Very Baad Books

Let's face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endearment. All hipster, counter-culture, soul searchers love baad stuff, perhaps ever since Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. That's because it does the right stuff: it refuses conformity to the powers that be; it refuses to take seriously all the high-falutin' ideals and pretenses; it gets down with the real folks, whoever they might be. And it's a pretty rigorous taxonomy, best used, of course, for the contemporary, the latest baad stuff. But you could take it back a bit, using the same criteria and say that, for instance, Madame Bovary (1857) is baad—so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Henry Miller's Sexus (1949) and Nexus (1960), Samuel Beckett's Murphy (1938), Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes's Mule Bone (1930), Amiri Baraka's Dutchman (1964), Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and so on—you get the point, there's a lot of baad stuff there that's really good.

But can a book be baad and bad at the same time given this taxonomy? The answer has to be: of course. The book can be hip, cool, revolutionary, code breaking on many levels, but just plain crappy. Examples will have to work here, and so I'm going to nominate for dual honors Bob Dylan's 1966 classic baad book, Tarantula. If this isn't baad and bad at the same time, I give up. So I'm just going to end with the first, well, let's call it "sentence" of the book:

aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled & cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel & ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot…

If you love that, you know you're baad, no matter that the book itself is bad.