Casey Rae > Quotes

“Burroughs’ conversation with Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale covers a dizzying array of topics—from Jordache jeans to religious fundamentalism to the likelihood of America becoming a fascist state. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny: JOHN CASALE: William, you and David Bowie had a discussion in Rolling Stone in 1974 about whether to use sonic warfare onstage. Bowie said he was not interested in doing that to people. He said he would never turn it on a crowd and make them shit their pants. I suppose we would. . . . WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: In a sense, if any artist is successful, he would do exactly that. If you wrote about death completely convincingly, you’d kill all your readers. JC: What’s going too far, though? Making them shit their pants? WSB: Would it be going too far to kill them? I’ll ask that question. JC: Well, I suppose there’s still some liberalism left in Devo; we’d say yes. We want ’em to come back and shit again.48”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“A band is a tribe. A substitute family. Because with a few exceptions, artists tend not to have great histories with their original ones.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Storm the citadels of the Enlightenment,” Burroughs once wrote. It is rapidly becoming a truism that on the Internet, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” to borrow one of his favorite turns of phrase.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“For all the problems of the old guard media Establishment and the humdrum squares vs. freaks, our current situation is vastly more challenging for outsiders to break through,” says author and musician Jamie Curcio. “There are niches within niches online, and the challenge is not platform but rather signal vs. noise. . . . Where is the counterculture?”54”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“The success of Sgt. Pepper helped take Burroughs-style cut-ups out of the underground and on to the hi-fi, completely changing how we relate to recorded sound.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“. . . for example i am playing back some of my dutch schultz last word tapes in the street five alarm fire and a fire truck passes right on cue you will learn to give the cues you will learn to plant events and concepts after analyzing recorded conversations you will learn to steer a conversation where you want it to go the physiological liberation achieved as word lines of controlled association are cut will make you more efficient in reaching your objectives whatever you do you will do it better record your boss and co-workers analyze their associational patterns learn to imitate their voices oh you’ll be a popular man around the office”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Burroughs inspired McCartney to cut in found sounds on Beatles recordings, including alarm clocks, automobile horns, and circus atmospherics. This, in turn, gave Brian Wilson—whose Beach Boys were locked in a kind of cross-continental musical arms race with the Fab Four—the gumption to add barking dogs and bicycle horns to his own masterpiece, Pet Sounds. The formal name for such experimental composition is musique concreté.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“In Burroughs’ epic dystopia—and it is epic in the classic meaning of the word—man becomes “an automaton, an interchangeable quantity in the political and economic equation.”8”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Besides his .38, Burroughs’ trustiest weapons were the typewriter and the tape recorder.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Though not a work of science fiction, the book is attuned to humankind’s evolving relationship with technology: “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets,”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“He believed that words on a page or sounds on tape take on a life beyond the person who put them there.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“In the early 1980s, Burroughs visited Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where his name was already legend in a West Coast scene that included acts such as Dead Kennedys, Off!, and Black Flag.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Since music is registered with the whole body it can serve as a means of communication between one organism and another. . . . Agent attends a concert and receives his instructions.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“we are the soft machines upon which the “algebra of need” is encoded.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Dylan arrived on the scene with a beat-up acoustic guitar and a voice that David Bowie later compared to “sand and glue” in his “Song For Bob Dylan” from Hunky Dory (1971).”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“For other would-be movers and shakers, the poet had sparked intense dreams of transformation beyond the literary sphere,” Simon Warner writes in Text and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.1”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Metamorphosis is a key theme in Burroughs’ life and work. Often his efforts were directed at himself, though he also sought to transform the outside world by cutting up, rearranging, and playing back its artifacts—namely, text, image, and sound. Burroughs’ ideas and techniques can be applied in many different contexts, music among them. Of course, one must have the proper tools. For Burroughs, these were his typewriter, tape recorders, camera, scissors, and voice. We can think of them as Burroughs’ divine weapons, which he used to assert his visions upon reality. This is a fundamentally occult conceit. Drawing inspiration and energy from symbols, sigils, recitation, and charged objects, practitioners enter non-normative states during which their will—or desire—is projected into the day-to-day world where it is meant to have an impact. The effectiveness of a creative or magical act is a matter of sticking the mark. A curse needs an objective, just as a work of art needs an audience. A bullet requires a target. The circuit finds its path to completion.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Devo didn’t see humanity as destined for uplift, but rather the opposite. The reason? There’s simply too much money in keeping people dumb.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

“Today’s time-warp culture jammers may not realize it, but they are the direct descendants of Burroughs, who played doula to the future through his work with cut-ups.”
― Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll