Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Howl From Beneath The Footnotes*

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked
,*

who put shotguns in their mouths* while their records ruled the air,*
insisting it was better to burn out than fade away,*
their civilizations* crumbling on that* Manhattan* day –
our weapons turned against us –*
and the good guys have to pay,

* The following stanza is an imaginative extension of Ginsberg’s poem Howl for a younger demographic, specifically Generation X, defined most widely as those born between 1961 and 1981 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X). The prevalent use of footnotes emulates, as well as satirizes, the original.

*These two lines begin Ginsberg’s original text.

*A reference to Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, who committed suicide in 1994. Nirvana, as well as many other bands under the grunge/alternative umbrella, gave voice to alienated feelings of many teenage and young adult Generation X’ers.

*Ironically, while Cobain was the only prominent alternative musician to commit suicide during the 1990’s, several others, despite their commercial successes, were not able win their battles with substance abuse. The three that are most remembered are Andrew Wood (Mother Love Bone), Shannon Hoon (Blind Melon), and Layne Staley (Alice In Chains); each of them died from a drug overdose. Even in cases where drugs did not result in a death, addiction often tore apart bands, such as was the case with Scott Weiland and Stone Temple Pilots.

*This phrase, taken from Neil Young’s song ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),’ gained infamy when Cobain used it in his suicide note.

*The word ‘civilizations’ is meant to evoke the so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory promoted by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. This theory postulates that “people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clash_of_Civilizations).

*The word ‘that’ is italicized to distinguish 9/11 from the many other horrific events that, while similarly brutal if not more so, did not occur on U.S. soil.

*The choice here to use the term ‘Manhattan’ to refer to New York City deliberately carries echoes of the ‘Manhattan Project,’ where the atomic bomb was developed by the United States.

*This refers to the irony present in the theory that some of the same Afghan elements the U.S. funded against the Soviet Union eventually morphed into the Islamic extremists who organized and conducted 9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden).

4 comments:

  1. If there was a "like" button here (like the one on Facebook), I would simply "like" this blog post! But, there's not so I'm saying I love it! There's a lot of creativity in our classroom!

    ReplyDelete
  2. thank you! i prefer comments to the 'like' button anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  3. For you and the rest of us gen. x's:

    http://new.music.yahoo.com/nirvana-269788/news/kurt-cobains-daughter-to-make-singing-debut-with-my-chemical-romances-gerard-way--61998810

    thought this was interesting since our discussion of Ginsberg led into Cobain.

    ReplyDelete