Bop Apocalypse
Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The gripping story of the rise of early drug culture in America, from the author of the acclaimed Can't Find My Way Home
With an intricate storyline that unites engaging characters and themes and reads like a novel, Bop Apocalypse details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new and revolutionary segment of the American social fabric.
Drawing upon his rich decades of writing experience, master storyteller Martin Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Reefer Madness, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the coming of heroin to Harlem. Aficionados of jazz, the Beats, counterculture, and drug history will all find much to enjoy here, with a cast of characters that includes vivid and memorable depictions of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Borroughs, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and countless others.
Bop Apocalypse is also a living history that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions surrounding drugs today, casting many contemporary issues in a new light by connecting them back to the events of this transformative era. At a time when marijuana legalization is rapidly becoming a reality, it takes us back to the advent of marijuana prohibition, when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes. As a new opioid epidemic sweeps through white working- and middle-class communities, it brings us back to when heroin first arrived on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s. And as we debate and grapple with the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration, it puts into sharp and provocative focus the racism at the very roots of our drug war.
Having spent a lifetime at the nexus of drugs and music, Torgoff reveals material never before disclosed and offers new insights, crafting and contextualizing Bop Apocalypse into a truly novel contribution to our understanding of jazz, race, literature, drug culture, and American social and cultural history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Well before the hippies hit the scene, a drug-soaked, music-mad bohemia was birthed in the 1930s, according to this intoxicated history of the first American counterculture. Journalist Torgoff (American Fool) entwines several cultural turning points and the circles that nurtured them: the shift from popular big-band jazz of the 1930s to avant-garde bebop of the 1950s, with its inward, psychological bent, featuring musicians Lester Young, Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane; the crafting of the jazz-inspired Beat movement by anti-establishment writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Borroughs; and the drugs that fueled both groups: mellowing marijuana, ravaging heroin, and hallucinogens that unlocked the doors of perception. Torgoff's account celebrates the jazz-beat confluence as a breakthrough into the beginnings of a multiracial, anti-square society. It's also a fervent critique of the war on drugs his villain is Harry Anslinger, chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that shades into drug romanticism as he insists, unpersuasively, that drugs crucially enriched artistic achievements. (A stoned Ginsberg, he gushes, beheld "the infinitude of the blue sky" and "saw the river of life flowing past" on Broadway.) This exuberant appreciation, made luridly entertaining by all the intoxicants, captures the wild energy and fertility of these seminal movements. Photos.