It's A Curse

(1)

It's a curse
Well, thy forsooth
Who is that interesting hack over there?
By Gad, verily
Cracked curse
Disliked,
Disliked.
Burdened
It's a curse
And I am not unguilty of using it

You, your tone is...
You, your tone is...
Tone of everybody.

Trying to bolt out of 
Trying to get over  (2)
Operation mindfuck (3)

I do not like your tone.
It has ephemeral whinging aspects.  (4)

It's a curse. I am not unguilty of using it

Waiting for you to fff...   (5)
Trying to get out of
Trying to get out of
Waiting
They are waiting bitterly
For you to fall over
It's a curse

Down their long egg breath
Cheap shaving lotion days
Their sandwiches stashed under their side seats
Their froglike chins ready to burst
I tell you, it's a curse
It's a burden
It's a curse
Trying to get over
bargain vampires
In shops
I tell you, it's a curse

You, your tone is...
You, your tone is...
Trying to get out of...
Trying to get out of...
It's a curse
Shafted over 
It's a curse
I tell you, it's a curse
It's a curse
It's a burden
It's a burden
Operation Mindfuck

Look back bores
It's a curse
Bach and Wagner
All you really need is a good Spaß (6)
It's a curse
Balti and Vimto and Spangles were always crap, (7)
Regardless of the look back bores (8)

It's a curse
Shafted over
Trying to bolt out of
Waiting for you
It's a curse

1. Another swipe at nostalgia and even, seemingly, the past itself, in the vein of "A Past Gone Mad" from the same album. The song, one of the highlights of The Infortainment Scan, is sometimes dismissed as lacklustre by those who seemingly can't feel the relentless one-note riff where it needs to be felt.  

^

2."Operation Mindfuck" is a Discordian idea, popularized by Robert Anton Wilson, in which rigid ideas of reality are destablized for the purposes of a kind of libertarian and hedonistic enlightenment. They put this idea into practice:

Through every means available, Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan, the Mindfuckers intended to “attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies” to the Illuminati and other hidden hands.

So they planted stories about the Illuminati in the underground press. They slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal Innovator and the New Left newspaper rogerSPARK. They cooked up a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in “The Playboy Advisor.” When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy-hunting district attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison’s booster Art Kunkin, of the Los Angeles Free Press, got a note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates. The telltale sign: None of them had a left nipple.

Discordianism is also invoked in "New Puritan."  

On the other hand, Dan submits:

"According to fanzine writer/publisher Lee Gibson, in his book A Punk Rock Flashback, the song critiques his mid-80s fanzine, Operation Mind Fuck (his 13th and last) (p.171):
 

OMF received a brief mention in the song 'It's a Curse' by The Fall on their album 'The Infotainment Scan' - and a bit of a critical bashing by Mark E Smith: 'Operation Mind Fuck/I do not like your tone/it has ephemeral whinging aspects.' If MES knocks you, consider it an honour that you even crossed his radar or stepped into his rifle sights. At the end of the day, I think MES was probably right.

There's no actual explanation there of why Gibson thinks the line is indeed about his fanzine. And I'm not sure of how it all fits together chronologically. Looks like it might have been c.1984, but more research required--if it is c1984, I think this song is a bit late to be a comment on the fanzine."

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3. "Trying to get over" is a quote from Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly," and is sung to the exact same melody.

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4. "Whinging" (sometimes spelled "Whingeing") is British slang for impotent griping or whining.  

^

5. Alex Griffin points out the echo of "My Generation" here...and Richieboy very plausibly points out it's probably MES jumping the gun on the ensuing "fall over," which is how the thought concludes a few lines down. It seems likely this is correct, which to me seems to make it somewhat more likely that the "My Generation" allusion is unintentional...

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6. "Bach and Wagner" phonetically echo "bargain vampires" from the previous verse. Portsmouth Bubblejet: "'Spaß' is a German word meaning 'fun' and is thus the natural response to someone who listens to the seldom humorous Bach and Wagner." However, it sounds like he may be saying "schwarze" ("Black" in German) or "schwartze" (the same in Yiddish). John Howard points out that there has been scholarly speculation for many years that Beethoven was black.

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7. Balti is a Pakistani curry dish; Vimto is a British soft drin made from raspberries, grapes and currents; and Spangles were a hard candy, discontinues in the early 1980s, which seem to symbolize nostalgia for MES like nothing else; love of Spangles also comes in for opprobrium in "Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room" and "A Past Gone Mad."

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8. "Look Back Bore" has become a common term among Fall fans to describe those who focus on the band's older material; it is equally likely to be ruefully self-applied as it is to be used as a criticism.  

^

It's A Curse: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1993