The Best Minds of My Generation Go Bang! On Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg

Abstract Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, new music composer and underground disco producer Arthur Russell and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg performed and recorded together, collaborating on a range of poetry-music hybrid projects. This chapter provides readers with a way of understanding Russell’s music and Ginsberg’s poetry as enacting, commenting on and interpreting aspects of each other’s poetics. Ginsberg’s influence, the chapter argues, can be heard in Russell’s dance-oriented songs including Russell’s “#5 (Go Bang!)” (the version originally released on Russell’s 24→24 Music rather than the better-known François Kevorkian mix released in the spring of 1982 as “Go Bang! #5!”). Correspondingly, Russell’s music enables listeners to go back retrospectively to Ginsberg’s textual practice with new ways of thinking about his work, including the seminal poem “Howl.” By highlighting sometimes latent associations between Russell’s music and lyrics with Ginsberg’s poetic practice and his signifying power as countercultural bard, this chapter encourages readers to perform close readings of both figures’ texts while simultaneously considering the wider cultural context that shaped them. Going back into that context will help us see how Ginsberg and Russell provided readers and listeners with complex and often skeptical takes on the value and possibilities of affinity between queer, Black, and white bohemian communities.