Hippie
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hippie refers to a subgroup of the 1960s and early 1970s counterculture that found its earliest beginnings in the North American counterculture, becoming an established social group by 1965 before declining during the mid-1970s. The hippie dream of peace and love was shattered in 1970 with the events at Altamont, the Manson murders and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Overview
The hippie (or hippy) subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word 'hippie' came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, though 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 inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation and mimicked some of the then current values of the British Mod scene. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and some used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.
In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco 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, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and later (in 1970) to the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400 000 people. 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 fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms, including health food, music festivals, contemporary sexual mores, and even the cyberspace revolution.
In film
- Easy Rider
- Petulia
- I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968)
- The Trip
- Up in Smoke (1978)
See also
- "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"
- Summer of Love
- If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy we Would Be
- Timothy Leary
- Vietnam War
- Free love
- Sexual Revolution
- North American counterculture
