What is Gonzo journalism?
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One of my favorite examples is from Hunter S Thompson:
>My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . .
He could easily be talking about the events of objectively a single night: this one time, this one particular time, that he stayed out late after a concert and drove across the bridge to another part of the metropolis. In fact despite his protestations that it might have been “five or maybe forty nights” it really kind of sounds like that he just went once, and got lost like you do the first time, but had fun anyway.
If you put it that way, it sounds lame. Or at least, it becomes another kind of writing. A kind of understated, I’m-a-sad-sack David Sedaris kind of style.
But Thompson is trying to also get you to understand what it felt like to be him back then, in San Francisco in the middle 1960s. What “no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories” could adequately convey. So instead he starts to write wildly, unreliably, vaguely. Because only by blurring it can he represent it truthfully.
At least… that’s the idea.
A journalist who gets involved in the story he is reporting on. Louis Theroux is a modern example of a gonzo journalist.
Go read [‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadant and Depraved’](https://grantland.com/features/looking-back-hunter-s-thompson-classic-story-kentucky-derby/)
This is the most well known article from the most widely recognized ‘gonzo’ journalist.
RIP HST. a man that didnt quite fit into our time or any time, but we’re worse off without.
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Traditional journalism tries to remove the writer from the event and portray events as objectively as possible. For example, “The elephant has wrinkly skin.”
Gonzo journalism recognizes that no one has an objective perspective. For all we know, the elephant is completely smooth on the other side that we can’t see. It becomes about telling a story about an event, sometimes untrue, that captures the “feel” of it to someone in the middle of it.
Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” for instance, followed George McGovern’s campaign from primary underdog to near-record general election loss.
Where a journalist might talk about polls and numbers and strategies, Hunter focused on the people and their energies. He made up a lot of stories, but several of his outlandish stories were things that actually happened to him. Both kinds served to illustrate the feeling – inhospitality, desperate labors, backroom bickering, boundless hope, and the lingering spectre of ’68’s instabilities.
Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s campaign manager, would often say in later years that the book, despite its embellishments, represented “the least factual, most accurate account” of the election. (quoted directly from Wikipedia – I wasn’t gonna phrase it any better)
See also Tim Crouse’s “Boys on the Bus” that describes other journalists covering the campaign as writing effectively the same stories, based on the same sights and press reports. But Crouse was willing to peak through doors, look through documents, ask hard questions. And when he wrote, it was about HIS experience as a journalist on the trail, reflecting the campaign staff, not a story about the campaign staff themselves.
That isn’t an ELI5 this is just an encyclopedia question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism
It’s like saying “what is technology” or something.
True, old school, Gonzo was personal immersion in the story fueled by drugs and alcohol so that the experience itself became the story, resulting in insights that would not have been possible without the transcendent state.
Gonzo is not just real-life stories told with a personal slant.
Hunter s Thompson pioneered Gonzo journalism with books like hells angels, well worth reading. Also a really interesting guy
I think the one point others don’t point out or underemphasize is the journalist *participating*. Not just passively experiencing, but often experiencing by doing. Be it gambling, be it protesting, be it hitchiking, be it shooting people dead in war zone.
New Journalism, as practiced by Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, incorporated fictional literary techniques, such as ia subject’s internal dialogue. Gonzo journalism, practiced by Hunter S. Thompson and even music critic Lester Bangs, took greater liberty with those literary techniques to incorporate more of the writer’s opinions, social commentary and point of view.
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