A “defence” of any musical period is both superfluous and impossible to accomplish with a mere thousand words, if at all. So why this article? Well, because too often contemporary music is mercilessly written-off due to its ostensibly “difficult” nature, which is rather sad. The music itself doesn’t need defending, but the charges of pretentiousness frequently levelled at it must be addressed, allowing it to have a chance to be appreciated as something more than narcissistic indulgence by a quasi-intellectual elite, and a bandwagon for bourgeois pseuds to jump on.

Where do you start with Naked Lunch? Whilst not as incomprehensible as Finnegans Wake, sitting down to the midday meal with Burroughs and then afterwards trying to discuss what actually happened isn’t a million miles away from attempting to explicate Joyce’s final opus. Nevertheless, this ostensibly tricky and horrifying ‘novel’ is actually a text of completely accessible humour, insight, and pathos once one begins to understand its author and genesis. As in fellow beat Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs fuses life and art to dazzling effect in Naked Lunch, following his own maxim that “there is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.”