Generation MTV

Abstract

Around the same time that Robert Capa published his photographs of Generation X, John Clellon Holmes wrote an essay titled “This Is the Beat Generation” (1952) in which he quoted a conversation with Jack Kerouac from 1948. Based on this interview, Holmes conveyed that “more than weariness […], beat implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness” (qtd in Ulrich 20). Beneath the detachment of the Beat state of mind lie “the stirrings of a quest” (Ulrich 20) that is not meant to disrupt or undermine postwar society, but rather to evade it by searching for spiritual meaning through new forms of expression. Beat, in the work of Kerouac, takes on a tripartite vision that includes the marginal, the spiritual, the creative, and the artistic (the rhythm of bebop and spontaneous prose) (Ulrich 21).KeywordsVideo ClipMusic VideoNarrative StyleNarrative TechniqueEmotional ChargeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.