Madman Bums and Angel-Headed Hipsters

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Marshall Mathers. Ginsberg, who published poems in the 1950's, was criticized for the content which were critical of American society at the time. Mathers, known in the music world as controversial rap artist Eminem, produced an album which was extremely anti-social and anti-establishment. This paper shows that even though these two artist were decades apart, their poems paint the same picture about American society - that ,as much as the mainstream tries to hide from it, injustice and inequality are still running rampant in society.

From the Paper:

"For most, the year 1956 conjures visions of cookie-cutter conformity and glazed-over domestic pleasantries. The 1950s seem to figure in most memories as a time of simplicity, without war or domestic conflict, yet despite the surface-level appearances, this era teemed with underground tensions. This was the age in which music was revolutionized by the new rock genre of Elvis Presley, when schoolchildren worried over threats of nuclear bombs, when the Cold War culminated in the secretive dispatch of troops in South Vietnam, and when all of this conflict was glossed over by Americans who wished to turn a deaf ear to the unpleasant. Out of this backdrop, Allen Ginsberg dropped a literary bomb on popular culture, publishing his book of poetry Howl and Other Poems, a collection which used obscenity, shock value, and literary genius to create an inflammatory portrait of America which could not be ignored. Over forty years later, in 1999, the formerly obscure rap artist, Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, released The Slim Shady LP, a collection of songs characterized by many as an obscene and self-indulgent abuse of his noteworthy talent. Eminem, in his endeavors, produced an album whose seemingly derogatory and misogynistic lyrics forced a politically correct culture to acknowledge the very thing they feared the most: that even in modern society, prejudice and hate still exist, and worst of all, his overwhelming popularity suggested there was still a market in white, suburban mainstream culture to embrace it. The similarities in the controversy sparked by Eminem's lyrics and Ginsberg's poems echo a deeper likeness between the poets; the endeavors of both artists to gain recognition for unpleasant realities that their contemporaries ignore resulted in parallels of style and theme."

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