lyrics, literally making her pain the listener's for the duration of the song. the thrumming sequencers, distorted vocals, and atonal synths that commingle for just above 4 minutes call to mind the medical machines she relies on for life, the way a technician's voice might hit ears that have melted off, and the overall feelings of pain and delirium that result from only being able to sleep for a couple minutes at a time for months and months. by creating such a harsh sound, throbbing gristle takes what would be an uncomplicatedly voyeuristic dynamic and forces an audience that would either poke fun at this figure or ignore her entirely to sit in her chair for a few minutes. where other art centering disabled subjectivity may "disarm what is painful with wicked humor" (sandahl, queering the crip), hamburger lady's inflicting auditory pain on people arms listeners with a new understanding of different ways of being. after all, hamburger lady's ability to retain consciousness while in this state grants her an understanding of the world that is inaccessible to those who have not had her experience. knowledge about this type of pain is valuable for people who lack the experience to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition as a whole.