Jump to content

Hippie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Messy~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 17:33, 26 July 2006 (Re-added an external link that I noticed had been anonymously removed a few days earlier). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This page refers to hippies as a group engaged in a certain lifestyle - for the TV comedy, see Hippies (TV series)

A singer dresses in a stereotypical hippie outfit.

Hippie, often spelled hippy, is a term originally used to describe some of the rebellious youth of the 1960s, although the dawn of the 21st century has brought with it a neo-hippie movement, holding similar beliefs and values as the hippies of the 1960s. The word hippie was popularized by the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Caen's articles were always written with the help of notes and letters from his San Francisco fan base. He is also credited as among the first to include the words beatnik and yuppie in his column.

Though not a cohesive cultural movement with manifestos and leaders, some hippies expressed their desire for change with communal or nomadic lifestyles; by renouncing corporate influence, consumerism and the Vietnam War; by embracing aspects of non-Judeo-Christian religious cultures (including much Eastern philosophy); and with criticism of Western middle class values. Elements of romanticism and Transcendentalist philosophy can be seen in their writings and artistic expressions.

Such criticism included the views that the government was paternalistic, corporate industry was greedy and domineering, traditional morals were askew, and war was inhumane. Hippies often referred to the structures and institutions that they opposed as The Establishment or The Man.

Origins

During the 1940s and 1950s the term hipster came into usage by the American Beat generation to describe jazz and swing music performers, and evolved to also describe the bohemian-like counterculture that formed around the art of the time. In his Autobiography, Malcolm X uses the word to describe a specific type of beatnik. As this is mentioned during his reminiscence of 1950s Harlem and Detroit, it shown that the term was in use before the actual movement during the 1960s.

The 1960s hippie culture evolved from the original beat culture, and was greatly influenced by changing music styles and the creation of Rock & Roll from Swing and Blues, or what is known as jump blues. The first use of the word hippie on US television was on WNBC TV Channel 4 in New York City at the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 22, 1964. Some young Anti-Vietnam War protesters, wearing t-shirts, denim jeans and with long hair like The Beatles, staged a sit-in and were called Hippies by NYPD officers and reporters. The police fought with and swung their batons at them to chase them off the escalators and they fought back and were arrested. Before that date, the type was generally referred to as Beatnik.

On the east coast of the U.S., in Greenwich Village, young counterculture advocates were called, and referred to themselves as, hips. At that time, to be hip meant to be "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being called a stodgy "square". Disaffected youth from the suburbs of New York City flocked to the Village in their oldest clothes to fit into the counterculture movement, the coffee houses, etc. Radio station WBAI was the first media outlet to use the term hippie to describe the poorly-dressed middle class youths as a pejorative term originally meaning "hip wannabes."

September 6, 1965 marked the first San Francisco newspaper story, by Michael Fellon, that used the word "hippie" to refer to younger bohemians. The name did not catch on in mass media until almost two years later. Many of these original hippies were former students at San Francisco State College (the old name for San Francisco State University) who had "dropped out" after they had started taking psychedelic drugs and began living communally in the then cheap large Victorian flats in the Haight-Ashbury.

Hippie action in the San Francisco area, particularly the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theater group that combined spontaneous street theater, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda of creating a "free city." The San Francisco Diggers grew from two radical traditions thriving in the area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the new left/civil rights/peace movement.

Los Angeles also had a vibrant hippie scene in the mid-1960s, arising from a combination of the L.A. beat scene centered around Venice and its coffeehouses, which spawned the Doors, and the Sunset Strip, the quintessential L.A. hippie gathering area, with its seminal rock clubs, such as the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and the Troubadour just down the hill. The Strip was also the location of the actual protest referred to in the Buffalo Springfield's early hippie anthem of 1966, For What It's Worth.

On October 6, 1966, the San Francisco hippies staged an enormous gathering in Golden Gate Park, titled "The Love Pageant Rally." As explained by Allan Cohen and others, the purpose of the rally was two-fold--to draw attention to the fact that LSD had just been made illegal, and to demonstrate that people who used LSD were not criminals, nor were they mentally ill. Rather, people who took LSD were mostly idealistic people who wanted to learn more about themselves and their place in the universe, and they used LSD as an aid to meditation and to creative, artistic expression. The rally was a huge success and drew many more curious seekers to the Haight-Ashbury district.

Summer, 1967 in Haight-Ashbury became known as the "Summer of Love" as young people (75,000 by police estimates) gathered and shared the new culture of music, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and alternate lifestyles. On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In concert provided the initial spark for the Summer of Love, and a few months later Scott McKenzie's rendition of John Phillips' song, "San Francisco," became an instant hit in both the United States and in Europe. Inspired by the song, thousands of young people from all over the world traveled to San Francisco and environs.

The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and a number of other musicians lived in the Haight at the time, which added to the intensity of the Summer 1967 experience. At the end of the summer, the Diggers held a Death of Hippie parade because they felt co-opted by incessant media coverage and interpretation of the hippie movement.

The hippie movement reached its height during the late 1960s, as evidenced by the July 7, 1967 issue of TIME magazine, which had for its cover story: The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture. 1971 is generally considered the last year of the Hippie Era. By 1972 many of its ideas and styles had become integrated into mainstream society.

Because many hippies wore flowers in their hair and distributed flowers to passersby, they earned the alternative name, "flower children."

Time and history revisionists have obscured the true origins and influence of the hippies, whose roots stretch back 100 years to Europe. Around the turn of the century (1890s), there was an active movement in Europe to return to the natural life away from the polluted, crowded cities. This movement was inspired by authors like Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha), and Eduard Baltzer, who wrote about how modern man’s material yearnings were taking us away from our balance with nature and leading to spiritual and physical diseases. Thousands of young Germans turned their backs on modern society and sought a return to nature and the pagan spiritual life of their ancestors. They embraced a variety of radical lifestyles including vegetarianism, fasting, raw food diets, nudism, organic farming, communal living, sun and nature worship, etc.

These ideas were introduced into the US over several decades as one by one these Germans settled in various places around the country, some of them opening the first health food stores. In the USA, many of them lived in Southern California where they could practice their alternative lifestyles in a warm, welcoming land. Many young Americans learned from these Germans how to stay healthy and avoid succumbing to disease and urban malaise. A group called the Nature Boys took to the California desert, grew organic food and espoused the healthy lifestyle they adopted. A song written by one of them, Eden Ahbez (or eden ahbez), called "Nature Boy", was recorded in 1947 by Nat King Cole and became the #1 song in the USA, as America finally realized there was a new back-to-nature movement in its midst.

Eventually a few of these Nature Boys, including the famous Gypsy Boots, made their way to Northern California just in time for the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. The psychedelic posters that announced concerts at the Fillmore and elsewhere in S.F. were heavily influenced by the artist Fidus, one of the original German hippies. Read more about the influence of the Germans on America's hippies here:Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture.

Politics

Hippies were often pacifists and participated in non-violent political demonstrations, such as civil rights marches, the marches on Washington, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, including draft card burnings and the 1968 Democratic Convention protests. Yippies represented a highly politically active hippie sub-group. Some Americans, especially conservatives, military personnel, and veterans felt that even non-violent hippie opposition to the Vietnam War was unpatriotic because it compromised the ability of the United States to prosecute the war.

With their emphasis on Free Love, hippies were an embodiment of a counterculture movement that found early expresssion in the Beat Generation. Both Beats and Hippies advocated for legal and societal acceptance of sexual expression outside the traditional bounds of marriage and procreation. With regard to bisexuality and homosexuality, the Beats had demonstrated early tolerance during an era when homosexual expression of any sort was still punishable by stiff prison sentences. Although hippies generally accepted co-habitation and open relationships for heterosexual couples, hippie tolerance of homosexuality fell short of full inclusiveness; many hippies were not particularly tolerant of homosexuality when it came to communal living arrangements.

In fact, hippie domestic life seemed largely to default to traditional gender roles, with women doing most of the work -- cooking, cleaning, child care, etc. -- while the men engaged in creative, artistic pursuits. Images of women in hippie art abound, generally as innocents, goddesses or muses. Most hippie entrepreneurs, philosophers, commune founders and leaders, writers and artists were men. A notable exception was Lenore Kandel, whose Love Book got her busted for pornography in 1967.

Hippie political expression often took the form of "dropping out" of society to implement the changes they sought. At their inception, the back to the land movement, cooperative business enterprises, alternative energy, free press movement, and organic farming were all politically motivated hippie enterprises.

Although hippies were sometimes accused of verbally attacking soldiers returning home from duty in Vietnam, or participating in the torching of ROTC buildings on college campuses, with the exception of a small radical fringe element hippies did not verbally assault military personel and did not condone acts of political violence. With the release of FBI records under the Freedom of Information Act, it has become clear that many such attacks were actually perpetrated by FBI COINTELPRO agents provocateurs operating on J. Edgar Hoover's instructions to discredit those who opposed the Vietnam War. [1]

Scott McKenzie's 1967 rendition of John Phillips' song "San Francisco," which inspired the hippie Summer of Love, became a homecoming song for all Vietnam veterans arriving in San Francisco from 1967 on. Mr. McKenzie has dedicated every American performance of "San Francisco" to Vietnam veterans, and he sang at the 2002 20th anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial Wall. "San Francisco" became a freedom song worldwide, especially in Eastern European nations that suffered under the Soviet yoke.

Other songs, such as Lloyd Marcus' "Welcome Home Brother," have given voice to Vietnam veterans who felt disrespected by hippies and who lamented that fellow Americans never properly honored them for their sacrifices in serving the nation.

Drugs

Driven by the appeal of the Sixties "psychedelic guru," Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who advocated use of these drugs as a form of mind expansion, many hippies participated in recreational drug use, particularly of marijuana (see cannabis, cannabis (drug), and hashish) and hallucinogens such as LSD (see both psychedelic and psychedelic drug) and psilocybin (see Psychedelic mushroom). Some hippies prize marijuana for its iconoclastic, illicit nature, as well as for its psychopharmaceutical effects. Although some hippies did not use drugs, drug use is a trait often ascribed to hippies. Some hippies used drugs to express their disaffection with societal norms.

In addition to Leary, Ken Kesey was also an important figure in spreading the psychedelic philosophy. By holding what he called "Acid Tests," and touring the country with his band of Merry Pranksters, Kesey became not only a "drug guru" but a magnet who drew media attention to the fledgling movement. The Grateful Dead played some of their first shows at the Acid Tests, often as high on LSD as their audience. The use of cannabis had been established by the Beats, and the drug appears in "On The Road" (in which it is generally referred to as 'tea'), which was widely read among soon-to-be hippies.

The drugs used by hippies may have been introduced in part during CIA project MKULTRA, which tested the effects of various drugs and other treatments on numerous Americans. Ken Kesey himself was a volunteer subject in one of the many tests of the project.

Travel

Hippies tended to travel light and were able to pick up and go to wherever the action was at any given time, whether that was a "love-in" on Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco, a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Berkeley, one of Ken Kesey's "Acid Tests" or just because the "vibe" wasn't right and a change of scene was desired. Pre-planning was eschewed and most were happy to put a few clothes in a backpack, stick out their thumbs and hitchhike to just about anywhere. Hippies seldom worried about whether or not they had money, hotel reservations or any of the standard accoutrements of travel. Because most hippie households welcomed overnight guests on an impromptu basis, the reciprocal nature of the lifestyle permitted enormous freedom of movement. People generally co-operated to meet each other's needs in ways that were seldom seen before 1965 or after 1971. [citation needed] This way of life is still seen today among some Rainbow Family participants.

A derivative of this free-flow style of travel were hippie trucks and buses, hand-crafted mobile houses built on truck or bus chassis to facilitate a nomadic lifestyle. Some of these mobile gypsy houses were quite elaborate with beds, toilets, showers and cooking facilities.

Hand-crafted Hippie Truck 1968

On the West Coast, an entire lifestyle developed around the Renaissance Faires that Phyllis and Ron Patterson first organized in 1963. Entire families traveled together in their trucks and buses, parked at Renaissance Pleasure Faire sites in Southern and Northern California, worked their crafts during the week, and donned Elizabethan costume for weekend performances and to attend booths where handmade goods were sold.

The sheer number of young people living at the time made for unprecedented travel opportunities to special happenings. The peak experience of this type was the Bethel, New York Woodstock Festival that was held August 15-19, 1969, and which was attended by over 500,000 people.

Legacy

By 1970, much of the hippie style, but little of its substance, had passed into mainstream culture. The media lost interest in the subculture as it went out of fashion with younger people and even became the target of their ridicule with the advent of punk rock. However, many hippies made, and continue to maintain, long-term commitments to the lifestyle. As of 2005, hippies are found in bohemian enclaves around the world or as wanderers following the bands they love. Since the early 1970s, many rendez-vous annually at Rainbow Gatherings. Others gather at meetings and festivals, such as the Peace Fest, and the Glastonbury Festival in the UK.

Interest in natural food, herbal remedies and vitamins has largely been adopted into mainstream culture, and the little hippie "health food stores" of the 60s and 70s are now large-scale businesses.

Many hippies of today have made use of the World Wide Web and can be found on virtual communities such as Hippyland, the largest International Hippie community on the web, or UKhippy in the UK. Also, there are many events, festivals and parties which promote hippy lifestyles and values.

In the United Kingdom, the New age travellers movement revived many hippie traditions into the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, in America, many Hippie types refer to themselves as Rainbows, for the tied dyed T-shirts they wear, or for their participation in the hippie-like Rainbow Family.

The "boho-chic" fashion style of 2003-5 had a number of hippie features and, indeed, the London Evening Standard used the term "hippie chic" (11 March 2005).

Characteristics

Pejorative connotations

The term hippie has also been used in a derogatory sense to describe long-haired unkempt drug users. Among those of the Beat Generation, the flood of youngsters adopting Beatnik sensibilities appeared to be cheap, mass-produced imitations of the Beatnik artist community. By Beat standards, these newcomers were not "clever" enough to really be "hip". On the other hand, conservatives used the term hippie as an insult toward young adults who had leftist, liberal, and other progressive outlooks on life. Band members like the Beatles defied and baffled adults in adopting long, shaggy hair. Such displays of apathy with regard to appearance were but one way in which hippies defied preconceived adult expectations.

Today in more conservative or mainstream culture, and especially in political discourse the term hippie is often used to alude to slacker attitudes, irresponsibility, leftist sentiments, and participation in recreational drug use. An example is its use by the South Park cartoon character, Eric Cartman. In the "Die Hippie, Die" episode (viewable here[1]), the entire town joins Cartman in his negative view of hippies after they invade South Park for a "Hippie Music Jam Festival … [creating] the largest such gathering in the history of Man."

Neo-Hippies

Art car seen in Northern California

Neo-hippies or simply hippies today is generally used as a pejorative term for a Western spiritualist, however it is self-applied by certain groups. Often these are 21st century people who claim to believe in some form of the hippie philosophy developed in the 1960s. Dreadlocks — especially with beads sewn into them — remain popular amongst neo-hippies. Many critics argue that these "new hippies" are making more of a fashion statement than participating in a meaningful anti-materialist movement.

While there are references to the peace and justice themes advocated by their 1960s counterparts, neo-hippies have engaged in little civil disobedience or demonstrating to oppose the Iraq War and Patriot Acts I and II, compared to the 60's. Many of today's hippies are prominent in the "Dead-head" and "Phish-head" communities, as well as in the jamband scene, in general. Many criticisms of the hippie period following the Summer of Love continue to resonate: it can be shallow, hedonistic, fueled by drugs and the same middle-class money it claims to oppose.

Perhaps the two most valid criticisms are that many new hippies are not, in fact, more than superficial believers in the original culture, and that those who are true believers have largely disconnected from society. Hippies often promote organic farming, growing one's own food, making clothes by hand and "living off the (electrical) grid"; this leads to living in rural settings where these goals are feasible. Most older hippies today are political dropouts, with little to no faith in the system. The book The Rebel Sell details a more thourough criticism of both neo and original hippie 'counter culture' as being essentially individualistic and materialistic, thus consumer advocating, though claiming the opposite. This individualistic approach is evident in the isolating back-to-the-land and politically non-allied characteristics. Back-to-the-land ideas echo the original frontier mentality of American expansion as well as ironically lead to environmentally destructive suburban sprawl in continually further reaches. Political individualism can be contrary to socialist principles of common ground and compromise, as well as ironically similar to the each-for-himself ethos that defines capitalism.

Many US marijuana growers are hippies, either by adoption of the trade and culture, or because their parents did the same. Stable hippie communities built on the marijuana trade exist on the Northwest Coast of the US, (especially in and around Humboldt Co., CA), in the South and Northeast of the United States, as well as in several provinces in Canada. Smaller hippie communities built on more traditional farming and crafts are spread throughout the US and Europe.

In the US, the art car has almost replaced the VW Bus since these have become sought-after by enthusiasts, however a few hippie-era buses remain. In the UK and Europe, New age travellers in converted buses and trucks are generally referred to by others as "hippies", although most of them will strenuously reject this and other labels. An interest in environmentally-friendly technology like hybrid vehicles (not to include biodiesel and SVO/WVO technology) have also gained massive acceptance and promotion.

Drug usage is just as accepted as in the "original" hippie days, although it is not considered necessary to take drugs in order to be part of the lifestyle. Some modern hippies frown upon excessive drug use because of lessons learned from the past. Some of the more conservative hippies deplore most drugs other than cannabis and psychedelics, such as LSD, magic mushrooms and salvia divinorum.

Neo-hippies of today are usually found attending music and art festivals around the United States. The bands performing at the festivals are usually called "Jam Bands" because many of their songs contain long instrumental jams. The jams are similar to music performed by the original 1960s hippie bands such as Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers Band, Carlos Santana, Big Brother, and Jefferson Airplane. The modern jam bands play a fusion of all musical genres including rock, blues, jazz, bluegrass, funk, reggae, prog-rock, folk, and hip-hop. Psychedelic Trance music is also a common music preference for hippies around the world. Psychedelic Trance festivals last up to seven days and typically take place in the summer months. Israel, Germany and South Africa have major trance followings but the psychedelic trance culture is followed by many hippies worldwide.

The biggest jam band hippie festival is called The Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. It is a four-day, multi-stage, summer camping festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, and it is reminiscent of the festivals of the 1960s. However, the trend of Bonnaroo shows it is moving away from jam band headliners as the 2006 lineup is led by non-jam bands like Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, and Sonic Youth, just to name a few. This is perhaps an indication that the hippie music scene, or jam bands, is once again decreasing in popularity. Certainly, without the Grateful Dead and Phish in existence, the nomadic touring hippies are left without a seminal jam band to follow.

See also

Bibliography

  1. ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/cointelpro.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hippie&oldid=65994683"