Here’s the studio version of his trademark song, “Feeding Them Rasberries to Grow”, which borrows the melody and rhyme scheme from The Bentley Boys’ 1929 song “Down On Penny’s Farm“ (included on Harry Smith‘s legendary 1952 folk song compendium “Anthology of American Folk Music“).
Steven Taylor plays guitar and sings backing vocals, and Allen plays the claves (a pair of short, wooden percussive sticks) and also adds backing vocals.
Here’s a project that’s been in the works for a while now – Renude 19 (Ash Huntington and Christabel Cossins) – “Reimagining Allen Ginsberg’s Howl”.
Listen to the Waking Nightmare EP (Waking Nightmares, Visionary Angels, I’m With You In Rockland) is presented here as a three-track album-teaser.
Renude 19 had initially turned “Howl” into an electronic album using recordings of Allen’s original voice, before experimenting further, re-recording all the words with the distinctive and engaging voice of Freak Power‘s Ashley Slater
We’ve featured a live version of it here before, but here’s the album cut, it’s certainly worth featuring again
“Youth, and Jesse Goodman of the Allen Ginsberg Estate came to London’s Bureau of Lost Culture to talk of the beat poet’s impact on music and the British counterculture. We hear about Youth’s ‘Iron Horse’ project and (the) two albums (courtesy of the Ginsberg Estate) of interpretations of Ginsberg’s Fall of America poems (performed) by an astounding range of artists…”
Reimagine Howl ? More like un-imagining ,censoring,(deleting the word “negro”
from the second “strophe”), & overlaying it with “demagogic” electronics
that detracts from the words -detracts from the essence of the poem ,and renders A G’s words subservient to cliched ,bombastic hip-hop stylings. This is a dis-service not only to the poem, but to the projected audience for which the poem is being dumbed -down,excuse me re-imagined, -like when a public school teacher tries to “engage” the class by turning something into a “contemporary” version ,and thus refuses to challenge students by immersing them in something utterly unfamiliar, thereby broadening their horizons .Of course the argument against that view is that this will open up a generation who might otherwise never be exposed to ,or hostile to the real thing -the poem itself ,without the noise. But how will they then react to seeing the word “negro” if they get to the real unadorned Howl -will they then conclude that A G was racist? This “re-imagining” ,in my view, is yet another A I encroachment on the anti-mechanical Blake like spirit of A G .