There has been but a handful of consciously literary musicians since the unruly birth of rock and pop in the 20th century, among them Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Chris Cornell and, more recently, Sufjan Stevens. But two explosive writers irrevocably shaped the evolution, and rebellious leaps and plunges, of rock and then more experimental music.
One of them was a pasty-faced teenager born a century-and-a-half ago:
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
“I is someone else”: Arthur Rimbaud was a time bomb, a carbon-based hand grenade chucked into the placid hills and pastures of provincial French poetry, its rosy odes to femme and flora and picaresque sheep all soft white wool on soft green hillocks and Ah! The gentle blue of sky!
When Rimbaud began detonating at age 15, the elegant world of French letters exploded into beautiful, twitching limbs and aquatic dream-scapes flecked with horror and plunged in psychotropics. Heavens were collapsing and Venus with a rotting ulcer grinned in lust as little ponds imploded with dark amid the impossible divine of pain and insatiable hungers.
His poems would veer recklessly from pungently grotesque, childlike caricatures – speeding up the possible rhythms framed in a sheet of paper into dizzying speeds, like a textual version of the cartoons, the moving pictures of the next century – to soul-gasping beauty. There were feverishly brilliant visions of previously unthinkable possibilities.
“It was then I realized that to become a visionary – to become the first true poet of this century – I needed to seek every possible experience. I decided to become a genius. I decided to originate the future.” Arthur Rimbaud was around 16 when he intimated this to his (swiftly surpassed) mentor, the admired, gently adventurous poet Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud did not live to see it come to pass he, incredibly, lived up to this megalomaniac claim.
By the time Rimbaud, at the age of 18, had taken his vow of writerly silence – never touching a poem again – the poetic landscape was devastated: Sheep’s hoofs and charred breasts and broken lovers and smoking earth, vicious smells, but also strange drug-like vapors, and new, alien dialects come alive. The future would never be the same.
With the exception of Charles Baudelaire, the 19th century’s other poetic visionary, poetry before Rimbaud had been polite and neat, melodic and bovine. Its only beauty lay in oft gorgeously elegant structures. After Arthur Rimbaud, the canvas was shattered – the frames of the possible, even the potential! – were rent wide open.
His passionately bohemian life, poison wit (“your mind is almost as ugly as your body”) and the unrepentant genius of his inked visions left inextricable imprints on the lives and works of such 20th century mavericks as Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, the Beat poets, Bob Dylan and John Lennon – and just about every kid who ever ran away from home to start a garage band.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted”: William S. Burroughs embodied his century – dangerously adventurous, unsentimental, dark, self-polluting, poisonous and and a little too gifted for their own health. Despite a monstrous appetite for dangerous drugs, Burroughs (like fellow drug fiend Hunter S. Thompson) seemed to defy death purely out of spite – crimson middle finger raised in the face of society.
His unrelenting cynicism (he would have called it realism) made Arthur Rimbaud look like a daisy-picking dandy. His seminal work, 1959’s Naked Lunch, is a near-unreadable assault on human sensibilities, a cold hallucinogenic rant sliced up at random and thrown into the air to reassemble at will. Quite literally. Burroughs was the first literary adherent of the “cut-up” approach to art – assembling literary structures from ill-fitting, strangely resonant combinations of word forms. An unflinching commitment to push into unknown territories of experience and language pervaded his work and life, often hurtling him beyond coherence.
Burroughs’ influence spanned from the short golden gasp of the Beat age (he co-wrote his first novel with Jack Kerouac and was immortalized in both key Beat Generation novel On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry), through to influencing all manner of artists, from conceptual through visual, philosophic and, above all, musical. His no-punches-pulled rebellion against any prescribed ethics or aesthetics surged through the veins of punk, and especially the dirtier, syringe-stained neon of ’80s alternative rock.
He collaborated with everyone from jazz-noise-funk pioneer Bill Laswell and Tom Waits to Kurt Cobain, from Frank Zappa and John Cale to Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. He even graced the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Extracts from his cerebrum-searing texts are emblazoned as a dozen band names – including Steely Dan (after a dildo from Naked Lunch), MugWumps, the Insect Trust, the Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, to name the more memorable.
Mick Raubenheimer was born into the crudeness of 1979 Krugersdorp, Transvaal (now Gauteng), South Africa. He writes for the most part about adventurous music, women and God, which is a kind of equation. Contact Something Else! at [email protected].
There has been but a handful of consciously literary musicians since the unruly birth of rock and pop in the 20th century, among them Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Chris Cornell and, more recently, Sufjan Stevens. But two explosive writers irrevocably shaped the evolution, and rebellious leaps and plunges, of rock and then more experimental music.
One of them was a pasty-faced teenager born a century-and-a-half ago:
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
“I is someone else”: Arthur Rimbaud was a time bomb, a carbon-based hand grenade chucked into the placid hills and pastures of provincial French poetry, its rosy odes to femme and flora and picaresque sheep all soft white wool on soft green hillocks and Ah! The gentle blue of sky!
When Rimbaud began detonating at age 15, the elegant world of French letters exploded into beautiful, twitching limbs and aquatic dream-scapes flecked with horror and plunged in psychotropics. Heavens were collapsing and Venus with a rotting ulcer grinned in lust as little ponds imploded with dark amid the impossible divine of pain and insatiable hungers.
His poems would veer recklessly from pungently grotesque, childlike caricatures – speeding up the possible rhythms framed in a sheet of paper into dizzying speeds, like a textual version of the cartoons, the moving pictures of the next century – to soul-gasping beauty. There were feverishly brilliant visions of previously unthinkable possibilities.
“It was then I realized that to become a visionary – to become the first true poet of this century – I needed to seek every possible experience. I decided to become a genius. I decided to originate the future.” Arthur Rimbaud was around 16 when he intimated this to his (swiftly surpassed) mentor, the admired, gently adventurous poet Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud did not live to see it come to pass he, incredibly, lived up to this megalomaniac claim.
By the time Rimbaud, at the age of 18, had taken his vow of writerly silence – never touching a poem again – the poetic landscape was devastated: Sheep’s hoofs and charred breasts and broken lovers and smoking earth, vicious smells, but also strange drug-like vapors, and new, alien dialects come alive. The future would never be the same.
With the exception of Charles Baudelaire, the 19th century’s other poetic visionary, poetry before Rimbaud had been polite and neat, melodic and bovine. Its only beauty lay in oft gorgeously elegant structures. After Arthur Rimbaud, the canvas was shattered – the frames of the possible, even the potential! – were rent wide open.
His passionately bohemian life, poison wit (“your mind is almost as ugly as your body”) and the unrepentant genius of his inked visions left inextricable imprints on the lives and works of such 20th century mavericks as Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, the Beat poets, Bob Dylan and John Lennon – and just about every kid who ever ran away from home to start a garage band.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted”: William S. Burroughs embodied his century – dangerously adventurous, unsentimental, dark, self-polluting, poisonous and and a little too gifted for their own health. Despite a monstrous appetite for dangerous drugs, Burroughs (like fellow drug fiend Hunter S. Thompson) seemed to defy death purely out of spite – crimson middle finger raised in the face of society.
His unrelenting cynicism (he would have called it realism) made Arthur Rimbaud look like a daisy-picking dandy. His seminal work, 1959’s Naked Lunch, is a near-unreadable assault on human sensibilities, a cold hallucinogenic rant sliced up at random and thrown into the air to reassemble at will. Quite literally. Burroughs was the first literary adherent of the “cut-up” approach to art – assembling literary structures from ill-fitting, strangely resonant combinations of word forms. An unflinching commitment to push into unknown territories of experience and language pervaded his work and life, often hurtling him beyond coherence.
Burroughs’ influence spanned from the short golden gasp of the Beat age (he co-wrote his first novel with Jack Kerouac and was immortalized in both key Beat Generation novel On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry), through to influencing all manner of artists, from conceptual through visual, philosophic and, above all, musical. His no-punches-pulled rebellion against any prescribed ethics or aesthetics surged through the veins of punk, and especially the dirtier, syringe-stained neon of ’80s alternative rock.
He collaborated with everyone from jazz-noise-funk pioneer Bill Laswell and Tom Waits to Kurt Cobain, from Frank Zappa and John Cale to Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. He even graced the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Extracts from his cerebrum-searing texts are emblazoned as a dozen band names – including Steely Dan (after a dildo from Naked Lunch), MugWumps, the Insect Trust, the Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, to name the more memorable.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
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