Renude19

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness; starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

Notorious beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote and first performed his epic poem Howl 70 years ago. Its debut performance, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955, is said to have heralded the birth of the Beat Generation, the literary subculture that also included cult writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Kerouac wrote that the event was “the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance”, and Ginsberg was immediately asked to publish Howl by City Lights Books.

Howl — whose title was given to Ginsberg by Kerouac — was reportedly written after a terrifying peyote vision, and discussed the exploits of a colourful cast of outcasts, explicitly talking openly about drug use and homosexuality in parts. It’s been written that Howl was Ginsberg coming to terms with his own sexuality, and also his mother’s schizophrenia.

After publication, copies of Howl & Other Poems were seized by customs officials, claiming that the parts of Howl relating to homosexuality were obscene, and the City Lights bookstore manager and book publisher were arrested. At the subsequent obscenity trail, literary experts testified to Howl’s artistic merit and the judge ultimately ruled that Howl was of “redeeming social importance”, and threw the case out. Along with the obscenity trial that William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch also overcame the following year, the publication of Howl helped redefine the constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment, and ultimately helped liberalise publishing in the United States as a whole.

Renude19 initially turned Howl into an electronic album using Ginsberg’s original voice, before re-recording all the words with Ashley Slater of Freak Power fame. The lolloping, rich textured rhymes lend themselves well to electro riddims, the evocative prose sitting on top of the interwoven music with stark relevance. The album project has received the stamp of approval from the Allen Ginsberg Project, the foundation that oversees the poet’s legacy,