America by Allen Ginsberg with music by Tom Waits

Ginsberg is like William Burroughs and Tim Leary, they were all beatnik icons of the 60s counter-culture that I sought out as part of 'counter-education' and they were all people I began to distrust. But you don't have to like an artist to enjoy their work. And I'm not sure I really trust Tom Waits either!

It's a great poem (but you might need to be a 1950s leftists to get half the references) and Wait's music is perfect. A number of these lines sometimes float up in my head.

Ginsberg reading of “America” is from Chicago in 1959, he wrote the poem two years earlier.
Waits' instrumental is the title track from his first album, Closing Time (1973)
Someone mixed them together in 1996 "using a very Primitive copies of CoolEdit and Soundforge"
It was released to Soulseek in 1999 (where I got my copy)
In 2006 someone else added a photomontage and posted it to Youtube

America By Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.  
I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
 
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint
There must be some other way to settle this argument.  

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.  
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?  

I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.  
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.  
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.  

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing (undressing?) you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?  
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.  
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.  
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana, millions of genitals, an unpublishable private literature that jet-planes [goes] 1400 mph and twenty-five thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of 500 suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford, my strophes are as individual as his automobiles, more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket, a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers, it was all so sincere, you have no idea what a good thing the party was, in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch, Mother Bloor, the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.  
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digestes. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Ah.
Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.  

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.  
America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.










Here is the secret origin of this song

Ralph Beard, March 30, 2013 at 7:29 AM

Every now and then I do a search on this thing just to see what’s been written about it over the years. It’s not doing to badly for something I cut together on a whim back in 1996 using a very Primitive copies of CoolEdit and Soundforge. (The sound is a little tinny from the old noise removal tool) You’re right, by the way, the levels are all over the place at points and it kind of runs out of steam at the end. But it’s remarkably effective for something that only came about because I was changing cds, and went from one to the other. It wasn’t till I cut it together that I heard the live version of a reading where it’s performed as a crass comedy routine. Then again, it was never meant to go any further than my computer. I shared it to a friend on Soulseek 1999 and it made it’s way from there. Funny how some things can live on even if you don’t mean them to.

I got this song off of Soulseek so I was one of the 2nd waves of sharers.    I would do a similar mash-up of Burroughs reading his own work and Dirty Three.

This is the other Ginsberg track I got off of Soulseek...



This poem was written by Ginsberg after the death of his father, he called the poem "the fruition of my Buddhist training." I was into Buddhism and Pallative Care when I download this song and it had a profound effect on me. That impact is not transferable to others or even my current self, but there is core humanism to this song that makes the bones shine through the flesh.


Hey Father Death, I'm flying home
Hey poor man, you're all alone
Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going

Father Death, Don't cry any more
Mama's there, underneath the floor
Brother Death, please mind the store

Old Aunty Death Don't hide your bones
Old Uncle Death I hear your groans
O Sister Death how sweet your moans

O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths
Sobbing breasts will ease your Deaths
Pain is gone, tears take the rest

Genius Death your art is done
Lover Death your body's gone
Father Death I'm coming home

Guru Death your words are true
Teacher Death I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues

Buddha Death, I wake with you
Dharma Death, your mind is new
Sangha Death, we'll work it through
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn

Father Breath once more farewell
Birth you gave was no thing ill
My heart is still, as time will tell.