Kurt Cobain. David Bowie. Thom Yorke. Three huge names in music famous for their unusual and profound lyrics. Can it be that they are or were simply part of the divine? With ancient knowledge that us mere mortals will never understand? Are we destined to idolise them, whilst still trying to figure out what rhymes with “fuck parliament”?
Well yes….But also, no.
People have been analysing or mimicking these artists for years and one method that seems to appear repeatedly is the Burroughs method. In this article we will look at how this method is achieved and some suggestions on how you can start incorporating it into your songwriting and beat that writer’s block.
But first everyone loves an origin story.
If you don’t you can skip this whoooooooole section. I don’t mind. Honest…I only spent time researching and writing it. But hey man, you do you.
History
The Burroughs method or “cut-up technique” as a concept has roots in Dadaism, a European Avant-Garde art movement that looked to break all the rules of logic and reason in art. This would involve poems with nonsense words and sounds rather than any coherency or linear structure. The movement was also heavily involved in the use of collages. Mixing and matching everyday objects to create an assemblage or photo montage. Attempting to make scissors and glue the new paintbrush and water.
Their passion for collage would spill over from the visual arts to the written word some time around the 1920’s and is best described in a manifesto written by multi-medium artist Tristan Tzara (suspiciously found on the Radiohead website):
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
This method would later be rediscovered during the Beat generation of the 1960’s and popularised by writer William S. Burroughs. Get it? Burroughs method. Didn’t invent it, but he got his name on it. During the mid 50’s shortly after writing his novel “Naked Lunch” (A book written and designed so that the chapters could be read in any order) Burroughs learned of the cut-up method from his friend Brion Gysin. Gysin was experimenting with the technique by cutting up words and sentences from newspaper clippings and rearranging them to create new juxtaposing sentences.
In the late 1960’s the method evolved further through the poets Howard W. Bergerson and J. A. Lindon into a technique they called vocabularyclept poetry. With this method poets would take poems they had written and cut them up to rearrange them. This method allowed them to maintain the stanza and length whilst staying true to the spirit of the poem. Bergerson pioneered this idea by taking his poem “Winter Retrospect” and rearranging the poem so all the words were in alphabetical order and challenged his readers (including Lindon) to further play with his poem. This scheme would be later be played with by Dave Kapell who attached the words to magnets and play with them on his fridge. So now you know where the idea for fridge letters came from.
If you made it this far well done. you can now say fuck you to all the philistines who skipped this section to get straight to the “So how does this help me?” part.
“So how does this help me?”
I’m glad you asked.
The methods I described above are EXACTLY how the artists I started this article with wrote their songs.
Kurt Cobain would cut out lines from his poetry and rearrange them to create songs like “Lounge Act”, “Heart Shaped Box” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. In his words “My lyrics are total cut-up. I take lines from different poems that I’ve written. I build on a theme if I can, but sometimes I can’t even come up with an idea of what the song is about.”
David Bowie would use the same idea and also clip words from newspapers, books and magazines to create songs like “You Better Hang on to Yourself”, “Moonage Daydream” and “Girl Loves Me”. Bowie being Bowie also found an easier method by using a computer program in the 90’s instead of cutting the words out himself. In an interview with the BBC Bowie described that “I take articles out of newspapers, poems that I've written, pieces of other people's books, and put them all into this little warehouse, this container of information, and then hit the random button and it will randomize everything.”
For the album Kid A, Thom Yorke would take several phrases of lyrics and put them into a hat to pull out and use over the music he and the band were creating.
Cool huh? See what I did there? Full circle baby.
If this hasn’t given you a clear enough idea of how to use the cut-up method here is what you do:
Write some shit. cut it up. rearrange the words by hand or pull them out of a hat. done.
Go to www.languageisavirus.com and use the cut up engine. Copy and paste yours and/or other peoples poems, articles and/or facebook statuses in to the engine and cut it up. copy down any interesting phrases. combine these phrases any way you want to. You can even use this article! done.
Do the above, but fit those phrases into multiple songs.
If you have friends you can use the Exquisite Corpse method! Pick a theme. Cut up a poem or write a line that fits this theme. The next person does the same without seeing what you wrote. keep going for as long as you want. Put it all together. Done.
You might recognise this method from when you were a kid. Did you ever fold a piece of paper multiple times and you and your friends would take it in turns to draw the next part of a body on each fold? That. That’s an exquisite corpse.
Happy cutting you fucking Emos.
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