Before Jack Kerouac made being "beat" something cool and hip, before stretching the avant garde lifestyle past the unknown bohemian artist studios of the Lower East Side and SOHO into the mainstream, music was conservative and clean. The music then was great and uplifting but at the same time it was about to change. On September 5, 1957, On The Road was published and became the most influential book of the 20th century because of the impact it had on not just the literary evolution, studio art and culture but even more powerful was the impact on music. In fact it was the seed of what we call today, "modern."
What is interesting about the work is that it was created from a series of notebook pages typed out in a stream of conscious over a three week period and encompassed a generation of young people coming out of war torn times searching for reason and truth in a broken world. The great depression was still a fresh nightmarish memory, many people, nearly everyone it seemed knew someone who had been killed, maimed or psychologically damaged by the war and people were on the move both physically and intellectually. Something was bound to burst. The times were moving faster than globalization and the industrial age was becoming a dinosaur. With the techie boom silently waiting in the wings the world needed something or somebody to bring it into the new age. It doesn't get much more romantic then setting off on the road with nothing but $50 in your pocket and an enthusiasm about a life that has no road map to follow.
But with all the magical horizons before them, excitement and adventure the reality of their situations begins to close in on them. Pregnancy, poverty, depression, loneliness, vice and the darker sides of life that we conveniently ignore until it is staring us right in the bloodshot eyes. The hangover pounding and you start to wonder how it all went so Goddamn wrong. So initially it was the journey, the unknown, the sailing along on the great jazz music of the time, carrying individual dreams and illusions and urban, iconoclastic fantasies sewn up in the dirty ripped jeans of a disadvantaged youth or at least those who pretended to be. It is the life of the average people. Their big expectations and dreams and then they wake up and realize that it all lead nowhere. The marriage under the golden cathedral ceiling culminating in a rotten vicious divorce. The kids turning around to shun you followed by twenty plus years of silence and a lack of communication. You remarry but walk in on your new spouse naked in bed with your best friend. Claustrophobia sets in and every day just seems so bland when you go out and pick up an alcohol or pill habit and find yourself either pregnant at 45 or having knocked up some strange whose name you don't even know. That is pretty much the direction of On The Road that leads you down an empty hallway into an empty playground that looks like a thousand that you've seen before. It is the ultimate mirror of life so practically everyone. At least that is so for everyone who is honest and not hiding behind the flip book of good times we call the social media galaxy.
The idea of a "Beat" was sentimentality. It is was the quest for independence in a world that had a strangle hold on an evolving culture. On The Road signified the necessity of the dilution of different generations into the creation of something that was supposed to be extraordinary. The idea was form of anti-a priori. It was experiencing life through observation and shunning the deductive reasoning mumbo jumbo.
The moral of the story is that the journey is only part of it. It begins inside the soul first. It could be something as complex and reinventing oneself. It is done all the time for many different reasons but the journey itself is something that is there to add dimension. The foundation is what begins within the mind and then the building of a life can begin. No good fortune or happiness is accidental. It it the product of a continuous work in process that began with an idea and was constructed over the long and often difficult journey that one can look upon as a great adventure. A cliche would be to "Get off the couch and Get On The Road." Or maybe that isn't so cliche after all.
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