BEAT SOUND, BEAT VISION: The Beat spirit and popular song (Manchester: MUP, 2007)
This book reveals the ideas behind the Beat vision which influenced the Beat sound of the songwriters who followed on from them. Having explored the thinking of Alan Watts, who coined the term ‘Beat Zen’, and who influenced the counterculture which emerged out of the Beat movement, it celebrates Jack Kerouac as a writer in pursuit of a ‘beatific’ vision. On this basis, the book goes on to explain the relevance of Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder to songwriters who emerged in the 1960s.
Not only are new, detailed readings of the lyrics of the Beatles and of Dylan given, but the range and depth of the Beat legacy within popular song is indicated by way of an overview of some important innovators: Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Van Morrison and Nick Drake.
While this may seem at first sight to be a deviation from my earlier themes, I should stress that the book addresses the recurrent theme of the interplay of ‘the sacred and the profane’ – the two dimensions of all religious experience, according to the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade.
The Beat writers were obsessed by the possibility of apprehending the spiritual dimension of the everyday, ‘fallen’ world. In Buddhist terms, this means recognising the identity of ‘nirvana’ and ‘samsara’. Alan Watts and Gary Snyder are particularly impressive in the way they effect this in their own writings.
Again, in the final chapter, entitled “‘Eco-Zen’, or ‘a heaven in a wild flower'”, I bring my interest in mythology and my interest in ecology together, in assessing the Beat legacy within the work of a wide variety of sixties songwriters. The ‘green’ emphasis, I argue, began with the Beats and was developed by Joni Mitchell and others.
Responses to BEAT SOUND, BEAT VISION (2007)
Brian Dalton in his review for Beat Scene writes:
It must be a sign of the times. Laurence Coupe meshing writers such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Leonard Cohen, William Blake alongside musical iconic figures such as Jim Morrison of The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Nick Drake and others. It must be a delightful development for many to read about, seeing this line of descent, this family tree approach to how things grow. In a series of articulate essays Coupe stretches out his ideas and linkages, investigating who inspired who, casting Alan Watts in a central role alongside the omnipotent William Blake. … Some of Coupe’s theories are contentious but from this uniquely English perspective they are absolutely thought provoking.
Susan Rowland in her review for Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture writes:
There are secret histories. Even in the most flagrant and ostentatious of arts, popular music from the 1960s, there are secret, because unconsidered, affiliations and invocations. There are secret histories folded up in words as the etymologists and the rhetoricians knew. So what does it mean that ‘Beatles’ contains ‘Beat’ as in Beat poets?
There are secret histories and histories of secrets, as Laurence Coupe shows in this stunning and authoritative new work. His book on the Beat poets, popular music and the secret traditions they espoused, encompasses mythology, Zen, the perennial philosophy, and a quest for the sacred. …
Beat Sound, Beat Vision is a work of tremendous cultural imagination itself in revealing the vertical and horizontal paradoxes of the Beat vision. Reaching back into ecological myths of a sacred feminine earth, forward to condemn capitalism’s destruction of it, outwards to recognize, honour and mourn the other Native American culture, Beat Sound, Beat Vision brings a healing scholarship to the complex, corrupted yet still vibrant picture of popular culture of the last fifty years. All those who seek to belong to the truthful in our own age, who seek art that offers a sense of the sacred to the collective, all of us should read this book.