Hippie
A hippie is a subculture associated with the counterculture of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It originated as a youth subculture that began in the United States and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies adopted the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.
In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and the Monterey International Pop Festival popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s to mid 1970s teenager and youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe.
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asiatic spiritual concepts have reached a larger group. Those who participated in the hippie movement at its height were those born during or shortly after World War II, during the 1940s and early 1950s. These were the youngest of the Silent Generation and oldest of the Baby Boomers; the former who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the early pioneers of rock music.
Etymology
Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie are derived from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The word hip in the sense of "aware, in the know" is first attested in a 1902 cartoon by Tad Dorgan, and first appeared in prose in a 1904 novel by George Vere Hobart, Jim Hickey: A Story of the One-Night Stands, where an African-American character uses the slang phrase "Are you hip?"The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1944. By the 1940s, the terms hip, hep and hepcat were popular in Harlem jazz slang, although hep eventually came to denote an inferior status to hip. In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square, meaning conventional and old-fashioned. In the April 27, 1961 issue of The Village Voice, "An open letter to JFK & Fidel Castro", Norman Mailer utilizes the term hippies, in questioning JFK's behavior. In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used both the terms hipster and hippies to refer to young people participating in black American or Beatnik nightlife. According to Malcolm X's 1964 autobiography, the word hippie in 1940s Harlem had been used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes". Andrew Loog Oldham refers to "all the Chicago hippies," seemingly about black blues/R&B musicians, in his rear sleeve notes to the 1965 LP The Rolling Stones, Now!
Although the word hippies made other isolated appearances in print during the early 1960s, the first use of the term on the West Coast appeared in the article "A New Paradise for Beatniks" by San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon. In that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn Cafe , using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district.
The hippie movement in the United States began as a youth movement. Composed mostly of white teenagers and young adults between 15 and 25 years old, hippies inherited a tradition of cultural dissent from bohemians and beatniks of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s. Beats like Allen Ginsberg crossed over from the beat movement and became fixtures of the burgeoning hippie and anti-war movements. By 1965, hippies had become an established social group in the U.S., and the movement eventually expanded to other countries, extending as far as the United Kingdom and Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. The hippie ethos influenced the Beatles and others in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, and they in turn influenced their American counterparts. Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music, folk, blues, and psychedelic rock; it also found expression in literature, the dramatic arts, fashion, and the visual arts, including film, posters advertising rock concerts, and album covers. In 1968, "core visible hippies" represented just under 0.2% of the U.S. population and dwindled away by mid-1970s.
Along with the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement, the hippie movement was one of three dissenting groups of the 1960s counterculture. Hippies rejected established institutions, criticized middle class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, embraced aspects of Eastern philosophy, championed sexual liberation, were often vegetarian and eco-friendly, promoted the use of psychedelic drugs which they believed expanded one's consciousness, and created intentional communities or communes. They used alternative arts, street theatre, folk music, and psychedelic rock as a part of their lifestyle and as a way of expressing their feelings, their protests, and their vision of the world and life. Hippies opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire ideology that favored peace, love, and personal freedom, expressed for example in the Beatles' song "All You Need is Love". Hippies perceived the dominant culture as a corrupt, monolithic entity that exercised undue power over their lives, calling this culture "the Establishment", "Big Brother", or "the Man". Noting that they were "seekers of meaning and value", scholars like Timothy Miller have described hippies as a new religious movement.
History
Precursors
A July 1967 Time magazine study on hippie philosophy credited the foundation of the hippie movement with historical precedent as far back as the sadhu of India, the spiritual seekers who had renounced the world and materialistic pursuits by taking Sannyasa. Even the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the cynics were also early forms of hippie culture. It also named as notable influences the religious and spiritual teachings of Buddha, Hillel the Elder, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi and J. R. R. Tolkien.File:Miss Beatnik of 1959 contestants.jpg|thumb|Beatniks posing in front of a piece of beatnik art, 1959. The Beat Generation are seen as a predecessor to the hippie movementThe first signs of modern "proto-hippies" emerged at the end of the 19th century in Europe. Late 1890s to early 1900s, a German youth movement arose as a countercultural reaction to the organized social and cultural clubs that centered on "German folk music". Known as Der Wandervogel, this hippie movement opposed the formality of traditional German clubs, instead emphasizing folk music and singing, creative dress, and outdoor life involving hiking and camping. Inspired by the works of Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse, Wandervogel attracted thousands of young Germans who rejected the rapid trend toward urbanization and yearned for the pagan, back-to-nature spiritual life of their ancestors. During the first several decades of the 20th century, Germans settled around the United States, bringing the values of this German youth culture. Some opened the first health food stores, and many moved to southern California where they introduced an alternative lifestyle. One group, called the "Nature Boys", took to the California desert and raised organic food, espousing a back-to-nature lifestyle like the Wandervogel. In 1948, songwriter eden ahbez wrote a hit song called "Nature Boy" sang by Nat King Cole and inspired by Robert Bootzin, who helped popularize health-consciousness, yoga, and organic food in the United States.
1958–1965: Origins
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally first in Oregon and after the 1962 success of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in his San Francisco villa. Members included Beat Generation hero Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs, Carolyn Adams, Stewart Brand, Del Close, Paul Foster, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and others. Their adventures were documented in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. With Cassady at the wheel of a school bus named Further, the Merry Pranksters traveled across the United States to celebrate the publication of Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. The Merry Pranksters were known for using cannabis, amphetamine, and LSD, and during their journey they "turned on" many people to these drugs. The Merry Pranksters filmed and audio-taped their bus trips, creating an immersive multimedia experience that would later be presented to the public in the form of festivals and concerts. The Grateful Dead wrote a song about the Merry Pranksters' bus trips called "That's It for the Other One".In 1960, eden ahbez released the exotica album "Eden's Island", ahbez had previously written the song "Nature Boy" inspired by the Californian "Nature Boys" and the work of Robert Bootzin. In 1961, painter, sculptor and former marathon dancing champion Vito Paulekas and his wife Szou established a clothing boutique on the corner of Laurel Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood, close to Laurel Canyon. The boutique was credited with being one of the first to introduce "hippie" fashion as well as a brand of free-form dancing that would become associated with hippie culture. Paulekas and his later associate Carl Franzoni were known for their sexual appetites and unconventional behavior. They and an expanding troupe of associates called themselves "freaks" or "freakers", and became well known in the area by about 1963 for their eccentric free-form dancing in Sunset Strip nightclubs, being described as "an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants". Vito has been regarded as an early hippie, he provided rehearsal space for local bands such as the Byrds in 1964 and later Love. His antics which included invading local rock concerts with his dance troupe, helped bring attention to several West Coast groups. Vito and his dancers would pioneer a style of which would become popular amongst hippies. Paulekas and his troupe would later accompany the Byrds on a nationwide tour in July 1965. He would be retroactively described as "a man in his fifties who presided over a harem of predominantly young female 'freakers'". Writing in 2003, writer Barry Miles labeled Vito and his wife Szou as "the first hippies in Hollywood" and "perhaps the first hippies anywhere".
During this period Greenwich Village in New York City and Berkeley, California anchored the American folk music circuit. Berkeley's two coffee houses, "the Cabale Creamery" and "the Jabberwock", sponsored performances by folk music artists in a beat setting.
In April 1963, Chandler A. Laughlin III, co-founder of the Cabale Creamery, established a kind of tribal, family identity among approximately fifty people who attended a traditional, all-night Native American peyote ceremony in a rural setting. This ceremony combined a psychedelic experience with traditional Native American spiritual values; these people went on to sponsor a unique genre of musical expression and performance at the "Red Dog Saloon" in the isolated, old-time mining town of Virginia City, Nevada.