Beats of the Beatniks
- rockislandsound1
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Music is reflected in every movement of literature, and literature is reflected in every movement of music. Classical composers such as Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev have taken heavy inspiration from themes in Shakespeare’s works (eg. Hamlet and The Tempest for the former and Romeo and Juliet for the latter) and since the Romans (Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, &c.) poetry has often stressed certain syllables to create rhythm and meter, causing the oration to rise and fall like a song. And yet going against what Ovid said in the MetamorphosesーTime, that devours all thingsーthis relationship between these two prominent forces of art has not waned with antiquity. In the 40s and 50s, they intertwined once more through the writings of a small group of anti-academic intellectuals who led a literary revolution against the false camaraderie of a postwar American society, known as the Beat Generation.
The Beatniks wrote with a fever that central figure Allen Ginsberg only described as “First thought, best thought.” Going against the current of mainstream society, their writings delved into the depths of perception, sexuality, psychedelics, and the human condition with such nakedness as to reject the conformity and materialism that dominated the time.
For the Beatniks, their heartbeats were the rhythm of jazz, specifically the brisk, daring sound of Bebop. Characterized by a fast tempo with complex chord progressions that darted around chords and keys, Bebop Jazz challenged the rigid rules of form and structure from the previous era of Big Band Swing. It isn’t difficult to see the parallels between the era of Bebop and the Beat Generation, both centered around the emphasis of expressing the stream of consciousness, however conflicting and confusing it may be.
While the Beatniks were inspired by manyーsurrealists, transcendentalists, drugs, metaphysical visionary poets, Buddhism, the list goes on (they were avid consumers of art and media)ーit was the spontaneity and focused chaos of jazz that roused them to create some of their best works. Ginsberg stated Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In” was a direct inspiration for his most known literary piece Howl. Jack Kerouac stated that his novel On the Road, a key literary masterpiece and a definitive prose work of the era, was specifically inspired by Dexter Gordon & Wardell Gray’s 1947 blowing session “The Hunt.” The influence of jazz extended beyond their works as well. “Beat,” the focal term they called themselves, was a word used by jazz musicians and hustlers post-World War II, slang for down and out, or poor and exhausted. Kerouac then twisted its meaning, explaining that the word “beat” signified “beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz, real cool jazz.” In John Arthur Maynard’s account of the Beat Generation Venice West, he writes:
From it they adopted the mythos of the brooding, tortured, solitary artist, performing with others but always alone. They talked the talk of jazz, built communal rites around using the jazzman’s drugs, and worshipped the dead jazz musicians most fervently. The musician whose music was fatal represented pure spontaneity.
When asked about their writing process, Kerouac responded:
We’d stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets…
Not only was bebop an inspiration to the Beats, but it also influenced their writing style known as “Bop Prosody.” Stemming from the practiced spontaneity of jazz musicians playing riffs without prior planning, the Beats scribbled the manic stream of consciousness with rare punctuation or revision. They believed that structuring writing beforehand hindered exploration of new perspectives. In his essay Essentials of Prose Kerouac explores into Bop Prosody further, explaining:
No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddles by false colons and timid usually needless commas - but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)
The rhythm and meter of the Beats were thought to lean more towards jazz than traditional literary styles. Allen Ginsberg lengthened the lines in his works to equal the length of his own breath and paused for air before he went to the next, similar to wind players. In a 1959 essay about his approach to poetry, Ginsberg writes, “I depended on the word ‘who’ to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off again onto another streak of invention.”
Despite their cultural impact, the Beatniks remain heavily underappreciated. Their lifestyle proved to be significantly influential to rising musicians in the 60s and 70s, inspiring both the hippie movement as well as the genre of psychedelic rock. Ray Manzarek of The Doors once said, “... if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed.” Jim Morrison agreed with Manzarek’s statement, also citing Kerouac as a major influence for the band. Many of the Beatniks were also friends with frontrunners of the emerging counterculture movement, Ginsberg being almost a father figure to Bob Dylan. It was William Burroughs’ statement “These punk kids should throw away their electric records and listen to something with real soul like Leadbelly” that inspired Kurt Cobain to listen and become a fan of Leadbelly, eventually leading to Nirvana closing out their famous 1993 MTV Unplugged concert with a cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”
For the Beats, jazz was a physical manifestation of complex emotions and thoughts that was once stuck in the realm of their mind and soul. Beatnik John Clellon Holmes writes:
In this modern jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them, and their lives knew a gospel for the first time…these introverted kids…who had never belonged anywhere before, now felt somewhere at last.
I’m sure many reading this with a passion for music can relate to them as well. I certainly can; way before I got into punk and psychedelic rock, classical music was my first love. I’ve never been great at writing, let alone putting my thoughts and emotions to words. The phrase “music transcends language” is often overused, and though I’d rephrase it to “music transcends words,” I’ve always agreed with the sentiment behind it. For me, classical music is my jazz, what speaks for me. The universal language that gives voice to the unspoken.
For those interested in delving further into this topic, I recommend checking out some resources I used below:
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