William Burroughs
Spare Ass Annie (and other tales)

"I awoke from the Sickness at forty-five years old, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health... the Sickness is drug addiction and for fifteen years I was an unrepentant addict".

The enigmatic Burroughs, with pronounced homosexual urges, a strong predilection for firearms and crime and a natural inclination to break all the rules, was a guiding light of the Beat Generation and was the only member of that Movement who continued to write, enjoying literary credibility and great admiration not only in the academic world but also in the musical and cinematic realms. William, born in 1914, was a cold, glacial, ruthless, and terribly cynical personality in his desperate visionary lucidity and never fully adhered to the movement which had brought him so much in terms of fame and fortune. In fact, he did not come "from the street" like Kerouac or Ginsberg but was a snob-aristocrat of upper-middle-class extraction, who had studied at Harvard and in Europe, setting up a "regular" family without giving rise to second thoughts or incoherent and over-the-top attitudes like many more or less illustrious colleagues.

His "desperate visionarity" was entirely "inside" his mind, and to contain it, he absolutely needed an "exaggerated normality" to counterbalance his mental imbalance. Besides many novels, his hallucinatory and somewhat cryptic existential imagination (stimulated by the abundant and indiscriminate use of LSD, heroin, and experimental drugs), in recent years, he also dedicated himself to music with poetry records, including this "Spare Ass Annie" from 1993, recorded with the Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy, a hip-hop band from San Francisco, led by Michael Franti (former leader of Spearhead who has just released a splendid new work!) and Rono Tse (now ex-Mystic Journeymen), with the addition of jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter who saw in the "old Burroughs" the possibility of giving greater depth and incisiveness to their already sharp and cutting songs against American society.

In "Spare Ass", there is talk of violence in hip-hop, racial and homosexual discrimination, AIDS, homelessness, theft, corrupt police, and the death penalty... in short, the same themes dear to the now 75-year-old writer who saw, in the musical collaboration, a further "expansion" of his expressive possibilities beyond the classic sheet of paper. It's nice to hear his scratchy and dirty voice declaiming his visions in contrast with the free-jazz-style and hip-hop of the group that colors with notes the evocative atmospheres narrated by the Bard. Interesting then are the small "spoken" intervals of a few seconds and a few notes framing the sharp words of a William Burroughs as cynical and sharp as ever. Some texts were written using the cut-up technique, that is, taking prose pieces of his or others, cutting them, and then randomly assembling them (as was the case in "The Soft Machine", "The Ticket That Exploded", and "Nova Express"). Burroughs believed that the Modern Man is too bound to schemes, conditioning, and rules and that, to rise and reach a higher level of awareness, he had to "let words, images, and free associations flow freely" freeing himself from the thousand chains that bind him to the limiting earthly reality, for this reason, like Jim Morrison, he advocated and praised the use of drugs and a liberal and unconditional attitude towards sex as a "connection and instrument with the Higher Self".

Burroughs' art also manifested with the Yellow Magic Orchestra of Riuichi Sakamoto, Laurie Anderson, Duran Duran (inspired by him for Wild Boys), Kurt Cobain (with the CD "They called him The Priest"), Sonic Youth, DJ-musicians like Howie B. or Fatboy Slim, Moby while from the cinematic point of view Burroughs appears or is an inspirational source in the films "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" by Gus van Sant, "The Naked Lunch" by David Cronenberg (based on his masterpiece) and the famous cult movie "Tetsuo, The Iron Man" by Tsukamoto.

A record not exactly easy, at times from another time with 1950s symphonies (the track "Dr. Benway Operates), almost soul pieces ("Last Words" with Ras I. Zulu), funky ("The Words Of Dutch Schultz"), ambient ("Mildred Pierce Reporting"), ecclesial interludes (the attack of "Last Words With Michael Franti"), but if you have a good grasp of American slang, you perceive that it is a "felt" and disenchanted work in making us listen, through exclusively spoken verses with a hoarse and deep voice, the bizarre and noir stories of this "homosexual drug addict black sheep from a good family" (as some particularly hostile fellow writers later defined him for his arrogance and that sense of "desperate perversion" that accompanied him until his death at the venerable age of 83). Bau Bye!