The penultimate section of William S. Burroughs’ most notorious book carries the heading “Atrophied Preface,” and it’s there that the author drops a useful—if belated—hint for the reader: “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point.” That line provides a shot of literary self-esteem for anyone who’s experienced trouble following the experimental text in sequential fashion up until this juncture.
Given how slippery the 1959 book is with chronology and setting—and how quickly it moves between riotously debauched sexual libertinage (and violence), vaguely sketched political conspiracies, descriptions of alien-bug climaxes, and comparatively sober theories regarding various aspects of drug dependence—most readers will have already cottoned onto the fact that Naked Lunch privileges an aggregate feel over any traditional sense of novelistic progression. In his late-50s correspondence, Burroughs even went back and forth on the question of whether Naked Lunch was a novel at all. It’s always nice to have some authorial permission to skip around in a piece of writing as avant-garde as this one, the better to attack it from multiple angles and see what happens at the level of comprehension.
Now that the author of Naked Lunch is gone, this officially approved liberty-taking comes in handy for Hal Willner—a skilled producer who worked with the writer on LPs made during Burroughs’ lifetime—as well as for a group of musicians that stretches across eras. Let Me Hang You is the delayed result of some recording sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs was reportedly asked to isolate and recite a number of his favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. These performances received a bit of musical accompaniment at the time, courtesy of guitarist Bill Frisell, violinist Eyvind Kang, and pianist Wayne Horvitz, before the overall project was buried by record label executives. Some time after Burroughs’s death, Willner exhumed the tracks, and asked a new generation of musicians to help him refurbish the album—among them the Canadian punk auteur King Khan as well as the singer (and author of the “Negrogothic” manifesto) M. Lamar.
The casting is right. And even the irregular nature of the album’s path to market would seem to be in the spirit of its anarchic source material. That said, for significant stretches, Let Me Hang You only manages to conjure a portion of Naked Lunch’s wild power. In part this is due to Burroughs’ editorial decisions regarding excerpted texts, which seem focused on the book’s perviest jags. Even within certain of these more infamous “routines” from the author’s repertoire, his readings here excise key lines from Naked Lunch that originally lent the book’s scenes a distinction beyond their noted luridness.
The album’s title track is a refrain from the portion of Naked Lunch devoted to group orgasm-via-hanging. In the book, the transgressive erotics are part of a story within the story—specifically, a porno being projected at something like a society ball. At the end of the book-section titled “A.J.’s Annual Party,” the actors who portrayed this brutal ménage à trois on-camera step out from behind the screen, at film’s end, and take a bow while sporting ropes around their necks. Part of the charge of this passage in Naked Lunch comes from this slapstick juggling of modes, as well as the depiction of what an elite audience in the novel’s fictional land of Interzone will happily consume.
On Let Me Hang You, though, the routine is merely presented as a distinctly naughty sex scene that was written and read by the author himself, and then paired with an often-quiet but suitably discordant avant-rock arrangement. The stripping away of context seems primed to privilege the nastiest parts, though at the expense of the author’s social and political cynicism. (Not to mention his humor.) Instead of promoting the feel of Burroughs’ early approach to satire, this latter-day performance feels more akin to that of a grade-schooler walking around the playground at recess, eager to show you something unexpected and unsettling.
This juvenile fixation extends to other tracks here, like “Islam Incorporated,” which also snips out some of Burroughs’s funniest gags (as set down in the Naked Lunch section “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone”) in order to focus on the gross-out clauses. (The most savage jokes in this part of the book are actually trained on the American bourgeoisie.) Burroughs’ interpretations here seem clearly inferior to his first recorded excerpts from Naked Lunch, on the 1965 spoken-word album Call Me Burroughs.
Just as the aesthetic range of Burroughs’ writing tends to be scaled back in these vocal takes, most of the arrangements stake out a single style and then stick with it for the duration of a given reading. Gravely thrumming bass tones hold sway during “Lief the Unlucky,” 60s-style rock-boogie drives “Clem Snide the Private Asshole,” while countrified twang is created for “The Queen Bee.” The performances always sound crisply played, but for the most part, they don’t measure up to the moment-to-moment inspiration of Willner-produced tracks on the 1990 Burroughs album Dead City Radio, which placed the author alongside John Cale, Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Just because it’s possible to “cut into” Naked Lunch at any point doesn’t mean all readings will be equally robust. Though there are, happily, two arrangements here that do full justice to the book’s surreal stream of textures. During the lengthy “Disciplinary Procedures,” ambient noise dominates at first, before some staccato strings are added. A groove is gradually lathered up, and the swinging finale suggests big-band bombast. And on “Gentle Reader,” M. Lamar’s countertenor voice manages to be both spooky and lyrical—the perfect accompaniment to a spiritual, incantatory Naked Lunch lick in which the narrator announces his intention to set loose his “word hoard.” It’s Burroughs’ best vocal performance on this album, too, as he slides from his trademark aristocratic whine to more overtly threatening cadences. Along with attractive miniatures like “The Exterminator” and “Quick,” these major tracks from Let Me Hang You offer some stray, valuable new connections with the best of the Burroughs style.
