Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America

Musicologist Kapusta debuts with a comprehensive survey of artists, musicians, and performers who, in the years after WWII, practiced self-realization, or using art to express one’s “freely flowing creative energies” and become one’s “true self.” He traces the idea’s roots to the turn of the 20th century, when figures like Paramahansa Yogananda and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze framed yoga and music as vehicles for transcending the ego, tapping into one’s soul, and building a more harmonious world. The movement took off amid the post-WWII “age of anxiety,” with such artists as composer John Cage adopting a creative process of “doing without attempting to control what you are doing” and jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins debuting a “brand new” form of jazz that he called “playing me” and which possessed “an almost occult power to open others’ minds.” Other artists continued the tradition through subsequent decades, though the 1970s brought a wave of detractors that viewed self-realization as an “inward facing creed” that threatened “long-standing American values like duty, self-sacrifice, and family.” Kapusta valiantly argues for the nobility of the enterprise, though he concedes it ultimately failed to change the country as its proponents hoped it would. The result is an impressively researched history of a promising if limited artistic movement. (May)