As Black Sabbath, Paranoid and Master Of Reality get the reissue treatment, John Doran revisits them and the birth of heavy metal
http://thequietus.com
There were a lot of reasons to hate misogynist, gun toting, wife-murdering, paedophile, sex-tourist, heroin-glamorising, trust-funded, downwardly-mobile, Nike-advertising, mumbo-jumbo spouting, self-hating human jism stain William Seward Bourroughs. But let’s be fair to the old cadaver for a second; it isn’t quite spot on to call him a sweetcorn-detailed turd floating in the otherwise crystal clear waters of creative writing. For every three bad books he turned out there was always one touched with genius such as Naked Lunch or Junky. It’s just that when he was bad he stank. Reading The Ticket That Exploded is like having a social anthropologist in the full throes of dementia, after a week of drinking carbolic oil and withdrawing from opiates; dropping his trousers bending over in front of you, meticulously and digitally parting his sphincter and unleashing a stinging jet of foul diarrhoea straight into your gaping mouth.
One of the many cultural atrocities that he bequeathed to us was the infernally piss poor concept of the cut up. WSB wanted to step up his concepts of ‘automatic’ writing, and one way he achieved this was to physically cut his prose up into sentences, place them in a hat and then rearrange them at random. Now, at least Old Bill had a certain flair with the sentence, but his legacy is a herd of third-formesque copycat poets squirting their own jets of effluence into the ether. To be fair it is a very egalitarian art form as anyone can do it. I’ve had a go myself here: Grip a fucking get idiots you dullard. So given all this, why do I love him? Because he invented Heavy fucking Metal.
As Black Sabbath, Paranoid and Master Of Reality get the reissue treatment, John Doran revisits them and the birth of heavy metal http://thequietus.com
There were a lot of reasons to hate misogynist, gun toting, wife-murdering, paedophile, sex-tourist, heroin-glamorising, trust-funded, downwardly-mobile, Nike-advertising, mumbo-jumbo spouting, self-hating human jism stain William Seward Bourroughs. But let’s be fair to the old cadaver for a second; it isn’t quite spot on to call him a sweetcorn-detailed turd floating in the otherwise crystal clear waters of creative writing. For every three bad books he turned out there was always one touched with genius such as Naked Lunch or Junky. It’s just that when he was bad he stank.
Reading ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ is like having a social anthropologist in the full throes of dementia, after a week of drinking carbolic oil and withdrawing from opiates; dropping his trousers bending over in front of you, meticulously and digitally parting his sphincter and unleashing a stinging jet of foul diarrhoea straight into your gaping mouth. One of the many cultural atrocities that he bequeathed to us was the infernally piss poor concept of the cut up. WSB wanted to step up his concepts of ‘automatic’ writing, and one way he achieved this was to physically cut his prose up into sentences, place them in a hat and then rearrange them at random. Now, at least Old Bill had a certain flair with the sentence, but his legacy is a herd of third-formesque copycat poets squirting their own jets of effluence into the ether. To be fair it is a very egalitarian art form as anyone can do it. I’ve had a go myself here: Grip a fucking get idiots you dullard. So given all this, why do I love him? Because he invented Heavy fucking Metal.
The term comes from his maddeningly pointless 1964 work of sci-fi hackery The Nova Express, via The Soft Machine, and was seized on and popularised by walking drug pudding Lester Bangs and biker rock bezerkers Steppenwolf (in their Easy Rider anthem ‘Born To Be Wild’) and was primed and loaded waiting to be applied generally the next decade.
