The Beat Generation

In reading about the Beat Generation, I began to make connections between Dadaism, Surrealism, the Beatniks and the later 60s counterculture of the Hippies. The Beats incorporated the Dadaist spontaneity and its non-conformity to bourgeois values and, like Surrealism, allowed the imagination to move freely through the subconscious. Injecting their writings with spiritual references and inspiration from the truths they found in the streets, poems such as Ginsberg’s Howl emerged. In listening to DJ Spooky’s, “Once loved/ A footnote to Howl”, I could hear Ginsberg saying such things as “The bum is as holy as the seraphim. The madman as holy as you my soul are holy. The typewriter is holy. Holy the jazz bands’ marijuana hipsters, peace, and junk, and drums. The tongue, and cock, and ass-hole, holy. Holy Holy Holy. Everything is Holy.” Obviously, such thoughts were not mainstream but were proclaimed anyways, breaking free of societal constrictions. The Beatniks grew out of the media attention surrounding writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. As the decade turned, the Beatniks morphed into the new cultural phenomenon of the Hippies.
In is interesting to note the effect that media played in taking what was spontaneously happening in the cultural scene of New York and elsewhere during the 50s and then taking that energy, repackaging it and selling it to the masses. In one of the Beat Generation documentaries on You Tube, many of those interviewed said that they were not aware of what they were doing as any sort of movement, per se. Rather, they were just having fun and experimenting with new ways of expressing themselves. For example, the rhythm of music and the body movements of the performers such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk were a large influence on the poetry as were painters of the time such as Franz Kline.
It is interesting to note that Ginsberg himself even says that nobody knew whether they were “catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own.”