Post #60236 by tikibars on Sun, Nov 16, 2003 12:55 PM

On 2003-11-16 10:03, seamus wrote:
JT !! You and I have got to do some more drinking buddy! Joe Strummer and Tom Waits are two of my Favorite guys. Both are best known and beloved for their musical endeavours, but both were/are known to appear in the occaisional offbeat indy type movie as well. Joe strummer is one of my personal heroes.

Although I think you were addressing this to a different JT, I want to pipe in that Strummer and Waits are two of my hugest musical gurus as well. Although I do agree that Waits is the last true Beat, I don't think I can include Strummer in that category.

And not to contradict the mighty Jab, but my impression was that the Beats were serious writers of the late 40s and 1950s such as Keouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al, and the Beatniks were the trendy kids who were trying to emulate them?

My understanding of 'Beat' was that it is a term coined by Kerouac, meaning both beatific, and beat-up - not physically attacked, but run down, defeated by life, world-weary.

I guess there are as many explainations for these things as there are historians writing about them.

For the record, I have seen many photos of the Beats in their heyday, and I have never seen a single photo of any of the original Beats, the ones mentioned above or otherwise, in stripey shirts, berets, goatees or playing bongos. These were cliches introduced by the wannabee Beat followers - the Beatniks, in my understanding of the word - and seized by the popular media in creating the Beatnik stereotype we know today.

Beatniks, by the way, begat Hippies, another term coined by Keroac, derived from Hipster.

Finally read Joey's literature list above. Good stuff, all of it.