Book Review #21: William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock'n'Roll

How rockers venerated Beat legend

William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock’n’Roll by Casey Rae (Austin: University Of Texas Press, 2019)

WILLIAM Seward Burroughs had an ambivalent relationship with rock music to say the least. No fan of that burgeoning post-Presley formula, the novelist nonetheless became unavoidably entangled in this new culture because purveyors of recordings from psychedelia to punk, electronica to hip-hop, were drawn to his extraordinary creative techniques – particularly the cut-up – and his drug-friendly ideology.

So, even though Burroughs had a genuine distaste for much of the music that treated him as a fertile influence, he was sufficiently canny to see that his association with the innovative outpourings of these various hip subcultures would do him no damage. Rather it would increase his literary profile with generations of younger listeners.

Anyway, while this groundbreaking writer had a deep aversion to the peace and love messages of the hippy enclave, by the time a new wave had swept away most of the vestiges of the Woodstock nation, the dystopian visions of Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Exterminator seemed to chime with the nocturnal nihilism of CBGBs and it was not long before he was being hailed a hero and ‘the Godfather of Punk’.

But, to Casey Rae’s William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock‘n’Roll, a recently published and welcome attempt to consider the writer and his impact on rock and rockers in a concentrated and user-friendly examination.

Why welcome? Well I’ve been on a personal 20-year mission to interrogate the crossovers between the Beat Generation and the singer-songwriters and bands who have emerged since the mid-1960s and it’s good to have a fellow traveller pursuing further routes that I have largely examined so far through the lens of Kerouac and Ginsberg.

One thing I would say to potential readers of this item: don’t be put off by the fact it is issued by an academic publisher in University of Texas Press. While the Beats increasingly have become the subject of scholarly attention post-millennium, this book is written in a fashion that is more journalistic than ivory tower and should therefore appeal to a general audience.

Pictured above: Kurt Cobain with William Burroughs

That said, serious researchers will not be sorry to hear that citations – gathered at the end rather than cluttering the main text – support Rae’s arguments as he unpicks and unpacks what he describes as ‘the Burroughsverse’. Furthermore, the index is wide ranging and reliable, though a bibliography would have been welcomed.

The usual suspects are in there – Bowie, Jimmy Page, Genesis P-Orridge, Kurt Cobain – in a narrative that is refreshingly thematic instead of chronological but an injection of fresh renegades join the parade – Laurie Anderson, Ministry, Hüsker Dü, DJ Spooky and many others – giving you extra bang for your buck.

Burroughs may well have scratched his head at this wide-ranging celebration of often unlikely alliances, but the landscape of leftfield music-making would have been considerably less interesting but for the grit this unique American man of letters lent to the oyster.

As Rae states, Burroughs was ‘a spectral figure who haunted the cultural underground and helped usher it into the mainstream.’ In the process, he ‘helped to accelerate an evolution in sound that continues to reverberate across continents and eras.' This entertaining and informative 300-page survey goes a long way towards confirming that opinion.

Editor’s note: This review first appeared in the UK magazine Beat Scene, Issue No. 93, Summer 2019