The Beat Generation was a group of authors whose literature explored and influenced American culture in the post-World War II era.
The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of Beat culture are rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The core group of Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac – met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs and Carr) ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.
Beat or beats may refer to:
Beats is a rhythm-based video game for the Sony PlayStation Portable handheld gaming system. It was released in 2007 at the PlayStation Store.
In addition to downloading music from the Internet, users may also use their own music to play along to in the My Music Challenge mode. Beats automatically loads the track titles and artist names of the songs it finds on the user's PSP. However, the game will only read up to 127 tracks for the user to choose from. There is as yet no explanation from Sony for this limitation, nor is it obvious how the game determines which 127 tracks are loaded from the library. (What is known is that the game loads the same set of tracks from the user's /MUSIC directory each time.)
During the game, three stationary targets, or landing points, (just one in Novice mode) are spaced evenly at the center of the screen. Symbols appear from off the screen and glide towards these targets in rhythm with the music. The symbols represent notes that players are meant to synchronize their button presses to and are identified by the four PlayStation face buttons: circle, "x", square, and triangle. These notes are generated based on the rhythm of the music using a beat tracking algorithm. While often occurring on the beat, notes can also occur off the beat at times. Tracks with greater emphasis on rhythm, especially techno songs with a strong, well-defined beat or powerful bass lines, generate the best in-game beat patterns.
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the mensural level (or beat level). The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a piece of music, or the numbers a musician counts while performing, though in practice this may be technically incorrect (often the first multiple level). In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts including: tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.
Rhythm in music is characterized by a repeating sequence of stressed and unstressed beats (often called "strong" and "weak") and divided into bars organized by time signature and tempo indications.
Metric levels faster than the beat level are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels. See Meter (music)#Metric structure. Beat has always been an important part of music.
The downbeat is the first beat of the bar, i.e. number 1. The upbeat is the last beat in the previous bar which immediately precedes, and hence anticipates, the downbeat. Both terms correspond to the direction taken by the hand of a conductor.
In the morning
I was weary
In the morning
I was lost
But in the evening
I was dreaming
Of our love
And the way it carries on
In the city
I was working
Feeling busy
Chasin time
But when I'm tired
She's my fire
Cause I know that her love is always mine
She assures me
That when life hurts me
Our love will carry on
In the afternoon
I was worried
About the future and where I'd go
But when I'm thinking
My fears start sinking