Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: "Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales" (Fourth + Broadway)

GREETING FROM William S. Burroughs across the vales of bad karma, Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales is more voodoo radio for voidoids, another excursion through the pain barrier into his own particular universe of constant annihilation and scant charity.

Of course it helps to have heard Dead City Radio, his earlier collaboration with Hal Willner that set Burroughs' graveyard tones in an alternate broadcasting universe where Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds was literal reality and the Martians won. Now the pair welcome aboard the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy but it's fair to say the beats function more as a mordant background than dynamic dance, with probably only 'Words Of Advice For Young People' likely to easily transfer to any alternative dancefloor.

That's because it's the only performance piece, here. The rest is recitations from his books so Willner and the Disposable duo of Michael Franti and Rono Tse have to tailor their tones to the Burroughs voice which still broadcasts from the craters (and the critters) of the moon.

It works exactly because the world has finally grown up to his contemporary. Burroughs is the ghost in the MTV machine, his cut-up technique analogous to the video experience, his use and abuse of low culture like Z-movies, penny dreadful thrillers and pulp sci-fi. Potentially now in tune with a new audience far more extensive than any earlier cult following. I won't be surprised if 'Spare Ass Annie . . .' is a surprise hit, since Burroughs' writing is based on the solitary witness of discontinuities and that just might find a new resonance among those anxiety-ridden survivors, barely clinging to the wreckage of the nuclear family.

He is almost a gourmet of disgust, a specialist in mutilated body language. The title track introduces a selection of morbid monsters, far more fearsome than any horrors of Gothic fiction; 'Dr. Benway Operates' with a total disregard for anyone's vain distaste; and 'Warning To Young Couples (Huntsmen's Hounds)' will put a stop to the step of all dog-lovers.

If he's a fearsome fabulist on those cuts, he only gets philosophical on 'A One God Universe', his own assault on the single, and eventually tyrannical standard of reality compelled by patriarchy. But all these tracks are no more than a softening-up for the longest cut, the 15-minute descent into hellish extremity and aversion therapy that is 'The Junky's Christmas'. It may be the most straightforward example of how Burroughs has often portrayed junk craving as a metaphor for consumer desperation, it is also the ultimate antidote to rock's occasional flirtatious glamorisation of the drug.

Its fifteen minutes also contrasts the approaches of the Disposables and Willner. Franti and Tse's beats and steals are sullen, remorseless and downbeat almost deadbeat, whereas Willner prefers the barbed use of traditional sources. Thus 'The Sugar Plum Fairy' gets soiled in the ordure of 'The Junky's Christmas' while 'Mildred Pierce Reporting' is Hollywood with a hanky, patriotic schmaltz demolished by Burroughs' tale of an army run amok.

Formally, both Spare Ass Annie . . . and Dead City Radio are more than fascinating, since they propose another model for spoken word records beyond rap. You don't need to borrow a black voice; you only need to find your own. Or so says Uncle Bill, the old sailor back from the colonies of slime.

• Bill Graham