This book tells the story of his personal connection to musicians and how his influence continues to echo more than twenty years after his death.

That’s from the introduction to this book, and it’s a good yet imperfect synopsis; this tome manages, better than any other that I have read on William S. Burroughs, to both incorporate all pop-music elements that I’ve heard and previously not heard of, and also provide meaningful and deep analysis of that.

Not only does the author, Casey Rae, delve into the music, the musicians, and wrap all of that up with how Burroughs reacted, but also provides valuable context and analysis of how Burroughs’s work influenced both artists and entire musical genres.

Here was a homosexual drug addict, born in the Gilded Age, who killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell and wrote infamous prose featuring orgasmic executions, shape-shifting aliens, and all manner of addicts, sadists, and creepy crawlies. But there exists a real person within the legend, a man who exhibited genuine kindness and hospitality to those who knew him, including many of the musicians discussed in this book.

There is a lot of hyperkinetic movement in this book; this is good, as Burroughs was undoubtedly hyperkinetic himself, not in a stressful manner, but more in that he kept his antennae to more than one world at a time, often while ingesting different types of drugs, which further expanded his consciousness.

Like this book says:

In many ways, Burroughs is a cipher, a puzzle to decode. Like a multifaceted prism or mirror, Burroughs reflects different things to different people depending on their own interests or agendas. To some, Burroughs is a junkie priest offering hardboiled wisdom from the narcotic underground. To others, he is a dark magus whose occult philosophies paved the way for today’s DIY sorcerers. Still others—especially recording artists and songwriters—find inspiration in his creative methods, including cut-up text and tape-splicing. That there are so many different ways to engage with Burroughs’ work and worldview is key to the perpetuation of his influence. It allows other artists to take his vision forward, often in mutated form. Over time, this gravelly voiced son of midwestern privilege has become like a space-borne virus from one of his books, hopping from host to host, medium to medium, each strain transforming culture in profound, though sometimes obscure, ways. This is just how he would have wanted it.

If you’re wondering just how much of Burroughs that seeped into musical culture, just check this short list:

It’s hard to imagine sample- and remix-based music without Burroughs, or at least without the artists he inspired—David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, and Coil among them. Hip-hop and electronic acts like Michael Franti, DJ Spooky, and Justin Warfield embrace Burroughsian ideas in their work, and a few were lucky enough to have collaborated with him.

Arena conquerors U2 used video cutups on massive global tours and sought Burroughs out for their 1997 video for “The Last Night on Earth”—his last filmed appearance. Countless bands got their monikers from Burroughs’ novels or incorporated his phrases in song titles and lyrics. Steppenwolf, who are credited with bringing the term “heavy metal” to music, borrowed the phrase from Burroughs. Then there’s Steely Dan, who famously took their name from a state-of-the-art dildo in Naked Lunch.

And there are others—such as the Soft Machine, Nova Mob, Wild Boys, and the Mugwumps—to name but a few. Iggy Pop and Patti Smith lifted lines directly from Burroughs and weren’t shy about letting the world know. At one point, synth-poppers Duran Duran attempted to make a full-length film based on their video for “Wild Boys,” a song that took its inspiration from a Burroughs novel of the same name.

More recently, psychedelic rockers Howlin Rain borrowed the title for a song that bandleader Ethan Miller described as an homage to Burroughs. “There is little that we find astonishing about the present American landscape in all its chaos and turmoil that wasn’t uttered in a fearsome, frothing monotone of absolute contempt by Burroughs a long, long time ago,” Miller told Relix Magazine.

In the ’90s, Burroughs didn’t travel much anymore, but plenty of notables came to him. The final decade of his life saw him hosting the likes of Kurt Cobain, Sonic Youth, and members of R.E.M. and Ministry at his red bungalow in Lawrence. In 1992, bassist and producer Bill Laswell released The Western Lands, based on Burroughs’ book of the same name.

That same year, Ministry sampled Burroughs in the song “Just One Fix”; he also appeared in the video. Burroughs collaborated with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy for Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, released in 1993. Burroughs and Cobain released a record together, The “Priest” They Called Him, shortly before Cobain’s suicide in 1994. In 1996, Burroughs teamed up with R.E.M. for a cover of their song “Star Me Kitten” and time-traveled back to the 1960s for a bizarre mash-up with the Doors, “Is Everybody In?.”

That’s only a few of the countless examples of how Burroughs directly, or indirectly, affected popular culture, and still does. I mean, David Bowie still used cut-up techniques while making his last album, “Blackstar“.

Also, Burroughs’s words on The Word Virus is very contagious, and Rae explains this in an easy-to-read way:

He predicted a future where minds would be literally infected by “very small units of sound and image” distributed en masse and electronically, which we see in today’s meme wars on social media and at certain message boards like 4Chan, where hordes of young, mostly male raconteurs engage in ceaseless rage attacks against tolerance and reason. “Storm the citadels of the Enlightenment,” Burroughs once wrote. It is rapidly becoming a truism that on the Internet, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” to borrow one of his favorite turns of phrase. The stories captured in these pages demonstrate that Burroughs not only foresaw but may even have helped initiate our increasingly chaotic present and uncertain future.

One of the main themes throughout this book, and also Burroughs’s writing, was Control and the idea of language as a virus:

Commoditized as it may be, no one would argue against music’s power to move the masses, even in today’s so-called distraction economy. In 2014, hip-hop producer Pharrell inspired millions in every corner of the world to make fan videos for his song “Happy.” The track exploded on YouTube, a site whose global reach and influence has come to define “viral.” These days record labels, movie studios, artists, and political candidates all seek to capitalize on contagion.

This is the modern media hustle, where you’re either a pusher or a mark. Burroughs died nearly a decade before YouTube was a glimmer in its developers’ eyes, but he was a lifelong student of influence; specifically, how the virus of word and sound can shape the destiny of humankind. As he explained in 1986:

My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C: an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence.

But there’s an upside: language can also be used to liberate by short-circuiting preprogrammed ideas and associations. Burroughs believed humanity is held back by constraints imposed by hostile external forces that express themselves in our reality as various aspects of the Establishment. Using fragments of word, sound, and image, reordered and weaponized, Burroughs sought to dismantle Control and its systems. His stance inspired other artists across generations and genres to use similar methods to rattle the status quo in ways that even he could not anticipate. You’ll get to know them, and their connections to Burroughs, as his story unfolds.

[…]

In Burroughs’ philosophy, the most important thing an artist can do is fight back by attacking the Control apparatus—that is, the prerecording that constrains us to Control’s script. Insurgence is accomplished through “playback,” a technique where reality—as represented by its media artifacts—is cut up, cut in, or otherwise disrupted. Playback can also reveal aspects of reality that were previously hidden—like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz or seeing the hidden code comprising the Matrix.

Naturally, the book mentions Burroughs’s cut-ups:

Burroughs would spend hours recording, rewinding, slicing, and manipulating tape in order to produce his audio cut-ups. He can be heard explaining the method on “Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut Ups,” a track from the LP Break Through in Grey Room (Sub Rosa, 1986): The first tape recorder cut-ups were simply extensions of cutups on paper. There are many ways of doing these, but here’s one way: you record, say, ten minutes on the recorder. Then you spin the reel backwards or forwards without recording, stop at random, and cut in a phrase. Now, of course when you’ve cut in that phrase, you’ve wiped out whatever’s there, and you have a new juxtaposition.

Now, how random is random? We know so much that we don’t consciously know that we know, that perhaps the cut-up was not random. The operator, on some level, knew just where he was cutting in. Further results can be heard on Nothing Here Now But the Recordings—a 1981 Burroughs LP originally released on Industrial Records, the label of UK noise pioneers Throbbing Gristle, and recently reissued under the Dais imprint. Here Burroughs’ sandpaper incantations are interlaced with disembodied broadcasts and socalled “electronic voice phenomenon,” or EVP. The overall product is disorienting and can hardly be described as musical. Still, one can see why Patti Smith referred to Burroughs as “a shaman . . . someone in touch with other levels of reality.”

This book does delve into areas such as his wife’s death—whom Burroughs shot to death in a tragic Wilhelm Tell-like accident—his very close relationship with Brion Gysin, his travels through cities like Tangers and New York City (both where he lived for some time), his interests in the supernatural and cats, meeting Patti Smith, David Bowie, other celebs, and, naturally, writing "Naked Lunch":

As exploratory as rock music would get in the coming decades, it still pales in comparison to the headfuck that is Naked Lunch. Any number of musicians have attempted to capture the novel’s essence, either in spirit or through direct reference. Arch jazz-rockers Steely Dan took their name from a dildo mentioned in the book (“Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: ‘Steely Dan III from Yokohama,’ she says, caressing the shaft.”) Post-punks Joy Division recorded “Interzone,” named after the book’s most outlandish location, for their debut. Electro act Klaxxons have a tune called “Atlantis to Interzone.” The alt-country band Clem Snide took their name from a recurring Burroughs character who first appeared in Naked Lunch. The Mugwumps, a 1960s folk act, also borrowed from the book, as did psychedelic improv act the Insect Trust. The list goes on.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the legendary San Francisco imprint City Lights told Allen Ginsberg that no one would risk printing this “flow of junk and jizzom,” and he was nearly correct.

Altogether, there’s been a vacuum for this book, and it fills it nicely; even though the book is somewhat repetitive at times, it still holds up to both intellectual examination and has style, the mix of the two being hard to come by in success; this book pulls that off, with flair.

This book is original, well written, and a complete payoff. To everybody who’s both interested in Burroughs from a musical perspective or otherwise, this is a very good book. ( )