William S. Burroughs
Photo: Unknown photographer / Wikimedia Commons / Unknown (editorial use)
William S. Burroughs (born William Seward Burroughs II, 5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997) was an American writer, visual artist, and cultural theorist, best known as a central figure of the Beat Generation.
Burroughs exerted one of the most profound intellectual influences on David Bowie, particularly through his ideas about language, control, fragmentation, and the destabilisation of narrative.
- Name: William S. Burroughs
- Born: 5 February 1914 (St. Louis, Missouri, USA)
- Died: 2 August 1997 (Lawrence, Kansas, USA)
- Role: Writer, visual artist, theorist
- Bowie link: Cut-up technique, lyrical and conceptual influence
- Core idea: Language as a system of control
The Beat Generation and beyond
William S. Burroughs emerged alongside writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but quickly distinguished himself through darker, more confrontational subject matter. His work explored addiction, power, surveillance, and the mechanisms by which societies control thought and behaviour.
Burroughs viewed language itself as a virus — something that programs human consciousness rather than merely expressing it.
The cut-up technique
One of Burroughs’ most influential innovations was the cut-up technique, developed with artist Brion Gysin. Texts were physically cut apart and rearranged, allowing chance and disruption to generate new meanings.
This method challenged linear narrative and authorial control, opening space for subconscious and unexpected associations.
Bowie’s adoption of the cut-up method
David Bowie directly adopted Burroughs’ cut-up technique in his songwriting, particularly during the 1970s. Bowie used scissors, later computers, to fragment and reassemble lyrics, producing phrases that felt alien, prophetic, and emotionally ambiguous.
Songs such as “Moonage Daydream,” “Blackout,” and much of Bowie’s Berlin-period work bear the unmistakable imprint of Burroughs’ approach to language.
Shared themes: control, identity, and fragmentation
Burroughs’ obsession with control systems — governments, media, addiction, and language itself — resonated deeply with Bowie’s recurring themes of identity fracture and alienation.
Both artists treated the self not as a stable core, but as something mutable, constructed, and vulnerable to external forces.
Meeting and mutual respect
Bowie and Burroughs met on several occasions and conducted interviews together, including a well-known filmed conversation in 1974. Bowie approached Burroughs not as a fan, but as an intellectual equal, probing his ideas about time, control, and artistic responsibility.
Burroughs, in turn, recognised Bowie as a serious artist who had successfully translated avant-garde ideas into popular culture.
Influence beyond the 1970s
Burroughs’ influence on Bowie did not fade with time. Themes of surveillance, fractured narrative, and coded language re-emerged throughout Bowie’s later work, including Outside and Blackstar.
The intellectual lineage between the two artists remained intact across decades of stylistic change.
William S. Burroughs in Bowie’s creative universe
William S. Burroughs occupies a foundational place in Bowie’s creative universe — not as a collaborator in sound, but as a structural influence on how Bowie thought about art, language, and meaning.
Through Burroughs, Bowie learned that breaking form was not destruction, but liberation — a lesson that shaped his work from the 1970s to the very end.