AMAZING! These Five Songs Have All Been Used to Torture People

You thought Somali pirates got dealt a bad hand by being blasted with Britney’s ‘Oops I Did It Again?’ Here are five other songs that have been used to torture people. (Royalties, anyone?)

1. ‘I Love You’ by Barney the Dinosaur

There is no official data on how many American parents have already lost their minds due to an overdose of this cuddly monster, but American interrogators would surely know the figures, since ‘I Love You’ is cited as one of the most ‘overused’ songs in their arsenal. A U.S. operative told Newsweek in 2003 that he was forced to listen to the song for forty-five minutes during training. “I never want to go through that again,” he laconically stated.

2. ‘Panama’ by Van Halen

International law prevented a Navy SEAL team from hunting down Manuel Noriega in December 1989, after the Panamanian dictator took refuge in the Vatican embassy. However, it didn’t prevent the Americans from blasting the papal emissaries with some good old rock ‘n’ roll. After several days of being blasted by Van Halen, the Clash and the Howard Stern Show at deafening levels, representatives of the Holy See eventually handed over Noriega.

3. ‘The Real Slim Shady’ by Eminem

It is hard to fathom the horror of hearing Em’s nasal voice declaring: “May I have your attention please?” for a hundredth time straight, but that was Benyam Mohammad’s experience while detained at a secret U.S. prison in Kabul. He told Human Rights Watch that interrogators played Eminem and Dr. Dre continuously for twenty days, while depriving them of food and water. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

4. ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow

Road spikes and boom gates did nothing to deter teenage hoodlums from congregating along the seaside promenade in the Sydney suburb of Brighton Le Sands, where they would abuse residents and generally cause mayhem. Then shop owner Martin Corben came up with a plan: Pink lights and Barry Manilow. “Pink light…makes the skin look blotchy and shows up spots,” Corben the Australian media outlet ABC. “I don’t know why Barry Manilow popped into my head. Maybe it’s because Brighton is the Copacabana of south Sydney?” The pubescent nuisance was driven away. What happened to the sanity of other Brighton residents’ is, however, unknown.

5. ‘Born in the USA’ by Bruce Springsteen

Detainees at Guantanamo have said that the Springsteen hit has been played for years on end as a wake-up call at the compound—a weird choice, one would think, considering the song’s highly U.S.-critical lyrics. The same goes for Rage Against The Machine’s anti-American banger ‘Killing in the Name Of,’ which has also reportedly been played at Gitmo. The band’s guitarist Tom Morello is one of many musicians who have endorsed a demand that the government disclose the titles of all song titles used as a method of punishment and who have protested such use.