Bop Apocalypse

Martin Torgoff

Torgoff is a brilliant writer; blending detailed music biography with cultural analysis to explore the folk devils and moral panics of the bebop era and the beat generation. His research is phenomenal, with an extensive bibliography and impressive cast of interviewees including Stanley Crouch, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson and Jackie McLean. The real villain for Torgoff is Harry J Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger’s war on drugs policy was clearly racist, motivated by the clamp down on a predominately black music, but his actions, claims Torgoff, also facilitated creativity. “No single piece of legislation more effectively guaranteed the growth of an underground alternative culture in this country than the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, and no single piece of legislation more decisively declared war on that culture,” he states.