The Beats

It's interesting how the Beats were so rapidly left behind by the culture they helped to foster. In the wake of Zappa, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Alice Cooper, even Led Zeppelin (if you read between the soporific vibrations), by the mid-70s the average "hippie" kid in the Midwest was in a position to possess a more sophisticated and appropriate "psychedelic understanding" than the Beats ever achieved. Along these lines, look at the miserable, twisted and laughable "insights" Michel Foucault came away with after his "famous" psychedelic experience at Zabriskie Point...

Moving beyond the question of their interesting place in the "zeitgeist," from an aesthetic perspective, when I go back and read the Beats today, their work seems insipid, over-the-top, and tiresome. Along these lines, when I read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, when Wolfe parodies "Beat writing" I am struck that his passages are more impressive than the originals. And as far as that goes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and John Milton have written things that are far more "psychedelic" and "cosmic" and "transgressive" than anything the Beats ever came up with. Indeed, most of the Beats' "transgressive" and "cosmic" insights are little more than either gauche exercises in staring at their own belly-buttons, or Dutch-angle encomiums to the Goddess of Self-Destruction.