Bring the Noise!
William S. Burroughs and Music in the Expanded Field

by

Brent Wood

Methodologies for the Study of Western History and Culture
Trent University

bwood@trentu.ca

Postmodern Culture v.5 n.2 (January, 1995)

pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

Review of:

Burroughs, William S. Dead City Radio. Island Records, 1990.

---. Spare-Ass Annie and Other Tales. Island Records, 1993.

Ministry, with William S. Burroughs. Just One Fix. Sire Records, 1992.

Revolting Cocks. Beers, Steers and Queers. Waxtrax,1991.

---. Linger Ficken Good. Sire Records, 1993.

1. Music, it seems, has always been the art that most easily eludes the grasp of theory. Perhaps it is the spectator relationship implied by "theory" that allows the visceral vibrations of music, even art music, to remain unaccounted for. As Frith and Goodwin (1990) have pointed out, in the discourse of cultural studies the "textual" analysis of music itself--as opposed to lyrics, iconography or consumption--remains extraordinarily immature when compared with treatment of the visual arts. Popular music in particular poses a challenge to cultural theorists who must bridge the gap between traditional musicology, which tends to isolate music from its socio-political context, and sociological or anthropological perspectives which handle music's physical presence poorly. Post-modernist theory has dealt with many such contextual challenges in its encounters with visual pop art in sculpture, painting, film, and even television. Why, then, is it so often necessary, when confronted with academic music commentary, to ask with McClary and Walser (quoting Bloom County's Billy and the Boingers), "yeah, but did we kick butt?"[1]

2. One obvious reason that music is so resistant to theory is the difficulty of representing the object of study verbally. Musicians have enough trouble communicating to one another what they hear in their aural imagination without bringing in non-musicians to complicate the picture. As sound has become easier to record and to reproduce, however, the concept of sound as an object manipulable by artist (and consumer) has become less far-fetched. It seems we have reached a point where it has become necessary to think of music as operating in an "expanded field" if we are to have any possibility at all of comprehending Public Enemy and Stravinsky, Woody Guthrie and John Cage, Michael Jackson and The Dead Kennedys (all available in the same digital format at the same retail outlet) as instances of one and the same "art".[2] The difficulty of commenting on music through the written word has been eclipsed by the possibilities of commenting on musical objects by manipulating copies of them with the help of sound-reproduction technology. As Laurent Jenny observed a generation ago, whenever new technological possibilities come into the hands of artists there is a tendency for the various arts to blend into one another.[3] This occurs not only stylistically and thematically but also technically. In other words, modernist intertextuality explodes into a post-modernist inter-mediality. In 1994, with spoken word an MTV fad and William S. Burroughs advertising Nike products, it is past high time to examine the sort of music-poetry which is forming today, and which constitutes a major "post-modernist" project in music.

3. Why characterize this tendency as a "project"? Because it is, naturally, a "work-in-progress." As a time-based art, it exists "in progress" as a moment of resistance to the results of the technological acceleration of the 20th century. The project today is essentially a continuous experiment in bricolage using the mechanical and verbal and sonic tools of commerce. It has perhaps become necessary to make use of Jacques Attali's argument for music-as-theory in order to get a grip on the currents which are most prominent in the project.[4] Attali hears currents of social (re)organization in the commercialization of sound, noise and rhythm; in these general terms, the post-modernist music project is about intervening in those patterns with new patterns, sculpting with garbage, found objects, and reclaimed enemy weaponry. This is a form of theory that doesn't meet the requirements of the print-based academy. Whether it has the stereotypical "punk" stylistic trappings or not, we can confidently give a name to this localized, ever-changing, music-in-the-expanded field, theory-project. That name is "cyberpunk."

4. I will now seek, in spite of the argument I have just made, to retain a modicum of credibility while attempting to describe and comment, in written words, on five interrelated instances of this project. The preceding three paragraphs may be read as a contextualization for the following review of five more-or-less-recent sound recordings in which the confluence of musical streams traceable to Euro-American and Afro-American sources forms a whirlpool around the venerable figure of William S. Burroughs. These recordings include Burroughs's own Dead City Radio (1990) and Spare-Ass Annie (1993); the Revolting Cocks' Beers Steers and Queers (1991) and Linger Ficken Good (1993); and the Ministry/Burroughs collaboration Just One Fix (1992). The reader will find that, like the music under study, I will end up attempting to explain the effects of various pieces by comparing them with other well-known musical texts. Perhaps I can justify my (electronically produced) literary commentary by offering it as a sort of annotated discography to contemporary recordings which can only be located as music within an expanded field. It will be up to the reader to take action (or not) in her or his sonic sphere.

5. The motivation for this review springs from a question that was posed to me over the recent television advertisement for Nike which features William Burroughs. In the ad, Burroughs appears on a miniature TV set being kicked around by joggers. "The purpose of technology is to aid the body, not confuse the mind," says the bard. Nike isn't selling shoes, of course; it's selling a mainstream counter-culture, and Burroughs is only the most recent icon chosen by the champ of hip footwear. The question is, how did we get from Spike Lee to Bull Lee? It's no secret that Burroughs has been rediscovered by a younger generation for whom the Beats and hippies that he once inspired are no more than the stuff of which movies are made.[5] Receiving much less media attention than his appearance in Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (1988), or Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch (1992), however, has been Burroughs's 1990 CD Dead City Radio, which has had a measurable influence through the medium of college radio if nowhere else.

6. Dead City Radio grew out of a 1981 appearance by Burroughs on Saturday Night Live during which he read "Twilight's Last Gleaming" while an old NBC Radio Orchestra recording of "The Star Spangled Banner" was played.[6] Hal Willner, then music co-ordinator for SNL, was struck by the power and grace of Burroughs's reading voice. Willner grew interested in expanding the project of putting Burroughs on tape, and travelled to Burroughs's home in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas to do the job. The majority of the music on Dead City Radio is drawn from those same NBC Radio Orchestra archives, and all the spoken word from the Lawrence sessions. Willner, on the recording's liner notes, claims to have chosen the music in order to highlight Burroughs's quintessentially American attributes. Indeed, the effect of Burroughs's critiques of American government, Christian morality, racism, homophobia, and drug wars when set against the NBC orchestra's nostalgic "program music" is a powerful one.

7. In 1993 Burroughs's familiar aging figure, in hat and tie, appeared once again in the popular music racks in another Willner production entitled Spare-Ass Annie and Other Tales. Once again, Willner had taken tracks from the Lawrence sessions and set music to them; this time it was with the aid of The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, the multi-cultural hip-hop group whose earlier popular recording "Television--the drug of a nation" echoed Burroughs's own feelings about the addictive American psychology. In stark contrast to the symphonic textures of Dead City Radio, most of the musical material of Spare-Ass Annie consists of relaxed hip-hop grooves created from looped sound-samples. Not only had Burroughs had been brought from the past (back) into the future (a copy of the one he once imagined in his 1960's experimental fiction), he had also been "crossed-over" from white culture into black, a vital step in the passage from the Beat-jazz of Cronenberg's Naked Lunch to a role as technological soccer-ball kicked around by shoes the size of Michael Jordan's over the beat of a DJ. It is apparent that Burroughs now occupies a position with respect to mainstream corporate culture analogous to the one assumed by Public Enemy and other artists who specialize in cultural appropriation to make their critiques. Bring the noise!

8. The creation of silence through noise-making has an honourable history. Since white people deemed black people's music to be noise several centuries ago, black people have had the lead in communicating publicly through noise. In twentieth-century art music, white European and American experimental composers, such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, began to play with the possibilities of noise. Since capital hit popular music in a big way, however, its principal figures have been Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Rotten, black and white icons for noise-resistance in popular music. Today, amid the never-ending war of words that characterizes our cybernetically-organized society, the control of communication technology is vital for any kind of resistance to the seductions of commercial culture. Public Enemy's Chuck D called hip-hop "TV for black America"; in just this way, I would argue, cyberpunk music is the underground info-highway for white youth. Burroughs's influence on Ministry's Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker is evident throughout their work, including that done in the guise of the Revolting Cocks on the CDs Beers, Steers and Queers and Linger Ficken Good. Special tribute was paid when Burroughs's voice and text were used on Ministry's 1992 CD single "Just One Fix".

9. All five recordings examined here use sound-reproduction technology to collage together a wide range of material, including readings from previously published texts, commercial film and television soundtracks, a variety of sound effects, and clips or imitations of advertising lingo. These are recombined with minimal new musical material. The effectiveness of the resulting tracks depends entirely on a redefinition of "noise" and a recognition of the necessity of throwing back the word-garbage and music-garbage which rains down upon us from corporate culture machines. The contrast between the various elements which make up a composition is the source of its success or failure in composition terms. The role of "noise" is central, not only in the form of distortion, white noise and background noise, but also as a paradigm for the creation of silent space in a soundscape saturated by mass media. Burroughs is the perfect candidate for this kind of textual re-arrangement, since much of his own work is self-consciously the rearrangement of the work of others, designed to function in just this way. What follows here is an attempt to read the various takes on William Burroughs texts that have surfaced in the expanded field.

10. Dead City Radio is destined to become a classic in the Burroughs catalogue. The performances by the NBC orchestra and various other sources are lush, and generally work with the texts by evoking a mood which is recognizable to the listener from other media experiences.[7] The opening track, "William's Welcome" is the exception on the album, a collectively produced soundscape for which Burroughs provides soundbites which are subjected to Pink Floyd-style electronic manipulation. In the majority of the tracks, music and text are overlaid to create a feeling of twisted Americana. This tactic is especially evident in "Kill the Badger" and "Thanksgiving Prayer," both of which retell Burroughs's own "Ugly American" story. In the first, the central role is occupied by Burroughs's former counsellor at the Los Alamos boys school to which he was sent as a child. The music for this piece, an Aaron Copeland-like bit of orchestral program music, is made to feel terrible and twisted by the text. In the same way the "Pomp and Circumstance" march of "Thanksgiving Prayer" is made sad and ironic by Burroughs's black version of grace, the blunt imagery of which, contrasted with the orchestra's moody modal tensions, recalls in mood nothing so much as Morrison's "American Prayer".[8]

11. Other noteworthy pieces on the disc include "Ah Pook the Destroyer," "Where he was going" and "Apocalypse." "Ah Pook" succinctly iterates Burroughs's standard warning against the tools of death (time, control, and junk). The warning is set against minimalist electronic accompaniment by John Cale reminiscent of much of Laurie Anderson's recent work. The effect here is more like the science-fiction of Anderson's earlier sound-recordings or of the Ministry pieces which I will deal with presently. "After-dinner Conversation/Where he was going," Burroughs's take on Hemingway, is perhaps the most sumptuous piece on any of the discs under review. The story is a variation on Hemingway's classic short story "Snows of Kilimanjaro," reset in a gangster-movie rural midwest. It uses church organ, sound effects, and mild electronic voice manipulation to achieve the effect of a radio play heard as an electronic Sunday night bedtime story. The preoccupation with death continues into the series of "moralist" texts (in Burroughs's special sense of that word) that form a suite of interconnecting sound-poems culminating in "Apocalypse." In some segments Burroughs reads from the Bible over a background of mock middle eastern music that could have been borrowed from Ben-Hur. "Apocalypse" itself is a monumental work, beginning with a celebration of an animist theology represented by Hassan I. Sabah: "Consider a revolutionary statement. . . . Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted." Burroughs here explains the meaning of this soundbite whose citations continue to grow more common. The text, reminiscent of Naked Lunch, is, according to liner notes, drawn from an experiment with silk screen done in collaboration with artist Keith Haring, to whom the album is dedicated. The NBC orchestra here supports the feeling of apocalypse, changing intensities, moving from mood to mood like a ballet piece, at times seemingly imitating Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps". Burroughs's reading of "The Lord's Prayer" functions as an appropriate culmination of the suite. This is in turn complemented by the piece which follows it and concludes the CD, a curiosity in which Burroughs sings a German love to piano and clarinet accompaniment. The album is thus wrapped by instances of Burroughs's lean positivism, which, as in his written work, just barely manages to rescue the whole from an utterly nihilistic cynicism.

12. In all the orchestral pieces on Dead City Radio there is an element of ironic commercial nostalgia that is not provided by the contemporary rhythms of Spare-Ass Annie. The musical arrangements on the second CD, which is either a "quick fix" attempt to surf the wave of Burroughs's marketability or simply a poorly conceived project, are not nearly as rich as on the first. On the whole, Spare-Ass Annie is a very curious disc, one which will accordingly take its place in the curiosity bin next to other attempts to bring white media figures into the world of black-inspired popular music, such as Leonard Nimoy's unforgettable recording of "Proud Mary." The spoken texts used here are not as essential to Burroughs's oeuvre as are those on Dead City Radio, nor are they as well performed. Worse still, it sounds as if Burroughs's distinctive speech patterns have been electronically altered to fit the beats put down by the Disposable Heroes, either by digital editing, severe compression, or (ironically) by noise reduction systems. The result is that he occasionally winds up sounding something like Barney Rubble.

13. In general, the cyclical nature of the sample-loops works against Burroughs's speech. As any mixer knows, the rhythm track is the track that is laid first. Burroughs's tracks are thus by definition the rhythm tracks. When these are combined with the beats of the Disposable Heroes, both layers begin to sound as if they are off-time with one another. Chopping up Burroughs's vocal gestures to better fit the overlaid digital rhythms only makes matters worse. The loops of his vocals on "Last Words of Dutch Schultz (this is insane)" and "Words of Advice for Young People" are comic in their attempt to make Burroughs's words into a popular refrain. The inescapable fact is that Burroughs's particular brand of poetry has no rhymes--the quintessential element to spoken rap/hip-hop rhythm in America.[9]

14. There are a few noteworthy moments on the recording. "The Last Words of Dutch Schultz" features a contradictory tape-loop similar to ones Burroughs once prescribed for therapeutic use.[10] The listless repetition of "but I am dying / no you're not," however, ends up sounding clumsy and uninspiring. While the text of "Warning to Young Couples" is largely pointless, there is an amusing Simpsons-like irony achieved by attaching bouncy "Leave it to Beaver" type music to a story of dogs chewing babies to death. "One God Universe," a companion piece to "Ah Pook the Destroyer" from Dead City Radio, is also tolerable, and highlights the anti-thermodynamic cosmology that supports much of Burroughs's work. The music here is reminiscent of funky 1960s style pop and the reggae that grew from it, which at least dovetails with Burroughs's penchant for keif-smoking.[11] There are two longer pieces on the recording, both drawn from Burroughs's early work. "Did I Ever Tell You About the Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk?," one of his most famous comic routines, is a major disappointment. However dull Peter Weller's reading of it in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, that rendition is nevertheless more satisfying than the terrible one on Spare-Ass Annie. "Junky's Christmas," a piece that went unpublished in written form until Interzone (1991), doesn't work as well as Sandra Bernhard's "White Christmas," to which it is comparable in form if not in spirit, but it gets by, its musical component alternating between Christmas carols and rhythmic themes typical of incidental television fare.

15. Also in the vortex spinning around Burroughs is the work of Al Jourgensen and his cohorts in their bands Ministry and the Revolting Cocks. As Burroughs in the 1960s used the "pulp texts" of his childhood as raw material for his anarchist text-and-image-collage, so RevCo uses "video pulp" for their industrial pop music. The frontier theme so prominent in Burroughs's narratives is treated by RevCo on the title track of their 1991 CD Beers Steers and Queers. Employing black-originated hip-hop sampling and rhyming techniques, the Cocks rhythmically cut pop culture sound-bites into their work in a way comparable to Burroughs's importing of pulp texts into his fiction. This is, aside from the rhythmic clash, the principle area in which Spare-Ass Annie is lacking. Beers, Steers and Queers, like much of the Spare-Ass Annie material, consists primarily of a sequenced dance beat. In this case, the beat is deliberately distorted to sound as if the speakers can't handle the volume. The only tonal portions of the composition are samples of banjo and bells from the soundtracks of the films Deliverance and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. The "rapped" lyrics concern the hypocrisy of American society as exemplified by Texan culture.[12] Dialogue from Deliverance setting up a homosexual rape scene opens the piece and recurs between flat recited rhymes mixing double entrendres of morality and depravity, righteousness and fellatio, such as "The truth is hard to swallow," "there is a law man, there is the raw man, who is the right and who is the wrong man," and "Get in my face." The blatantly offensive images of homosexual activity operate for RevCo just as they do for Burroughs, innoculating their work against commodification while drawing into question conventional definitions of morality. The double-meaning of "revolting" is the central feature of a tension here as the piece concludes, "Texas has religion--revolting cocks are god!" As in Burroughs's best work, morality and brutality are pushed so close together that a feeling of great discomfort results.

16. RevCo's next release, Linger Ficken Good, opens with an unashamed Burroughs rip-off entitled "Gila Copter." The opening of "Gila Copter" prefaces RevCo's typical digital punk/funk sound with a free rhythmic soundscape. Although the spoken text is free of rhyme, it does have identifiable refrains, all included in a narrative format and returning at unpredictable intervals. This use of refrain is in contrast with the predictable and much less effective use on Spare-Ass Annie. "Gila Copter" is a highly self-conscious piece which introduces the album as if it were an advertisement included within the product.[13] The text begins as a sales pitch but quickly degrades into crypto-political advice. The plea here is for silence, to be achieved by turning off the televisual manipulation of "the American prime-time victim show."

         Hey kids---you want a soundtrack that's gonna 
         make you feel tense--let you express your 
         frustration--make you scared, want to run out 
         and buy a gun?  You're looking for another rock 
         and roll record that'll make you feel like a 
         victim.  You love to be a victim, you love the 
         American prime-time victim show. Hey bells, gila 
         copters, machine guns--listen to that--listen to 
         that--kill for Allah--kill for Jesus. . . .  
         All that 1980s shit is over--brothers and 
         sisters--we're going to turn the volume down.

    The voice subsequently begins to take on a suspiciously incestuous quality which throws a wrench into the interpretive works. It is just enough to taint the text with doubt and irony and reinforce the edge of perversity that runs through much of Burroughs's work. In contrast to the Cocks' typical punk-style vocals, the vocalist here has a low raspy drawl imitative of Burroughs, clear but electronically treated. "Chopper" sound effects and other television noise drones throughout the piece, erupting in a violent distorted cameo at the transition between the free rhythmic introduction and the bass/noise-percussion groove which constitutes the majority of the tune.

17. Although Burroughs's most popular writing seldom treats technology explicitly, his experimental work from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine (1967) does. What makes Ministry Burroughs's digital-era doppleganger, however, is not only the theme of the spoken (or sung) texts, but the use of technology by the ordinary citizen to shatter the control system's hold on emotional manipulation. To this end the last and title tune from Linger Ficken Good (in which the Revolting Cocks are aided by the Revolting Pussies and, apparently, by their Revolting offspring) is an excellent example of postmodernist, underground, digital kitsch that revels in both its commerciality and its marginality in commercial terms. In this respect RevCo's work begins to resemble the "intentional failure" of Andy Kaufman's characters Foreign Man (resurrected as Latka Gravas in Taxi) and Tony Clifton, or that of Sandra Bernhard in Without You I'm Nothing .

18. "Linger Ficken Good" is a fold-in of magnificent qualities when heard in these terms, a montage of advertising and pornography. Like Bernhard's or Kaufman's work, it is titillating and amusing at first, but demands the audience's endurance and eventually gives rise to a level of sensibility above the merely commercial.[14] The music consists of six minutes of a jazz-style walking bass with sequenced high-hat and scratching samples providing a simple beat. Over this repetitive but ever-changing groove various voices enter and leave: a male vocal chants "finger licking good" over a panting female "more," with a chorus of "e i e i o"; the line "this is porno for your mind--porno for your crotch" is answered by an offhand comment of "family entertainment" and the sound of a chicken clucking. The result is a re-serving of the Naked Lunch, this one including meat which must have been processed in the world of David Lynch's Eraserhead. In the second segment of the piece, the (male) members of the band are introduced by female voices as if in a television special. In a call-and-response format, with their own voices providing an ostinato of "linger ficken good," the "revolting pussies" chant the names of the Cocks as if they were salivating over the possibility of getting a taste. The third segment is a simulated interview with a black male, ostensibly a studio-musician in the Cocks' employ. He runs through all the members of band, telling the listener their nicknames and insulting their musical abilities. "Kiss my ass" he snorts, " . . . punks"; the last word is spit out just as the music is pulled out from under him for a precious moment of silence. The fourth segment is another variation on this theme, with the pussies rhyming the qualities of their favourite cocks in response to an endlessly looped sample asking, "who's your favourite cock?" The effect here is of a child repeatedly pulling the cord of a talking doll. The irony inherent in the Cocks' name becomes clear in the piece's repetitive (but not sampled) denouement, a group of children singing a commercial jingle melody "it's a RevCo world--it's a RevCo world" in warbly harmony. This clever elision of the "revolting cocks," already a pun, into the banal ad-speak "RevCo" further confuses the position of the Cocks with respect to the corporate music machine and solidifies their ties to the tradition of Malcolm MacLaren style "punk." This piece is a particularly extreme example of music in the expanded field; there is no element which is not to be heard as if between aural quotation marks.

19. "Just One Fix," a CD single put out by Ministry in 1992, features Burroughs himself as this kind of quotable sonic text. Like much of Ministry's work, the track begins with a scream; the subsequent vocals are distorted and mixed into the noise that forms the body of the track and its various remixes. Burroughs's words are clipped carefully and mixed in with other noise textures, rather than being featured in their own right and played against a contrasting sonic background. The piece has an electronic dance beat which, like all Ministry work, is hypnotic in effect, lending Burroughs's words a sense of delirium. "Smash the control images; smash the control machine" are sampled and repeated on the "12" edit," while the "Quick Fix edit" features a slightly longer text in which Burroughs confesses an ambivalent position, presumably as an American or as a communication machine, with respect to the control machine as a whole. "To put it country simple, there are some things on earth that other folks might want--like the whole planet." Burroughs admits, "I am with the invaders--no sense trying to hide that." He makes his standard call for quiet, at which point a gap is inserted in the spoken text to allow the noise-samples compiled by Ministry to occupy the principal listenting space. The samples sound variously like highway traffic, airport noise and creaking machinery. The atmosphere of Nova Express is reconfigured in Burroughs's muffled claims that "there is no place else to go--the theatre is closed . . . cut music lines--cut word lines." Burroughs is here alluding to a universe which is entirely pre-scripted, like a biologic film running in a theatre which no one is allowed to leave. Ministry in their aggressive, chaotic composition are attempting to do just as Burroughs recommends--"cut music lines" and "cut word lines" by scrambling the codes through which commercial music manages the feeling and intellect of its audience. The products of commercial culture, including television and popular music, are here exposed as techno-drugs manipulating the addictive psychology of an audience that demands "just one fix."[15]

20. There are of course other sound-recordings by other artists which exemplify the tendencies outlined at the beginning of this article. I have chosen to focus on Burroughs because his work speaks to me, and through it I have been able to connect with contemporary sonic counter-culture. I can only assume that it is because Burroughs is surely nearing death that corporate America can push him. He has become a grand old man of counter-cultural resistance, just crazy enough that his intentions are not clear to the masses. Like that of Ministry and RevCo, his revolutionary message is partially submerged in texts that promote themselves as commercial pleasure-devices, such as the five reviewed here. I hope the reader will forgive me for celebrating the theoretical possibilities of music in a wholly verbal format, and for repeatedly relating the musical texts in question to others in other musical spectra. I may not have been able to say whether or not any of the CD's under review truly "kicked butt," but I hope I have been able to outline some of the ways in which butt can be kicked today with nothing more than a CD player, a sampler, a tape deck and a TV set.

Talk Back

Notes

1. Susan McClary and Robert Walser pose this question in their essay "Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock" (Frith and Goodwin 1990). Back

2. Rosalind Krauss (1979) has written of "sculpture in the expanded field" bounded by the limits of site-construction, axiomatic structures, marked sites and sculpture. Analogously, one might think of a four-cornered field bounded by music, soundscape, advertising and poetry. Her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," originally printed in October 8 (Spring 1979), appears in Foster, 1983. Back

3. Jenny's essay "La strategies de la forme" from Potéique 27 (1976) is referred to by Zurbrugg in his essay "Burroughs, Barthes and the Limits of Interxtuality" in the Burroughs issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (1984). Back

4. In his book Noise, French economist and writer Jacques Attali makes it plain that he intends "not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music" (Attali 1985: 4). Back

5. Besides Van Sant's and Cronenberg's film (the latter released in cooperation with a re-release of Burroughs's written work by Grove, his first American publisher), the current Burroughs revival has been fueled by Viking's publication of Burroughs's early work Queer (1985) and Interzone (1989) as well as the newly written The Cat Inside (1986) and The Western Lands (1987) and by the popularity of Burroughs-influenced cyberpunk science-fiction (particularly Gibson's Neuromancer (1984)). Back

6. "Twilight's Last Gleaming" is one of Burroughs's earliest and most often re-told tales, appearing in various forms at various times in Burroughs's career, including on Dead City Radio and in Interzone as well as (in a folded-in form) in Nova Express (1964). The tale is one Burroughs came up with as a young man in tandem with friend Kells Elvins, a black comedy in which all the "basic American rotteness" pent up in the Titanic's passengers and crew spills out when they have to run for the life-boats. Back

7. Other short sonic compositions to complement Burroughs's reading were contributed by Donald Fagen, Cheryl Hardwick, Lenny Pickett, Sonic Youth and Chris Stein. Back

8. This is ironically, for those familiar with American Prayer's "Lament for my Cock," followed by some amusingly banal pronouncements by Burroughs on the topic of snakes. Back

9. The speech rhythm problem is highlighted in a peculiar way by pieces in which Ras I. Zulu and Michael Franti read from the opening of Nova Express. This folded-in creation only barely hangs together when uttered by Burroughs, and gives a positively bizarre when read in Jamaican and afro-American speech rhythms. Back

10. In The Job (Odier 1974), Burroughs recommends several guerrilla tactics involving tape recorders and cameras for various purposes. One tactic, designed to shake the mind out of its habitual deference to authority, is to assemble a tape in which contradictory commands alternate at high speed. Back

11. See Burroughs's biographers Morgan (1988) and Miles (1992) for information on the role of cannabis in the composition of Naked Lunch and its experimental spin-offs. Back

12. The piece can be heard as an amusing retake of the many white blues rip-offs concerning mistreatment in Texas, such as Johnny Winter's "Dallas" or Creedence Clearwater Revival's "The Midnight Special". Its mood also recalls Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam. Back

13. The effect is similar to the one created by They Might Be Giant's "Theme from Flood" from Flood (1990). Back

14. My comparison is based on Philip Auslander's chapter on Kaufman and Bernhard in his 1992 book Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Back

15. At the risk of doing exactly what Frith and Goodwin decry, I must describe the cover art of Just One Fix. It is a multimedia painting by Burroughs himself, entitled "Last Chance Junction and Curse on Drug Hysterics" consisting of a montage of newspaper articles (an Ann Landers column on drugs, an AP clip about religious fundamentalists and the end of the world, and a photograph of a steam engine with the caption "Casey's last ride"), painted all around and over with random-looking squiggles of black and yellow. Back

Works Cited

Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959.

---. Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1964.

---. The Soft Machine. New York: Grove, 1967.

---. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.

---. The Western Lands. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

---. Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz. New York: Viking, 1991.

Foster, Hal. ed. The Anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.

Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew, eds. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Jenny, Laurent. "La stratgie de la forme". Poétique 27 (1976).

Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. London: Virgin, 1992.

Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. New York: Holt, 1988.

Odier, Daniel. The Job. New York: Grove, 1974.

Zurbrugg, Nicholas. "Burroughs, Barthes and the Limits of Intertextuality". Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1984).