Rip it up and start again

A certain kind of cut appeals to Burroughs, Bowie and their followers. What is the appeal of this radical technique a quarter of a century after El Hombre Invisible’s passing?

THE CUT-UP has assumed a mythical, almost mystical, status in the art-making of the avant-garde of the last hundred years: an often spectacular disruption in word and image undermining linear narratives, dismissing conventional representation, shattering expectation, and challenging the very notion of creativity as a mirror to perceived reality.

The method, which dates from at least the Dadaists of the 1910s, tested head-on the notion that the activities and emotions of the modern age could be depicted through standard prose forms or straightforward figurative imagery. A radically different vocabulary was required to forge a fresh, if oblique, sense of the world, the very necessary attraction of abstraction.

Artists on the frontline argued that the alienating effect of the ever-expanding city, the devastation of war and revolution, the terrifying powers of destruction posed by emerging military technology and, all too soon, the incineration of the human species, meant that fragmented voices and cracked paintings were required to convey the disturbing madness of the twentieth century.

Novelists and poets – from Eliot to Joyce, Dos Passos and Ginsberg – painters, sculptors and photographers – from Picasso to Hannah Höch and Robert Rauschenberg – found multiple ways to refract the light of contemporaneous experience in all its confusing and confounding cacophony, fractured pieces re-assembled in disorientating ways.

Beat giant William Burroughs, who died a quarter of a century ago next week, most famously resurrected the cut-up as a creative system in the 1950s when he and British-Canadian artist Brion Gysin, both, at the time, domiciled in that great city of innovation Paris, accidentally sliced through a newspaper stack and discovered, by splicing together the two halves of a disparate text, they could construct new and random articles. The two also developed a related tactic called the fold-in.

Burroughs utilised a version of these concepts on a series of early 1960s novels – the so-called ‘Nova Trilogy’ embracing The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964) – and drew critical acclaim for his outrageous and high-risk dabbling. But the idea behind this process was, I would argue, perhaps more appealing than the actual product. Not that this deterred a new body of disciples, to which we will come.

Cut-up for Burroughs was a logical progression, a fresh and exciting direction for a new literature, and certainly not a terminus. He felt film, a medium to which he was drawn and which applied jump cut editing and an almost constant rejection of the linear, was a clear exercise in the technique. In his own aesthetic mind, he could see no reason why prose could not be enriched by a similar deviation and discontinuity.

For his acolyte David Bowie, the novelist’s potentially unsettling credo had particular appeal. After bringing theatre, mime and movement to his early 1970s rock persona to huge effect, he added a Burroughsian twist to his songwriting, penning lyrics then cutting them up and reassembling the words and lines in chance order.

Bowie, like Burroughs, had a deep affection for the tropes of science fiction. So it is perhaps not so surprising that the glam rocker decided around this time to adapt George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four for a forthcoming album. The Orwell estate denied him the opportunity to make transparent reference to the book, but Diamond Dogs was the record which eventually emerged in 1974 with cut-up lyrics a significant feature.

By the mid-1970s, Bowie, not unlike his literary hero, had become entangled in some serious drug distractions and his behaviour became increasingly unpredictable but his workaholic nature drove him forward as global superstar. In ‘Cracked Actor’, the BBC’s legendary 1975 documentary following his US tour to promote that very album, he actually played out his lyric-making process on camera with direct reference to the cut-up and to Burroughs himself.

Bowie explained his motivations in a later 2008 conversation, remarking: ‘I used it for igniting anything that may have been in my imagination. You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects, creating a kind of “story ingredients” list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections, then mix them up and reconnect them.

‘You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations,’ he said. ‘You can use them as is or, if you have a craven need to not lose control, bounce off these ideas and write whole new sections.’

Others saw appeal in the Burroughs/Bowie system – a faith in its alchemy or appropriation as a form of flattery, or perhaps a little of both – and adapted it in various ways. Patti Smith, particularly on her 1975 debut album Horses and in her poetry collection Kodak (1972), for instance, showed evidence of such imitation, and Throbbing Gristle frontman Genesis P-Orridge would draw on its lessons, too, eventually collaborating with the Naked Lunch writer and Gysin.

By the 1980s, electronic innovators Cabaret Voltaire, christened in honour of a Dada meeting haunt, and industrial activists Ministry would also name-check Burroughs’ philosophy. In the subsequent decade, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana referred to the cut-up method as a creative practice and then Radiohead lyricist Thom Yorke would cite the application of a similar lyrical chemistry for songs on the 2000 album Kid A.

Further, Yorke included instructions on ‘How to make a Dada poem’ on the band’s website at the time. Which is almost where we came in, as Dadaist verse smith Tristan Tzara had published a similar manifesto during the First World War.

Whatever the significance of the cut-up – and few appear to share Burroughs’ somewhat superstitious view that it might even open windows on the future through the buried messages it reveals – it has become an important device in the toolkit of a number of influential music makers, left-field figures who have admired the concept sufficiently to use them to chop up texts – lyrical or musical – in adventurous ways.

We might even take the view that hip hop, the greatest driving force in Anglo-American popular music of the last 50 years, is the ultimate example of cut-up as a core production strategy, evidenced in its words and sounds, rhythms and samples. But the excitements of that incredible narrative and its associations with another stream of poetic history, from Amiri Baraka to Gil Scott-Heron, Chuck D to DJ Spooky and Kendrick Lamar, must wait for another time.

Note: See also ‘How Labi got cut-up tips from Bowie’, February 22nd, 2022; ‘Genesis and revelations’, October 19th, 2021; and ‘Cabs casualty confirmed’, September 21st, 2021, all published in Rock and the Beat Generation