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How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique — openculture.com

The strict realist mold that dominated fiction and poetry for over a hundred years broke open in the late nineteenth century with symbolist French poets like Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Charles Baudelaire. The next few modernist decades made it impossible to ignore experimental literature, which trickled into the public consciousness through all variety of media. Popular songcraft, however, held out for a few more decades, and though styles proliferated, the standard ballad forms—straightforward narratives of love and loss—more or less dominated into the 1960s, with the exception of odd novelty records whose existence proved the rule. Though neither ever abandoned the ballad, it’s significant that two of that decade’s most innovative pop songwriters, John Lennon and Bob Dylan, drew much of the inspiration for their more experimental songs from poetry—Lennon from an older nonsense tradition in English literature exemplified by Lewis Carroll, and Dylan from T.S. Eliot and other modernist poets.

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