Bug Powder Dust

Infobox Single
Name = Bug Powder Dust


Artist = Bomb The Bass
from Album = Clear
B-side = "Bug Powder Dust (remix)"
Released = 1994
Formats = CD single / 12-inch single
Recorded =
Genre = Dance, Breakbeat
Length =
Label = Island
Writer = Tim Simenon, Justin Warfield
Producer = Tim Simenon

"Bug Powder Dust" is a song by Bomb the Bass, released as the band's eighth single in 1994 as the first single from the "Clear" album. Featuring Justin Warfield on vocals, the track is primarily Dance music blended with Rap and Breakbeat.

History

Lyrically, Bug Powder Dust is essentially a homage to the author William Burroughs. Crowded with seemingly random images and 'in' references from trashy pop culture, Justin Warfield's lyric seeks to 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, The 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 beams in seemingly cryptic, but no less impressive, pulp images instead. The initial effect is one of insanity, but through repeated hearings, these references seemingly spurious visions begin to make sense.

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.

Warfield takes matters one step further, framing his lyrics in a traditional Rap format. By doing so, the vocalist successfully grafts literature to Hip-hop, seeking to reinvent - or make fresh sense - of the forms lyrical potential, by side-stepping the listener's expectation of stereotypical visuals, and cliched statements.

As a consequence, Bug Powder Dust was accepted by the British Hip-hop community as being a successful appropriation of what had up until then, been a wholly American - and Americanised - artform. A fact reflected by the songs repeated appearance in many rundowns of 'classic' British Hip-hop and Rap tracks.

The track incorporates a bass-line 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.

Commercial Versions

Bug Powder Dust (Radio mix) 4:20
Bug Powder Dust (Dust Brothers remix) 5:35
Bug Powder Dust (Bug Powder Drums remix) 5:38
Bug Powder Dust (Chemical Brothers Mix) 7:02
Bug Powder Dust (Sound Furnace Edit) (UK Album Version) (3:49)
Bug Powder Dust (La Funk Mob Mix) (5:43)
Bug Powder Dust (Kruder & Dorfmeister Session) (7:24)