The beat generation took shape in the 50s and declined in the 60s. It, like all movements, have distinct cultural and political circumstances which shaped the course of its development. In a post-war America, ecnomically prosperous and complacent,yet facing various political tensions in the form of the Cold War and the McCarthy trials, the beats represented a cultural and spiritual displacement from the comfortable corporate culture that was prevalent in America. They chose to live away from the mainstream, delibrately marginalising themselves and plunging themselves into the dark social underbelly of drugs, jazz and hoping to find a higher truth than what they saw as the coldly efficient producer-consumer relationship in America in their spiritual and artistic pursuits on and off the road.

Now we are on the threshold of a new millenium, and the beat generation is dead and gone –or is it? What we believe is that most of the major beat writers are dead, but they certainly did not leave without a trace. Their influence can be seen in the hippie movement of the sixties and seventies, the development of literature after the fifties and the music industry even up to today.

It is obvious that the beat generation helped steer the direction of the hippie movement of the sixties: many of the main beat figures participated in it, for example Allen Ginsberg was deeply involved in many of the Summer of Love Sessions and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were almost iconic with their psychedelic bus travels as recorded in The Electric Kool-Aid Test. However, Jack Kerouac had deep reservations (okay, deep repulsion) about the flower children as he felt that they lacked sincerity in their spiritual pursuits. There were many similarities between the beat generation and the hippies as many characteristics of the former were not lost in the transition. There is the emphasis on Eastern philosophy and religion that morphed into mysticism; the anarchist ravings for more freedom morphed into pacifist sloganistic "Make love not war" mass sittings; the beats’ liberal attitude to sexuality and freedom of expression also gave way to more open hippie gay and bisexual movements; the use of drugs to emulate the jazz musicians, fuel days of writing without rest and to explore the fringes of perception and consciousness continued in more experimentation in psychedelic drugs and halucinogens.

Besides steering the direction of the hippie movement, the beat generation generally also helped shape the road of American consumerism, ironically. According to Willliam S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road "opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes". The launching of the beat generation also introduced the culture of the holy degenerate in pursuit of spirituality through his verious experiences and wanderings. The literal movement of the self became a metaphor for one’s own quest for identity and truth. Jack Kerouac stirred the wanderlust in many people who felt alienated from society promted a more pervasive hitchhiking culture. Besides travelling and searching, the beat generation also caused more people to hang out at where the famous beat writers hung out, discussing their poetry. This movement, either pretentious or not, is another question.

The beat generation, most obviously, challenged the literary norm of the day, but the permanent extent of the change is limited. The beat writers abandoned what they thought was the restrictive, rigid formality of established literary form and structure, campaigned for absolute spontaneity in writing . "The best, once-beat, and post-beat poets (Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, John Giorno, the poetry slam movement) continue to hold their ground, but they constitute one more school", writes David Gates, and he notes that "mainstream-modern lyric poets like John Ashbery still win most of the prizes and get most of the teaching gigs". It is true that very few of the beat writers have their work taken seriously by the literary establishment , and few serious writers will actually like to write like them due to the many reservations the literary authorities have of them.

However, the beat generation did revolutionalise the pop and rock music industry in through the 60s to the 80s. "From Bob Dylan through Kurt Cobain, popular music has been essentially post-Beat poetry with electric guitars" claims David Gates. The beat figures helped launch many groups to fame through their involvement in other activities. For example, the Grateful Dead were inspired and travelled with Ken Kesey’s Kool-Aid Tests; Allen Ginsberg was Bob Dylan’s favourite poet; The Pink Flyod and The Soft Machine were rose to fame after events such as Marquee at the Royal Albert Hall (the place where the wildly successful International Poetry Festival was held with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti)……beat connections in music are endless. The sparse libertarian style of the beats influenced the bands to adopt a freer and more direct expression of their inner feelings, this lyrical style charaterised most of the bands, where expressed in punk, rock or pop, has its roots in the beat generation.

The beat generation, in truth, cannot be said to have far-reaching effects, but it is an attractive road for many disillusioned and alienated young souls belonging to any time and place who aspire to be the melancholic, talented , saintly outsider either modeled after the beat figures themselves or the downtrodden that the beats so eulogised. For many, this may be a shallow posturing that they will eventually grow out of. But we feel that the beats were more important than just a tantalising glimpse of the alternative lifestyle of sex, drugs, poetry and jazz; they represented, more than anything, a stinky fart on the coldly efficient, economically fat and complacent American system, in fact, any system at all; they are the brazen red flag of liberty in the face of rigid, dogmatic authority which anyone of us could face. Hence their relevance and bohemian appeal to many people, us included. We doubt that any of us will grow out of our liking for the beats, as they were, are, and will be forever, the icons of our freedom of expression. Amen.