beatnik

"My love is bigger than a Cadillac
I try to show it but you drive me back"


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"Beatnik" is a funny word; it only inhabited the customary speech of people in my world for a short time when I was in, maybe, kindergarten through first or second grade.  After that, the word was "hippie."


And I don't know that "beatnik" and "hippie" mean the same thing, probably not exactly the same thing, yet still the latter replaced the former.  By the late 1960s, no one said "beatnik"...


In his autobiography Keith Richards mentions, "...art colleges in south London that were turning out suburban beatniks -- which is what I was learning to be."


>>>> "suburban beatniks"


colleges "turning out" beatniks


taking a course called "Beatnik 101" ...


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I heard my father say the word "beatnik" sometime during early grade school years.  He was not for-or-against them; he just mentioned it.  I don't know if I ever said the word beatnik.  Or saw anyone, in that time period, who I thought might be a beatnik.


I used to think beatnik meant someone who liked the new rock music and they're "keeping the beat" -- but in the intro to Jack Kerouac's book On The Road it says "beat" refers to a person who has been living -- or exploring life -- in a fast, enthusiastic, deep, exhilarated way, and so is tired -- or, "beat."


(And then, looking it up -- according to "Boundless.com" website, "Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York.  The adjective beat could colloquially mean tired or beaten down, but Kerouac expanded the meaning to include the connotations upbeat, beatific, and the musical association of being on the beat.")


========== So -- sort of what I thought, all-of-the-above, plus some more...


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It seems like if you put the syllable "nik" at the end of a word, or the word just naturally ends in "nik" it makes the word punchy and flip -- the word alone seems to make a statement.


beatnik
noodnik
no-good-nik
refusenik


---------------------- [excerpt, Life, by Keith Richards] -------------- It was a kind of guitar workshop....the local musical fraternity used it as a meeting place....I was known in the john for my rendition of "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone."  They sometimes got at me because I still liked Elvis at the time, and Buddy Holly, and they didn't understand how I could possibly be an art student and be into blues and jazz and have anything to do with that. 


There was this certain "Don't go there" with rock and roll, glossy photographs and silly suits.  But it was just music to me.  It was very hierarchical.  It was mods and rockers time.  There were clear-drawn lines between the "beats," who were addicted to the English version of Dixieland jazz (known as traditional), and those into R & B. ------------- [end excerpt] ---------


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