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Been listening to recordings of William S. Burroughs this week, and—reflecting on how the death of Burroughs meant, for me, less the loss of a writer than the loss of that voice—started thinking about how spoken word and music work with (and occasionally against) each other.
Burroughs recorded fairly prolifically. Call Me Burroughs, the earliest commercial recording, is also the sparsest—just the voice, with a border-radio slap-echo that makes the thing sound like an emergency broadcast from the Interzone. On Dead City Radio, producer Hal Willner's high concept was to pair Burroughs's texts with music from the NBC orchestral archives: on some tracks, it works—"Thanksgiving Prayer" and "Kill the Badger," especially, gain a demented-Americana effect from the treatment—but the disc falters badly in its second half (although some of that is down to the texts—Willner inexplicably has Burroughs read from the Bible, instead of his own work, deploying repurposed Ten Commandments-style music, giving the impression that suddenly this is a Hal Willner album, guest-starring Burroughs). I haven't heard the sequel, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, where Willner and Burroughs are joined by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, but I can't say it sounds particularly promising.
Willner also worked with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg on The Lion For Real, and the results, again, did nothing for me. Ginsberg was never as commanding a voice as Burroughs, but he had a certain wry charm: the Steve Swallow lite-jazz backing did him no favors here, however.
Back to Burroughs, though: one project that works really well, IMHO, is one that sounds like a disaster on paper—the album Seven Souls, by Bill Laswell's funk band Material. Laswell's approach is to force the texts into a song format: that is, the band locks into a vamp as Burroughs intones a section of the text (the "verse," as it were), then moves into an instrumental refrain or bridge: Burroughs's voice returns when the vamp returns—just like the singer in a band. It's odd, but terrifically effective.
Laswell and members of Material worked with Hakim Bey, laying down soundscapes behind reading from T.A.Z. Did away with songforms entirely, here—it was mostly swooshes and rumbles, as I recall. Not terrible, but slightly pointless.
Then there's Ken Nordine, genius that he is: in his work, though, the music is part of the point...
What makes for good spoken-word-with-music? Are certain genres of music more conducive than others to this treatment? Is there a formula for the alchemy by which a text and a tune complement each other, creating a whole greater than the sum of the parts? Examples and analyses encouraged. |
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