Bug Powder Dust - History

History

Lyrically, "Bug Powder Dust" is essentially a homage to the author William S. Burroughs. Crowded with seemingly random images and 'in' references from pop culture, Justin Warfield's lyrics adopt a Burroughs-type view of the world.

However, through its use of Burroughs imagery - both fictional and biographic - as well as pulp science fiction iconography from the period, "Bug Powder Dust" also mimics the author's mashing up of fact and fiction by becoming simultaneously about, and of, Burroughs

Burroughs' most famous work, Naked Lunch, made famous his cut-up style of composition, which, alongside the subject matter of his novels, sought to question reality, mimic the brutality of sensory overload in modern life, and reproduce the confusion of inner-logic smashed by drugs.

In "Bug Powder Dust", Justin Warfield adopts Burrough's hallucinatory perspective, but plays it off against the bragaddocio of hip hop. Where a traditional rapper would compare themselves to the endurance, strength or impact of a famous object, person or quality, Warfield uses seemingly cryptic pulp images instead.

The effect is of a narrator - like Burroughs - who apparently possesses a perspective on life that cannot recognise the difference between fact and fiction, sanity and madness.

Bug Powder Dust was accepted by the British Hip-hop community, and makes an appearance in many rundowns of 'classic' British hip-hop and rap tracks.

The track incorporates a bassline by Alphonso Johnson, as performed on the title track of Flora Purim's album, Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly. Johnson is probably best known as having been with the jazz-fusion group Weather Report.

Read more about this topic:  Bug Powder Dust

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)

    Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)