Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac: Between Coolness and Ecstasy

Between coolness and ecstasy, a groovy essay in the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies.

From the piece...

In a recent comprehensive study, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has described the modern world as characterized by an unprecedented acceleration. Not only does technology allow us to move at an ever greater speed, virtualization enables us to “travel” while staying put in our armchair. In an even more encompassing sense, our entire social structure has become mobilized and accelerated. As a result of a self-perpetuating social process, what seems secure in one moment gives way to contingency in the next.

Starting from this macro-sociological narrative, it is easy to overlook that speed and acceleration are frequently mediated within modern culture, that— as we may put it somewhat formally—what characterizes its macro-structure is addressed, or used, on the level of microstructure. This becomes particularly pertinent in the subcultural production of the long 1950s. To get a better view of the way speed and acceleration play out on this micro-level, I will focus on a particular historical juncture of American popular culture, which I locate roughly between the years 1943 and 1957. At this moment, I argue, we can observe how two distinct subcultural formations mark their different positions in American society by the peculiar ways each makes use of speed as an aesthetic means.

The first formation I have in mind is the literary movement of the Beat Generation; the second consists of the musicians associated with bebop, who turned the popular big band jazz of the large dance halls into a small-combo art music to which listeners “danced in their heads,” as the expression goes. In the segregated U.S. of the 1940s and 1950s, these two subcultures inhabited different worlds. Considering that some of the Beats frequently belonged to the bop musicians’ audience, one may wonder what constitutes this difference. On the one hand we have the Beats, predominantly from the white middle class (though in many cases ethnically diverse), often with an aborted college education. On the other hand, we find the beboppers, professional musicians, predominantly African-American, generally from a poor family background, often hailing from the Midwest and rural South, and now mostly working in New York. Both groups constitute subcultures, and they give aesthetic expression to their conflict-ridden position vis-à-vis the cultural mainstream by each creating a specific style.[1] For both of these styles, acceleration and speed are key elements. Yet these identical elements are integrated into distinct stylistic attitudes. The Beats use speed for a style of ecstasy. Bop musicians, on the other hand, rely on speed to create a style of cool. The function of these two stylistic attitudes evolves out of each group’s relation to the mainstream of U.S. society.

Here's Charlie Parker playing with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young: