I'm not sure what to make of the Beats. Easily parodied on TV and in the movies... an instrument of cultural and personal promotion... obviously unsound (and unwholesome) lifestyle choices... closely-related to consumer culture... interesting energy, fashions and forms... directly--obviously but also merely vaguely and superficially "counter-cultural"--indeed, how effective in this measure (as a cultural/counter-cultural "movement") and in what ways?
It's interesting how the Beats were so rapidly left behind by the culture they helped to foster. In the wake of Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Alice Cooper, Firesign Theatre... by the mid-70s the average "hippie" kid in the Midwest was in a position to possess a more sophisticated and appropriate "philosophical tool kit" and "psychedelic understanding" than the Beats ever achieved. Henceforth, the cup of trendy hipster hipness would runneth over into infinity... (And along these lines, look at the unfortunate "insights" Michel Foucault came away with after his "famous" psychedelic experience at Zabriskie Point... and more on him, Zabriskie Point... and Antonioni's films in a forthcoming Highbrow post.)
It's interesting how the Beats were so rapidly left behind by the culture they helped to foster. In the wake of Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Alice Cooper, Firesign Theatre... by the mid-70s the average "hippie" kid in the Midwest was in a position to possess a more sophisticated and appropriate "philosophical tool kit" and "psychedelic understanding" than the Beats ever achieved. Henceforth, the cup of trendy hipster hipness would runneth over into infinity... (And along these lines, look at the unfortunate "insights" Michel Foucault came away with after his "famous" psychedelic experience at Zabriskie Point... and more on him, Zabriskie Point... and Antonioni's films in a forthcoming Highbrow post.)
Moving beyond the question of their interesting place--and it is interesting and it is a "place"--in the stream-of-culture: from academic and aesthetic perspectives, when I go back and read the Beats today, their work seems... hmmm? Weak/embarrassing? Nihilistic? Insipid? (Do they make of poetry a thing that it is not? Hmm...) Along these lines, as I read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in passages where 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. And this goes for hippies, freaks, new wave'ers, grungesters, goths, emos, witches (and whatever trendy or hipster "bag" you might crawl into, wear, evoke, or "conjure") as well...
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