From Kurt Cobain to The Beatles: William S. Burroughs’ significant influence on music
It’s impossible to understate the impact and importance of the Beat Generation. Bursting the literary world open, the era’s writers and poets completely disregarded form for something altogether more fun and wild. They welcomed modernity by throwing out the rules of the past.
Pioneering more contemporary and freer forms, the Beats refused to be confined by any one style. Writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara and more led the movement. However, despite being considered peers, very little connects the writers beyond attitude and ethos. Generally speaking, all of the Beat writers wrote about the world around them but to very different degrees, as Ginsberg tackled politics while O’Hara wrote specifically about the friends around him. The only unifying thread was a desire for literary freedom, to be able to write whatever they wanted, however they wanted, without any rules or confines.
No one took this further than Willam S. Burroughs. Considered the forefather of postmodern literature, Burroughs led the way in the Beat movement. The writer was prolific, with 18 novels and novellas, six short story collections and four essay collections. The obsession and interest in the writer has also led to several collections of his correspondence and letters being published as writers, fans, and artists alike scramble for a better understanding of his mind.
Of course, this burst of creative freedom has caught the attention of the world’s leading musicians, too. The influence of the Beat Generation expanded way beyond the literary world into all corners of culture. Their disregard for form and style encouraged artists of other mediums to do the same, and Burroughs pioneered the “cut-up method”, a style that would be adopted by musicians for generations to come. In his now-famed 1959 novel Naked Lunch, there is no obvious plot, just a series of passages written during drug-fuelled “episodes”, as the writer called them. Lumping all these different bits together results in a chaotic and trippy read.
Of his method, Burroughs said, “Cut-ups allow the future to leak through”. This would prove prophetic as the impact of his style was felt across literature, film and beyond. But he proved especially inspirational in music as countless past and present musicians cite the writer as a key influence.
Despite a lot of the Beat writers, including Burroughs and Ginsberg, facing censorship trials and book bans, their influence spread quickly throughout the US and America. It was a domino effect. In 1944, Ginsberg met Burroughs. In 1963, Ginsberg became close friends with Bob Dylan, introducing him to the world of the Beat poets and spreading Burroughs’ influence there. In 1965, The Beatles met their “idol” Dylan, becoming interested in his writing style and, in turn, in the Beats.
Stretching across the pond, spanning decades and genres, Burroughs’ impact on the music industry is huge.
How William S. Burroughs influenced music:
The Beatles
Throughout the 1960s, Burroughs moved to London, where he and Paul McCartney became unlikely friends, with the Liverpudlian musician even aiding in the writer’s process by lending him a recorder. “Burroughs and I hung out, and he’d borrowed my reel-to-reel a few times to work on his cut-ups,” McCartney recalls. The writer’s first influence on the Beatles came in the form of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, the band’s dark, gothic lyrical story of loneliness and death. “He actually got to see the song take shape when I sometimes used the spoken-word studio that we had set up in the basement of Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square,” McCartney remembers.
Montagu Square was home to the Indica Gallery and bookshop, something of a countercultural hub of the time. The hotspot sold Beat publications and was frequented by both The Beatles and Burroughs. The writer praised the musician’s work, as McCartney says, “When he got to hear the final version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, he said he was impressed by how much narrative I’d got into three verses.”
The praise from the Beat pioneer changed the course of the band forever. Their lyricism became less strictly structured, embracing the ethos of the writer. Burroughs’ impact on the band was so great that in 1967, he graced the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band alongside other world leaders and historic figures as a statement of his importance.
David Bowie
Burroughs’ impact on music stretched far into the 1970s. In 1974, Rolling Stone organised a two-way interview between two scene shakers as the man himself sat down with the great David Bowie.
While the interview struck up a clear mutual admiration between the artists, it fostered a total obsession in Bowie. After the conversation, he read each one of the writer’s works, began adopting his cut-up method for his lyricism, and shrugged off the more typical rock and pop structures heard on his earlier album for something altogether more experimental by the time Station To Station rolled around.
With the new album came a new character: The Thin White Duke, a highly controversial figure utterly inspired by Burroughs. In Naked Lunch, the writer described semen as a “thin white rope”, which is where Bowie got the name inspiration. He found the attitude in the text as well. The Thin White Duke was described by Bowie as being “a very Aryan, fascist type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all but who spouted a lot of neo-romance”. Taking influence from Burroughs’ drug-fuelled alter-ego, William Lee, Bowie seemed to adopt the sense of poetic recklessness that fuelled the whole Beat Generation.
Patti Smith
Though Burroughs’ influence stretched over the ocean, nowhere was it more substantial than in New York City. Musicians were rubbing shoulders with beat poets in real time as artists like Lou Reed, Mick Jagger and the Grateful Dead struck up close friendships with Burroughs. In the midst of New York’s artistic circles was a young Patti Smith.
Smith was especially influenced by the Beat Generation. In fact, it was Allen Ginsberg himself that gave her the push she needed to get up on stage and perform her poetry. Combining punk and literature, Smith’s lyricism and writing has always been inspired by things she had read.
Burroughs’ impact on Smith was so great that she dedicated the title track of her debut album to him. The opening part of ‘Horses’ focuses on a figure called “Johnny”, the protagonist in Burroughs’ 1971 novel The Wild Boys. Later in the song, Smith declares, “Go Rimbaud”, using the song to shout out her two biggest literary influences: the French poet and the American beat writer.
Beyond this shoutout, Burroughs’ influence is heard across all of Smith’s work as she weaves intricate and chaotic tapestries in her lyrics. Combining literary references, real-life observations, historical events and metaphors, her work is a perfect example of the writer’s cut-up method in action.
Duran Duran
Perhaps the most unlikely connection between Burroughs and the music scene comes through the New Wave pop band Duran Duran. Not quite as typically ‘cool’ as Burroughs or the other artists he inspired, it was the ‘80s duo that were almost tasked with soundtracking a film adaptation of the 1971 novel The Wild Boys.
The idea came when the band’s music video director, Russell Mulcahy, wanted to make a film of the novel. The band wrote the track ‘The Wild Boys’ for the film, but when the movie never came to fruition due to the novel’s pornographic content, they released it anyway. There’s no knowledge of what Burroughs thought of the song or the band, but his impact was written into music history when the track’s music video became the most expensive video ever made at the time.
Sonic Youth
Burroughs’ impact stretched decades. Over 30 years after the publication of his first novel, the writer was still a key point of reference to musicians. In 1990, after the rock scene of the 1970s died off and grunge took its place, Burroughs got involved with artists like Kurt Cobain, R.E.M, and, most notably, Sonic Youth.
In 1990, Burroughs decided to release a new spoken word album and called upon an all-star cast of contributors and collaborators. Proving just how respected the writer was in the music world, he managed to get Blondie’s Chris Stein, The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on board alongside all of Sonic Youth. The supergroup provided musical accompaniment for Burroughs’ performances on Dead Radio City.
To Thurston Moore, Burroughs was a God. “He was very radical to me as a writer,” he said. Especially loving the writer’s musicality, he added, “It was very curious and intriguing, and it was very musical, what he wrote.” On the deluxe version of their 1990 album Goo, the band shared ‘Dr Benways House’, a noise-rock instrumental taken from Burroughs’ spoken-word album.
Kurt Cobain
Burroughs clearly valued the grunge scene as he also struck up a friendship with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. The writer was Cobain’s idol, and the story goes that the grunge icon was desperate to collaborate with the writer, sending him letters requesting a meeting or for Burroughs to send a recording of him reading one of his obscure 1970s short stories.
Burroughs obliged, and what followed is probably the most experimental output of Cobain’s tragically short career. Both artists were troublemakers and genre shakers, so their kinship was to be expected. Eventually, in 1993, Cobain went to Burroughs’s home in Kansas, where they worked on ‘The Priest They Called Him’, putting Burroughs’ words to music.
Cobain left elated. Burroughs’ impact is felt across Nirvana’s discography, never shying away from grim or taboo images just as the Beat writer didn’t. But for the writer, Cobain left a sad impression. After the musician’s death, Thurston Moore reported that Burroughs’ was greatly impacted, recalling, “I always remember William talking to me about it. He had this look in his eye like: ‘Why would anybody take their own life?’ He couldn’t make sense of it. Why would you do that? Why would you disturb your energy and your cosmic soul like that? You don’t do that. You protect it. You have to fight for it.”
William S. Burroughs’ influence doesn’t stop there, either.
Across all genres and decades of music there are stories of the Beat writer inspiring musicians. Steely Dan got their name from a passage in Naked Lunch. Joy Division’s track ‘Interzone’ was named after one of his short stories. Artists including Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, King Crimson, The Doors and more all cite Burroughs and The Beat Generation as influences, paying direct homage to him in their music.
It’s hard to think of a singular figure quite as impactful as this literary legend.
