Hardcore v Jack Kerouac

"No-one talks about it, but Jack Kerouac's On The Road is shit, it's fucking shit. Jack Kerouac's On The Road is shit, it's shit ...". This is how Roo Stafford & The Innits ended their recent JT Soar show in Nottingham. No tedious "thanks for coming", "enjoy the other bands" or "please buy one of our t-shirts" nonsense. Just this, something entirely unconnected to anything in their weirdo-hardcore set. Great! More bands should do this kind of thing. Meanwhile, is Roo right? Is Kerouac's super-famous book ... shit? I reckon: no. No, it isn't. Admittedly I haven't er, actually read On The Road. About 30 years ago I tried to and gave up halfway through, finding it pretentious and semi-incomprehensible. So far, so shitty. But lately - belatedly - I've got quite heavily into Kerouac and I now think he's an unlikely choice for a slagging off from a musician. Why? Well, as I was suggesting in a blog on Kerouac's Visions Of Cody (a book in the same vein as On The Road), for several reasons: (1) Kerouac was a big music fan (mostly bop jazz, plus some classical music); (2) he writes with sympathy and verve about the 1940s-50s beat/hipster scenes; and (3) his own writing is often extremely "musical". Yeah, Roo, my man, you've got it all wrong on Jack Kerouac. Anyway, to - ahem - categorically prove my point, here are a few music bits and pieces from Kerouac's short novel The Subterraneans (1958), a book I was reading at exactly the time I caught Roo Stafford & The Innits blasting out their (excellent) hardcore stuff in Notts:

*Its protagonist Leo Percepied says his love interest - Mardou Fox, a "highclass" Black woman - has a "new bop generation way of speaking". For example, explains Kerouac/Percepied, "you don't say I, you say 'ahy' or 'Oy'". This new style evidently involved some kind of drawling, langorous way of pronouncing words which Kerouac saw as an "erstwhile 'effeminate' way of speaking". He reckons he'd also heard it in "the voice of new bop singers like Jerry Winters with the Kenton band on the record Yes Daddy Yes and maybe in Jerri Southern too". To me what's interesting about Kerouac is that he partakes in the new "bop generation" style as well as commenting on it. So his book is full of people saying things like he or she was "flipping" (getting extremely high on drugs), that they're getting high on "tea" (marijuana), or that someone or other would "like to make it" with another person (have sex with them). Meanwhile, Kerouac also steps back from all this and makes grandiloquent statements about the scene's wider significance. So he can say, with a sort of self-confident grandeur, "we were hipsters of America in the 1950s sitting in a dim room". It's classic Kerouac, man. Poetic, observant, unashamedly aggrandising, and ... undeniably musical. So yeah, daddy-o, I'm definitely down with this.

*Mardou, the troubled, sensitive woman in The Subterraneans, is described as a "rhythmic" person. If this sounds like an unsubtle form of objectification, I think in Kerouac's terms it's actually a way of praising her. Mardou has rhythm in her writing - something Kerouac greatly esteems - and she's said to be the first woman Kerouac had known who "could really understand bop and sing it". Yes, it's possibly a form of objectification/patronisation of a Black woman by an older white male writer, but I think in context there's some genuine effort at understanding and sympathy, as well as a writerly observation of how musicality and behaviour (speech modes etc) were apparently fusing and interacting within the beat subculture. 

*The subterraneans, Kerouac's name for a loose group of beat ne'er-do-wells bumming around 1950s Venice Beach in Los Angeles, evidently had the pick of bop-era jazz right on their doorstep. He refers to a music hangout they frequent, the Red Drum, where for "a dollar quarter at the door" they could hear Charlie Parker, Art Blakey or Thelonious Monk knocking out their stuff. 

Er, and that's it. Admittedly not a very fulsome riposte to Mr Stafford, but ... it'll have to do (there's more like this in the Visions Of Cody blog and another blog on Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller). Anyway, having said all this, I reckon Roo Stafford is probably a secret Kerouac admirer after all and was just joking about On The Road. Maybe he just said it for effect? For the riff. Even out of nervousness. It was another of his nervous reactions ... 

Is The Subterraneans shit? I think we should be told