The crossover success of rap music and the resurgence of performance poetry in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have rekindled the spirit of the spoken word as a musically viable art form. Both have as an antecedent the collaborations of word-slingers and jazz musicians who subverted the stultifying constraints of Cold War America in the Fifties with humor and agitprop, igniting a countercultural movement heralded as the Beat Generation. Tracing their roots to the bop-era jazz musicians of the Forties, Beat luminaries like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs wrote for the ear as well as the eye. The result was a rhythmically propelled literary phenomenon that shoved its way into American popular culture – books, film, fashion, television and vocabulary – and, like its contemporary sibling rock & roll, foreshadowed much of the social angst to come in the Sixties.

The Beat Generation, a three-CD anthology on Rhino Word Beat Records, highlights the legacy of the Beat era in all its manifestations. It gives glimpses of seminal Beat influences – like Langston Hughes and Lord Buckley – and re-creates, through poetry, jazz, comedy and interview segments, the aura of "hipness" that came to define the Beat Generation.

The collection weaves the bop and postbop melodies of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan and others together with classic spoken-word and comedy performances by notables including Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth and Lenny Bruce. Indeed, when Kerouac, who allegedly coined the term Beat, mouths that his compatriot Herbert Huncke was "ready to introduce a new world with a shrug," he is obliquely alluding to the Beats' invasion of the mainstream. As if to drive that point home, The Beat Generation juxtaposes Beat gods with the murmurings of 77 Sunset Strip star Edd "Kookie" Byrnes and the confessional lyricism of Rod McKuen. This effect, lumped with vintage documentary excerpts narrated by the likes of Charles Kuralt and Howard K. Smith, illustrates how firmly the Beats gripped the American psyche and confirms their historical significance.

An inheritor of the Beat tradition is rocker and spoken-word iconoclast Henry Rollins. His new double CD, Rollins: The Boxed Life, is a lucid tragicomic set culled from his Boxed Life Tour of the past year. Rollins, a former member of Black Flag and now leader of the Rollins Band, has been doing spoken-word shows between musical tours for ten years. Consequently, his timing is incisive, and his ability to turn the most horrific events into humor drums up comparisons to the dark, painfully honest routines of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.

"If you're something all the time besides alive, it might as well be funny," Rollins muses, and he pokes fun at everyone from gamblers in Las Vegas to airline pilots to himself. His working-class perspective and style speak for the average Joe and Jane ill equipped to articulate their sagas as postmodern Americans. There's a striking simplicity to Rollins's performances, yet he manages to make one feel foolish for not looking at the world as carefully – and as cautiously – as he does. "I'm a connoisseur of hatred," he announces sardonically, and this self-description leads to a zealous denunciation of all forms of bigotry; if you have to hate, Rollins reasons, hate weakness and "self-serving egotistical motherfuckers."

Intentionally or not, Rollins's introspective bent pays the greatest homage to his Beat predecessors. Like many of those artists, Rollins subverts the images of his past life in an effort to shed light on his present-day reality. He talks at length about his childhood misadventures, sex in the age of condoms and mundane topics such as exhaustion: "I will do the method-acting stunt/I will remember the last time I was sane and well rested/And I'll act like that."

The Beat Generation and Rollins: The Boxed Life serve as kinetic vocal grist for the mills of New Age bohemians eager to dig for greater truths and into themselves. The spoken word as an upstart genre is back and, as Kerouac would say, "intent on joy." (RS 649)

KEVIN POWELL