“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, and this first ‘Waking Nightmares’ EP serves as an album teaser.

EP opener ‘Waking Nightmares’ takes in Howl’s first stanzas, beginning with the infamous quote above before 80s-sounding future-retro synths turn it into an electropop paean. ‘Visionary Angels’ moves through vivid stream-of-consciousness descriptions of Americana ephemera and alternative geography to a disco beat, while the more banging third track ‘Rockland’ name-checks Carl Solomon, who the epic Howl poem was written for, and is called after the psychiatric hospital where Ginsberg met Solomon. “The ecstasy is holy,” Ginsberg exclaims, perhaps predicting the drug that would fuel the acid house revolution three decades later. (It was Ginsberg who actually coined the term ‘flower power’ in the late 1960s.)

After his notoriety spread after the Howl obscenity trial, Ginsberg appeared on stage with a number of musicians including Bob Dylan, The Clash and Patti Smith, and recorded with Paul McCartney and Philip Glass. Ginsberg passed away from liver cancer in 1997, but his legacy lives on.

Howl, then, is an important historical classic with considerable artistic merit. Indeed, at a time when librarians in the US and UK are being pressurised by evangelicals to take LGBTQ+ titles off shelves, it feels more relevant than ever. This timely Howl update by Renude19 recontextualises the seminal Beat Generation poem for a modern audience, amplifying the raw emotional power of his words and introducing him to a whole new generation.