Daniel Kane
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231162975
- eISBN:
- 9780231544603
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231162975.003.0010
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Making it onto the Billboard Chart’s Top 100 list in 1980, the Jim Carroll Band’s hit single “People Who Died” had – and continues to have - multiple lives. The fifth track on the Jim Carroll Band’s ...
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Making it onto the Billboard Chart’s Top 100 list in 1980, the Jim Carroll Band’s hit single “People Who Died” had – and continues to have - multiple lives. The fifth track on the Jim Carroll Band’s first album Catholic Boy, “People Who Died” is name-checked in novels (Jennifer Ball’s Catalyst; Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores). It is summoned in autobiographies (Steve Rutz’s Renewing Your Mind; Vanessa Gezarri’s The Tender Soldier). We hear it in films as various as Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial; Fritz Kierch’s Tuff Turf; and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And yet, despite the way Carroll’s “People Who Died” has resonated across the decades, few critics even bother to mention that Carroll’s song is inspired directly by Ted Berrigan’s poem “People Who Died,” first published in 1969. This chapter analyzes how the last great punk song on the last great punk album was actually modeled on a New York School poem.Less
Making it onto the Billboard Chart’s Top 100 list in 1980, the Jim Carroll Band’s hit single “People Who Died” had – and continues to have - multiple lives. The fifth track on the Jim Carroll Band’s first album Catholic Boy, “People Who Died” is name-checked in novels (Jennifer Ball’s Catalyst; Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores). It is summoned in autobiographies (Steve Rutz’s Renewing Your Mind; Vanessa Gezarri’s The Tender Soldier). We hear it in films as various as Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial; Fritz Kierch’s Tuff Turf; and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And yet, despite the way Carroll’s “People Who Died” has resonated across the decades, few critics even bother to mention that Carroll’s song is inspired directly by Ted Berrigan’s poem “People Who Died,” first published in 1969. This chapter analyzes how the last great punk song on the last great punk album was actually modeled on a New York School poem.
Daniel Kane
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231162975
- eISBN:
- 9780231544603
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231162975.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do ...
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During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.Less
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.
