Marching to the Beat: Music as a catalyst to the development and popularity of the Beat Generation.
Music and literature have many aspects in common. We talk of a stanza of music, but also of poetry. Other shared vocabulary includes words like rhythm, tone, mood and beat. There are a great many works of literature which have been influenced by music, and vice-versa. For example, there are a number of operas based on works of literature, ranging from writers as diverse as Anton Chekhov, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde; even The Diary of Anne Frank has been turned into an opera. Discussing the fact that music and literature were almost certainly born of the same ancestral cultural activity, Calvin Brown (1970) goes on to examine how the relationship between music and literature may be a valid field of study in its own right. One group of writers who were undeniably coupled to music was the Beat Generation. These writers were active not only in the literary world, but they were also influential in American society, often being linked to a ‘cultural revolution’ which Jonah Raskin (2004: 6) says began with Ginsberg’s reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, October 7th 1955. This cultural revolution was linked to many other types of revolution; literary, countercultural, social, spiritual — all of which have been attributed to the Beat Generation in one form or another.
This essay will attempt to trace the influence of music on the Beat Generation, and the influence of the Beat Generation on music. In particular, the influence of jazz music on certain key writers from the group and also the influence of the Beats on the music which was the central mouthpiece for the world Hippie movement in the 1960s. In the final part of this paper, I will look at the lasting effects of this influence in evidence today within modern experimental literature and certain types of electronic music.
2. The Beat Generation and Jazz
The Beat Generation were a group of American writers who were active primarily in the 1940s and 1950s. Although well-respected authors such as Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey and even to some extent Charles Bukowski are associated with the movement, the three most prominent members of the group were Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) and William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). Of these three, two (Ginsberg and Burroughs) were the subject of high profile obscenity trials, due to explicit references to sex acts and drug taking in their writings. The Beats, predominantly composed of young white men, were hailed by many as the voice of a generation disenfranchised with the rising materialism of post-war modernist values[1] (Halberstam 1993: 295). The following quote comes from Judge Clayton W. Horn’s ruling at the “Howl” obscenity trial, where he decided that the poem was not obscene in that it contained “literary merit”:
I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. [2]
Judge Horn (2006: 197)
However, the Beat Generation and their distinctively styled followers were also often ridiculed in national and international media, obtaining the pejorative label ‘beatniks’ from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. The term was used first in 1958 to describe a group of lazy, work-shy and unwashed youngsters showing up at a party in order to get free alcohol, and Caen himself has acknowledged that the word is a combination of beat and Sputnik (Rex 1975: 329). The marriage of these two words into beatnik would seem also to invoke the Russian competitiveness against the United States, and in doing so there is also a reference to communism, the Cold War and generally being anti-American. This is something which does actually fit each of the three major writers, for example Ginsberg was frequently outspoken and critical of the USA, not only in his poem “America” but also in his connecting the CIA with drug trafficking, and his open criticism of the Vietnam War. Burroughs was perhaps the most anti-American of all, described by poet Gael Turnbull (1958: 6) as a “very slow speaker” with “two themes in his talk, a hatred of America, the physical culture of it, and also an interest in all forms of drugs of all kinds”. Burroughs’ writing is full of cynicism and allusions to blind puppets at the controls who lack the power to control their own greed:
Question: If Control’s control is absolute, why does Control need to control?
Answer: Control needs time. […]
Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?
Answer: Yes.
Burroughs (1979: 31)
Interestingly, Kerouac was born to French-Canadian parents, spoke Joual French at home and only learned to speak English at the age of six. Despite this, he is perhaps the most American of the three; not only did he go to Colombia University on a football scholarship, he also served in the Merchant Navy during World War II, considered himself a patriot and a conservative and tried (in vain) to disassociate himself from the countercultural revolution that he became an involuntary spokesperson for (see Johnson 2012; Sandison 1999 for further details). Despite the very different stylistics of each writer, they were all close friends and spent a lot of time together, particularly in New York where they all first met. It was here that the idea of the New Vision was first conceived by Ginsberg and his Colombia University friend Lucien Carr, who introduced Ginsberg to Kerouac and Burroughs. The idea of the New Vision later was developed collaboratively into the idea of the Beat Generation, a term first coined in 1948 by Jack Kerouac in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes, who wrote the first Beat novel, entitled Go (1952). The term beat originated from the street-slang that was in use in 1940s New York, particularly in the underground and criminal communities. Ann Charters (1992: xvii-xix) explains how the term was passed in 1944 from a Times Square hustler named Herbert Huncke into a group of literary friends who included Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Burroughs first met Huncke when he was trying to acquire narcotics, and became fascinated by the ‘tone’ of the word. Huncke was also an avid jazz fan, and personally knew several famous musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, and he certainly recommended jazz music to the group. Huncke appeared in On the Road as the character Elmer Hassel, a shady but loveable crook who is synonymous with late-night jazz clubs and black culture. Later, Kerouac would explain what beat really meant in “The Origins of the Beat Generation”, trying to capture the duality of the word meaning both tired and energetic, having a contemporary relevance and yet deep ancestral roots. Kerouac then further elaborated on the way to write Beat compositions in his essay “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, in which he announced that the procedure was very similar to the way a jazz musician composes music, spontaneously and in the moment:
Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image. (57)
For the Beats, and it would seem especially for Kerouac, the appeal of the word beat was not only its duality but also its musical connotation. It is well documented that Kerouac and the other members of the Beat Generation were ardent fans of jazz music and specifically bebop.
Jazz in the late 1930s and early 40s was immensely popular, particularly with the younger generation, in what is now known as the Swing-era or big-band era. Jazz at this time was characterized by an emphasis on the rhythmic ‘swing’ of the music, which made it particularly danceable. As it moved more towards the larger orchestras it began to feature more complex arrangements. Bebop jazz was a reaction against this, and the younger generation of musicians rebelled against the more mainstream swing music with an extremely fast tempo which was too fast to dance to and therefore demanded to be listened to properly. Bebop also featured heavy experimentation with asymmetrical phasing, altered chords and often used improvisation. The musicians of bebop were predominantly black, and the genre also had a ‘tough’ or ‘bad’ image, with artists and performances frequently involving intoxication and narcotics (Kubik 2005; Rosenthal 1993). This type of jazz has come to be recognized as the archetype of modern jazz, although of course the genre of jazz music is very broad and features a large range of styles and sub-genres, in much the same way that ‘classical’ is a broad umbrella term for a wide variety of music. Jazz was the music of choice for young, intellectual, adventurous people, and in particular those who were ‘hip’.
From 1945 till [sic] the mid-sixties, jazz was also the preferred music of white renegades, bohemians, and artists. It was particularly central for the loose-knit group of writers associated with the “beat” movement (Rosenthal 1993: 17).
Jazz is frequently mentioned in the Beat literature, both as a backdrop to the scenes in which the story unfolds, and also as a metaphor for the energy and philosophy of the times. Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” is perhaps the best known of all the Beat Generation poetry, and it could even ostensibly be argued that it was this poem, and specifically the publicity it received during its infamous obscenity trial, which launched the Beat Generation into fame and popular culture (Raskin 2004). Ginsberg’s immortal opening lines describe seeing “the best minds of my generation”, who:
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz (Ginsberg 1956: 9)
Norman Mailer’s influential 1957 essay The White Negro, originally published in Dissent magazine before being released as a standalone book by City Lights, detailed the palpable sense of fear that oppressed the post-war society’s youth. He expressed that this fear and sense of disenfranchisement was due to the rising materialism and consumerism which spanned from a “Faustian urge to dominate nature” (42). He explained that the ‘hipsters’ were dissatisfied with being part of this, and that to get away from the culture of ‘deus ex machina’ the young generation was turning to Black culture, which was seen as more authentic and more concerned with being alive. A similar theme can be found in Ginsberg’s “Howl”, particularly in the second section which details Moloch and this ancient god’s resurrection into modern society through the sacrifice of human values:
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
(Ginsberg 1956: 21)
This concept was already making a large impact at the time of Mailer’s writing as 1957 was the year of the famous obscenity trial which launched the Beat movement to a worldwide audience, as freedom of speech itself was put on trial (Morgan and Peters 2006; Raskin 2004).
Being ‘hip’ marked the belonging to an in-group or a subculture, one that somehow possessed a greater understanding of the real world than those who were ‘square’, and jazz was a window into being ‘hip’ (Becker 1997: 55–65). This is not only evident in the Beat Generations’ veneration of black culture and underground jazz music, but also today in the way artists reference such sub-cultures in their own more mainstream work, thus lending themselves the credibility of the in-group.
Kerouac’s friend from Colombia University, Gerald Newman recorded some of the earliest records of such jazz greats as Charlie Christian, Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, and there is even a song which Newman retitled “Kerouac” on the album Jazz Immortals (Johnson 2012). Kerouac’s influence and deep connection with jazz and particularly Bebop is well-established, with music writer Preston Whaley (2004: 131) noting that “Kerouac had important contacts in New York City’s jazz world”. His interest in jazz would eventually fill the void left by Kerouac’s dissatisfaction with literature; Kerouac was unable to find inspiration for his own literary voice in the writing of others, and it was eventually through jazz that he discovered his own distinctive writing approach (Johnson 2012: 417–18). According to Chambers (1998), Kerouac not only did regular readings in front of a live audience accompanied by jazz music but he also wrote in Mexico City Blues of the death of jazz legend Charlie Parker, in which he likened him to Buddha. Charlie Parker was sometimes known as ‘Bird’, and this was how Beat writer Gregory Corso eulogised him in his poem “Requiem for ‘Bird’ Parker, Musician” which appeared in the collection The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955) .
Although, as this essay has shown, the links between the Beats and jazz music go quite deep, it is also clear that the jazz music was an influence on the Beat’s writing, but the flow of influence seemed to rarely, if ever, go the other way. The Beat writers were not musicians themselves, and likewise it seems that few of the jazz musicians they were so impressed by had literary aspirations (Janssen 2014). However, the Beat Generation did have a very large impact on the music that came in the 1960s, especially that associated with the World Hippie Movement, but also more generally in pop and rock and roll music.
3. The Beat Generation and the Hippie Movement
In the 1960s, music underwent a noticeable and lasting transformation. The impact of the 1960s is summarised well by Arthur Marwick, who wrote:
Mention of ‘the sixties’ rouses strong emotions even in those who were already old when the sixties began and those who were not even born when the sixties ended. For some it is a golden age, for others a time when the old secure framework of morality, authority, and discipline disintegrated.
There are many theories about what caused the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and there is even scepticism as to whether there even was a cultural revolution, but one fact which is almost irrefutable is the influence of the Beat Generation upon the worldwide Hippie movement, and in particular their strong associations with the music of that era. Music was a kind of mouthpiece for the entire movement, being both publicity generator and ideology broadcaster rolled together.
One of the most iconic bands from the 1960s, and arguably the most famous and successful band in global history, is of course The Beatles. Even the name of the band contains a reference to the Beat Generation (Miles 1998: 52). However, the references do not stop there. Aside from having associated with and met several key members of the Beat Generation, such as Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima, The Beatles also put William S. Burroughs’ portrait on the front cover of their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (alongside other incongruously placed individuals such as Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Bob Dylan and Adolf Hitler). Furthermore, John Lennon is known to have been influenced by Ginsberg, especially his most famous poem “Howl” (Raskin 2004: 226). A further connection is that Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg’s album Ballad of the Skeletons (1996), which also featured other prominent musicians such as modern-classical composer Philip Glass and aired on MTV. It is also notable that Yoko Ono, Lennon’s second wife, clearly styled herself as a beatnik. Biographer Barry Miles traces the connection between music and The Beats by tracing which people had introduced each other to certain recreational drugs. Miles states that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were “part of a lineage connecting the sixties youth movement with the American Beat Generation” (1998: 261). Also interesting is the fact that Barry Miles has written the biographies of both Paul McCartney and William S. Burroughs, as well as several other books about the sixties and The Beat Generation.
Another strong link between sixties pop music and the Beat Generation is Bob Dylan, who actually has his own section and works reproduced in Ann Charters (1992) The Portable Beat Reader. He is in many ways a physical embodiment of the connection between these two groups of people. Not only was Dylan deeply influenced by Beat writing (in particular the poems of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues), but also he toured with Allen Ginsberg in around 1977, and they even visited Kerouac’s grave together in Lowell, Massachusetts. The two figures were able to legitimise each other, although it seems they also had a genuine friendship.
Ginsberg stood for literary seriousness, on a level far above what even the most talented folkie lyricist, let alone rock and roller, could hope to attain. Dylan, meanwhile, helped Ginsberg make his transition from Beat generation prophet to a kind of older avatar of the late-1960s counterculture — for the poet, a new kind of fame.
Wilentz (2010: 62)
Other prominent figures from the 1960s music scene who were directly associated with the Hippie Movement and with the political ideology that arose from The Beats include The Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison and The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joanie Mitchell and of course The Grateful Dead. Perhaps one of the most defining moments in the history of the Hippie Movement was the Woodstock festival held between August 15th to 17th in 1969. This became synonymous with the peaceful activist image of the Hippie movement, simultaneously political and apolitical in its messages to society about how to keep ‘Spaceship Earth’ on course.
It is worth noting that one of the deepest ingrained connections between the Beats and the Hippies is the theme of pacifism, of opposition to war- specifically the Vietnam War, of sexual freedom and a rejection of authority. This is interesting because at least two of the Big Three Beat Generation writers do not comfortably fit this mould. Whilst it is true that Ginsberg was openly critical of the Vietnam War, neither Kerouac nor Burroughs were pacifists or openly opposed to war. Kerouac, as previously mentioned, served in the merchant navy in World War II, and during a rare later-life televised interview with William F. Buckley on September 4, 1968, a visibly drunk Kerouac dumbfounded his admirers by openly giving support for the Vietnam War. As for Burroughs, calling him a pacifist would be something so surreal as to deserve a place in his own writing. He was an avid collector of firearms, and according to Burroughs’ lover, Marcus Ewert, he would sleep with a loaded gun under the pillow (Leyser 2010). Not only this, but Burroughs went to prison and had to flee the country after shooting Joan Vollmer, his second wife and the mother of his only child, in the head during an intoxicated attempt at a party trick in which he tried to imitate William Tell. Clearly neither of these two men could even remotely be called hippies, which leads us to the conclusion that Ginsberg largely acted alone in conjoining these two movements. In other words, only one of the Big Three Beat Generation writers had any sympathy or affiliation with the Hippie movement. However, it would be rather naïve to believe that Ginsberg was the sole reason for the strong connection between beatniks and hippies. The so-called Beat ideals were opposition to authority, particularly totalitarian authority or any form of authority that suffocates freedom of expression. This can be seen prominently in the work of all the major Beat writers, Kerouac and Burroughs included. The Beat ideals also encompassed an opposition to the use of nuclear weapons, many works featuring explicit and horrifying depictions of the effects of a nuclear holocaust, the shadow of which hovered over the heads of many young people growing up during The Cold War. The Beats were disgusted by their country’s use of an atomic bomb against Japan (Charters 1992: 4), and this could be one of the major contributors to the aforementioned ‘anti-Americanism’ of the group:
HIROSHIMA… 1945… AUGUST 6, 23 SECONDS BEFORE 8 AM.
Question: Who really gave that order?
Answer: CONTROL.
The Ugly American… The instrument of CONTROL.
Burroughs (1979: 22)
Several of Ginsberg’s poems deal with the subject of nuclear war, most notably “America” which contains the lines “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (74). Gregory Corso’s most famous poem “Bomb”, is actually rendered in text, shaped on the page like an atomic mushroom cloud. In this way, rather than it being a personal connection, the link between the Beat Generation and the Hippie movement is an ideological one. And, in terms of music, one of the greatest catalysts for the worldwide hippie movement, arguably the main cause of its immense momentum, was the force of the musicians who openly supported the ideology of the movement and wove those ideas into the lyrics of their songs. In performing these songs to large audiences, the movement was able to become one of the first global socio-political movements in history. Whereas the beatniks had been a fringe group of American youngsters in the 1940s and 1950s, now the hippie movement was a global phenomenon which had a great deal of publicity and featured some of the strongest and most influential voices through some of the most iconic music of the 1960s.
4. The Beat Goes On in Contemporary Music and Literature
Despite the numerous collaborations between Beat poets and other musicians, undoubtedly the most active member of the group was William S Burroughs, whose various collaborations with modern musicians include Tom Waits, The Doors, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, R.E.M, Patti Smith, U2, Sonic Youth and many others. His influence is even more widespread, and his “nightmarish dystopian visions and anti-authoritarian world view has infused and informed the work and ideas of a pantheon of rockers” (Kansa 2010: 20) such as Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Even the term ‘Heavy Metal’ is attributed to him (Leyser 2010). Recordings of his voice have also been used in other music, such as the album Spare Ass Annie which was remixed by Hip-Hop band The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and a year after his death Burrough’s voice is used on the track “Images of .44 Casings” on experimental Hip-Hop band Dälek’s 1998 album Negro Necro Nekros. Burroughs’ pioneering Cut-Up Technique for writing has also been applied to music on numerous notable occasions. For example, the song “Revolution №9” on album The Beatles (also known as The White Album) uses this technique to create a disturbing avant-garde sound collage. It could also be argued that the Dadaist roots of this technique are still visible in modern music and literature, having undergone something of an evolution into experimental electronica music and Flarf writing. The British musician Richard D. James, known as Aphex Twin is a good illustration of the evolution of the cut-up technique; his music features a lot of experimentation, often using purpose-built electronic rigs and self-authored software programs which are used to compose music which is both ‘technical’ and ‘emotional’ (Gross 1997). Another notable contributor to experimental electronic music is Autechre, composed of musical duo Rob Brown and Sean Booth. Autechre’s music claims to be almost autonomous, something which is further alluded to in their nondescript track titles and abstract album art, and further reinforced by the band’s noncommittal responses to any questions regarding how their music is made, apart from to make claims that the pair simply create computer-based environments in which the music is able to create itself (Brett 2014: 9). Despite this mystique, according to Brett, there is an underlying fandom to their music which reveals that the experimentation behind the production of Autechre’s music is an exploration of the creative process itself. Other artists who also utilise techniques which take their music beyond their own immediate control include Squarepusher, Kid606, The Boards of Canada and many others, and are associated with diverse genres such as IDM, drill and bass, scatterbeat, braindance and breakbeat. Although unique in their application of modern technologies, these musicians share much in common with the earlier jazz pioneers of bebop, who were attempting to push boundaries and to create something new.
Perhaps developing more or less independently from this type of musical experimentation is the literary side of digital experimentation, although the two mediums have much in common. One early example is a book entitled The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed (1983) composed entirely by a computer called Racter (short for Raconteur). The software used to create the work was created by two software designers with literary aspirations, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. This book was perhaps an early prototype for later work which seeks to explore the interface between man and machine, of which the experimental movement of Flarf poetry is a good example. This is poetry which takes the online world of the internet as both its inspiration and source-code (Epstein 2012: 318). The term Flarf is attributed to poet Gary Sullivan, and is an experimental poetry movement “in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious” (Fischer 2009: 42). Sullivan has described Flarf as a “kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay’.” (Magee et al. 2003). Characteristically ahead of his time, William S Burroughs had already been experimenting with a type of Flarf, decades before the term was even invented. Around 1968, whilst living in London with collaborators Brion Gysin (with whom he developed the Cut-Up Technique) and Antony Balch, the three men encountered two IBM technicians named Willy Deiches and Brenda Dunks (MacFadyen 2012). These two claimed to be able to communicate with a sentient being on Venus through the means of a computer named Control. For 12 shillings a question, Burroughs, Gysin and Balch were able to communicate with this Venetian entity, which in reality was most likely either a computer program, an elaborate hoax or a subtle blend of each. Regardless of the reality, Gysin reports that “many of the answers were oddly apt, quite a lot of them were in fact… some of the answers were very sharp indeed” (cited in Baker 2010: 160). Although it is not directly stated in the literature, it seems that due to the question/answer nature and the computer’s name being Control, it is inferable that Burroughs used some of these answers in the composition of certain sequences in Ah Pook which were cited earlier. The digital interface of humans and computers, and particularly the way new media is shaping our language, is the subject of much recent discussion and empirical inquiry, see for example Tom Chatfield’s book Netymology which looks at new coinages coming from the internet, or The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Bray et al. 2012) for further examples.
Not only are the evolutionary roots of these modern musicians and literary innovations traceable back to the Beat Generation and the jazz music that inspired them, also the Beats themselves have recently come back into vogue, particularly through a series of new Hollywood films which either adapt their work or attempt to tell the story of their own lives. For example, the film 2010 Howl, features James Franco playing Allen Ginsberg and uses animations to bring the poem to the screen amidst a dramatized version of the famous 1957 obscenity trial. In 2012, On the Road was adapted into a film by director Walter Salles. Fans of the book may be surprised by some of the differences between Kerouac’s published book and the film, but these changes are actually reflections of the legendary original scroll of On the Road which was published by Viking Press in 2007 and features a much less redacted version of the story. The film version was critically panned although it did well in the box office. The most recent Beat adaptation to come out of Hollywood to date is the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, which stars Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) as Allen Ginsberg in a biopic about the murder/manslaughter of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr. This event had a very deep and profound impact on the group of writers in the early 1940s, and was also the focus of Kerouac and Burroughs’ collaboration And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks (written in 1945 and published in 2008). Of course, over twenty years earlier, director David Cronenberg had already adapted Burroughs’ Naked Lunch for the screen, and although critics gave mixed reviews it is said to be the first film in history to have made less money than the book upon which it was based.
Criticising the modern Hollywood obsession with The Beat Generation in The Atlantic, Jordan Larson said
Even at its best, the idea of a revelatory and sensual Beat adventure is rather clichéd, but especially so when divorced from the movement’s great and lasting achievements: Their rebelliousness paved the way for the counterculture of the sixties, and artists from Patti Smith to Thomas Pynchon have hailed the Beats’ style of jazz-like improvisation as an influence.
(Larson 2013)
Whether we find the modern revival of the Beat Generation and their values to be a blasphemous commercialisation of a once great American literary movement, or a much needed resuscitation of the values that caused an existential wake-up call from the apathy of modern life, it is certainly clear that The Beat Generation were and continue to be influential in literature, and that the ethos of their jazz-inspired world view is still something that modern generations of creative people find affinity with, be they writers or musicians.
5. Conclusion
This essay has attempted to trace the influence of jazz music on the Beat Generation; not just in terms of their spontaneity and energy but also in terms of how jazz music and black culture allowed them to belong to an in-crowd of ‘hip’ young intellectuals. In cultivating a sub-culture, their ideas and distinctive group identity was more likely to have become distilled into the ethos of Beat literature, which then led directly onto the worldwide Hippie movement of the 1960s. This movement was particularly powerful and taken up globally to a large part due to the international and borderless appeal of the music of the movement, which acted as a catalyst for the spreading of the ideology which had originated with the Beats and their jazz roots. In the final part of this essay, the influence and evolution of the ideology was demonstrated through certain modern examples in both music and literature, connecting the experimental and distinctive features of jazz with Flarf poetry and experimental electronica music. It is likely that this influence will continue well into the future as well, especially given the recent surge in popular interest in the Beats, as demonstrated by a recent string of Hollywood films featuring young rising-star actors and actresses. In tracing the influence of music on the Beats and the subsequent influence of the Beats on music it is hoped that this essay has demonstrated the strong connection generally between the creative arts, particularly music and literature. It was also my intention in writing this essay to illustrate the way certain ideologies about society can be spread through the creative arts to a large enough volume of people to actually affect great social change, as happened with the Beats and their emphasis on individualism, freedom of expression and rejection of conformity and apathy. This in itself is an ethos which can be traced back to the jazz musicians with whom the generation not only associated, but also on whom they modelled their way of life. Although at the height of their notoriety in the 1950s the Beats were often not taken seriously, they have certainly stood the test of time in terms of literary value and in many ways their search for authenticity in the modern backdrop of post-war consumerist society is even more poignant today than it was in their own time.
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