YMMV / Throbbing Gristle

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• Audience-Alienating Premise: The band's entire MO was to be as ugly and brutal as possible... until other like-minded artists caught on to what they were doing.
• Creepy Awesome: Say what you want about them, but you'd certainly be head bobbing if you heard discipline live.
• Crosses the Line Twice: "Zyklon B Zombie", "We Hate You (Little Girls)", "Last Exit", "Dead Ed", many of their early live shows...
• Funny Moments:
  • "United" and its 17-second album reprise.
  • Also, "You can't have anarchy and have music!"
  • The intro to their Sheffield University show in 1980:
    Uh, we're Throbbing Gristle, and we'd just like to make a small announcement: all the sounds you hear tonight are generated live as we're playing, there are no prepared backing tapes and no Revoxes.
    (message repeats verbatim, on tape.)
• Fridge Brilliance: 'Hamburger Lady' makes more sense as a song when you realize that it's taken from the perspective of the burn victim herself. The "heartbeat" drum, random murmurs, and the distorted chirps and synthesizer growls are effectively her in a coma.
• Harsher in Hindsight: 'Weeping' becomes more chilling than usual when taken into account that it's not only about suicide, but one of Ian Curtis' favorite songs, to the point where it is said he would ring up Genesis P-Orridge and simply sing the song before hanging up. Not long before his suicide.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "United" was funny enough as a Stealth Parody, but once you consider Genesis' attempts at achieving ''pandrogeny," it takes on a completely different meaning.
• Moment of Awesome: The final live performances in 1981.
• Nausea Fuel: "Slug Bait", "Hamburger Lady", parts of "Very Friendly".
• Nightmare Fuel: Plenty.
• Older Than They Think: Established in 1975, Throbbing Gristle are widely considered to be the Ur-Example of Industrial, but Cabaret Voltaire and COUM Transmissions (the latter containing members from Throbbing Gristle) preceded them by 2 and 6 years, respectively.
• Refuge in Audacity: Pretty much their whole reason for existing.
• Signature Song: Generally, "United" (as unrepresentative of their sound as it is) and, to a lesser extent, "Hamburger Lady", are their best-known songs. It helps that the first actually charted on the UK Indie Chart.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Weeping" and "Almost a Kiss".
  • "Hamburger Lady" is a combination of this and Nightmare Fuel. Genesis delivers a soft, calm and somewhat depressed sounding voice put through a vocoder while describing a woman so horribly burnt and in such horrible pain she resembles hamburger meat. While it's most upfrontly horrifying, it's also intensely sad at the same time, which is helped immensely by the extremely minimalistic instrumentation.
• The Woobie: It's hard not to feel absolutely horrible for the woman described in "Hamburger Lady", who is completely burnt from the waist up and will spend the rest of her life in strict medical care while feeling intense pain.

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