Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth Featured in Burroughs Doc

Photo of Thurston Moore by Mike White

Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo are just three of the dozens who can testify to the personal insanity and cultural significance of William S. Burroughs. The proof: an upcoming documentary on the beat generation writer himself, titled William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.

Burroughs died in 1997 at age 83. His most heralded work, Naked Lunch, is a fragmented, hallucinatory account of urban junkies that later defied censorship cases in Chicago and Boston. It also clearly illustrated Burroughs himself: a man addicted to drugs and guns, amongst other things.

"Although Burroughs fancies himself a satirist and occasionally resembles one when the diary's heroin fog clears a little, the value of his book is mostly confessional, not literary," Time said of the book in 1962.

Along with commentary, Sonic Youth provide music for the film, a task the band had done once before, for Burroughs' spoken word album Dead City Radio. Pop had personal encounters with the writer as well, as demonstrated in the documentary trailer: