Pulse, intervals, melodic shapes—all give the game away within seconds. This is 'standard' Glass through and through, vital, rhythmically pungent and—in this instance—hauntingly supportive of a writer whom Norman Mailer once described as ''himself a United States of America, teaming, sprawling, uneven...''. Allen Ginsberg was the Beat Generation's most outspoken poetic voice, a passionate advocate of the sexual, narcotic and political (anti-war) revolutions that turned the 1960s upside down and shook a whole generation out of complacency and (some would say) common sense. A mixture of love, wisdom and political rhetoric, Ginsberg's work retains its full quota of Whitmanesque eloquence, and Hydrogen Jukebox—a 1989-90 Glass/Ginsberg collaboration—espouses a vital sense of contemporaneity. Although the specific events that sparked off such pieces as ''Nagasaki Days'' and ''Howl'' have since passed into history, others—''Jaweh And Allah Battle'' and ''N. S. A. Dope Calypso'' (with its pointed 1990 'Addendum')—certainly haven't.
The underlying score is mildly minimalist and harmonically uncomplicated. Instrumentation includes keyboards, flute, soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet and percussion, with Glass himself accompanying (on piano) Ginsberg's declamatory reading of the white-hot, sprawling and ultimately moving ''Wichita Vortex Sutra''. Elsewhere, there's a vocal ensemble of half-a-dozen singers, while instrumentation varies from track to track. But the score always sets out to respect ''the music that was already in the words''—as Glass himself admits in the accompanying booklet-note.
So what exactly is on offer? Well, among much else, there's a highly percussive, multi-denominational protest about Middle Eastern tensions, a ''happy birthday'' for a much-loved friend, a kaleidoscopic, trans-American journey, a heart-felt indictment of modern man's relative soullessness (from ''Howl''—Ginsberg's most famous single poem), a visit to a ''Cabin in the Woods'', a wishful pilgrimage in search of gay love and, to end, a simple, six-part a cappella chorus on the death of Ginsberg's father. Neither chamber opera nor musical, song cycle nor pop 'concept' album, Hydrogen Jukebox is all of these plus a useful resume of insights, revelations and misconceptions that helped father the thinking of an entire generation. And that it succeeds without the aid of pop nostalgia says something both for the strength of Ginsberg's poetry and the suggestive power of Glass's music. Recording, performance and presentation (with full texts included) are state-of-the-art.'