Do You Consider Yourself A Counter-Culturist?

People can label themselves as "hippy" or "counter-cultural" but still be mainstream in many ways. Everyone can selectively choose what aspects of the hippy movement they believe in, and discard the rest. That's how it happens in real life anyways.

 

All these terms and phrases; cool, hip, groove, get down, lay back, dig it, etc, originated with Jazz musicians anyway. :beatnik:

So, you do get that It's all one big evolution. Correct?
The jazz hipsters faded but the Beats evolved out of that.
The beats faded and the hippies evolved out of that. Especially with the San Francisco Beats.
Sad, people say that the hippies faded, but nothing evolved out of that. Oh well.

We are still here and moving on. I call myself a hippie so that there is no doubt to others. I don't smoke and I'm not a stoner. Anyway that doesn't define hippie. Certainly not to me. Hippie is experimentation to me. Not dumping the standard lifestyle for the sake of dropping out or shunning it. But having the brains to seek a better way to go. Hippie is using your sharps (smarts). If you only get one life why not do it your way?

If I seek to invent a better way, maybe you could call it alternative. If others want to refer to that as a counter culture then let them. I'm not the one who is living with blinders on. I am an artist who is creating my own way of living.

 

Kenny, I don't hear a lot of people say hippies faded, without anything evolving out of it. I hear more people say that a lot of hippie values became mainstream and adopted by a big part of society (green movement for example), which rings more true to me. Sometimes it seems to me that hippies that are bothered about the lack of a hippie subculture nowadays just crave that intense groovy atmosphere from back in the day. They're almost craving the need for a counter culture (not saying there is no use for a counterculture but i don't insist it has to be a counter culture/come from a specific hippie-like subculture), even if it would seem we're more productive/constructive if we don't seperate ourselves in counter whatever groups. We can just as easily (I agree it's not that easy) change the system from within.

Damn Rev. No bank account but working in/connected to the system seems like a real drag at times. Is it?

 

I never heard of a "Jazz hipster"... If anything, the Jazz cat musicians just called them "half-stewed cats" lol Beat bongo hipsters that knew little or nothing about music and thought bep-bop was just improvised cacophony..."go man wow!" LOL

There will always be charlatans and pretenders

As for the rest, the labels faded, but for some at least, the attitudes didn't... :beatnik:

 

That's OK. I've never heard of you either. But that doesn't mean that you don't exist. LOL Existentialism. "There You Are."

charlatans and pretenders, two totally different bands.

Is anybody still talking about counter culture? Or have we exhausted this topic?

 

Speaking of which, still hanging out by the heated pool, kenny? d-:

 

I'd rather listen to this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ1JUxeTg3U

Than some girl wearing a meat dress. Or a coloful psychotic black female rapper. You know who I'm talking about.

Great post and fantastic beginning thread.

 

It can be. Like when I get my check I have to go to a check cashing place to get it cashed, Once I get a couple of more things paid off I'll probably get one at a credit union.

C/S,
Rev J

 

I don't see that anything or anyone could be considered much "counter-culture" because even those go into creating culture.

 

Yes Aerianne.I know you don't watch TV but you must filter a lot of junk through the internet.You must surely see that a lot of the agendas presented in mass pop culture are geared towards maintaining the status quo.Counter cultural art,music,film and writings seek consciously or otherwise to subvert these dominant paradigms,either subtly or brazenly.A lot of so called "culture" is created specifically for the purpose,sometimes with the funding of the CIA and other world agencies,with the express intent of thought suppression,positive DNA love vibration and the general blocking of free thought,expression and creativity.

people working from a counter cultural work method however seek to challenge these mundane life-worlds and models with a freestyle,freeform idea of how life could be reappropriated from a largely synthetic and instrumentalized pop culture that is so invasive that we often cannot even fathom the depths and mechanisms as it operates even within our own minds,giving rise to a reified false consciousness system that only goes to sell us back our own comodified freedom.




Never mind that most of the greatest counter culturists have been either psychologically disturbed drug abusers or alcoholics.

 

Yes, I understand about the barrage of pop culture and its effects.

I'm just saying that in the long run, those who started out as counter-culture are viewed as having supplied a vital part of culture. (I'm thinking of the Van Goghs, the Suffragettes, all those who were at one time considered radical and mad.)

 

Another, for instance: Bob Dylan! Now, he is on the cover of AARP magazine.

I think we're all a part of developing culture whether we mean to be or not.

 

Van Gogh may have been an outsider but he wasn't counter-culture. Quite the opposite. He very much wanted to be a part of his culture.

 

I know a fair number of people who define themselves (sometimes in part) as hippies.

Where I see a hippie or something like a hippie culture is at psytrance and related gatherings. I see people who clearly are not mainstream, who clearly are counter-culture. I see people who really have cut their ties with mainstream America or Europe. And at the same time, several of the people with whom I'm associated in a counter-culture sort of way are heading up roads similar to Rev JC's (as did I, long ago). I see a lot of the mystic beliefs that sometimes perplexed me in the 60s and 70s, and still do today. I see a lot of primo cannabis and quality psychedelics. I dance beneath the diamond sky, sometimes lasting until dawn lights the trees and clearings of the forest where these little get-togethers take place. Those are some of the values I think.

 

How to define this? It is in the Hippie Forum but the thread asks "Do You Consider Yourself A Counter-Culturist?"

For me, I think so. All my life I have not fit into the Mainstream Culture altho I have existed within it. Like I finished high school and went into the military (because we guys had to). Worked at str8 jobs, including security guard and police.

But, I countered at points that did not fit with me - gave up the mainstream religion, explored Eastern filosofy, sorta gave that up and back to agnostic (countered a couple of cultures). I dropped out of the mainstream jobs, did mostly human services for decades and never pursued a career. Smoked and dropped dope, lived in crash pads and communes, fucked indiscriminately (guys and girls) went to the Atlanta Pop Festival (how I found this site looking for info on that) hitch-hiked across the country and let my hair and beard grow. All the cultural conformity of a Hippie.

Now I am in my 7th decade and still follow many of the same ideals of personal freedom from that era. I support gay rights & gay marriage and that may in my lifetime become a cultural norm, just like gays in the military and sports. I am more concerned now about the Medieval mindset of the Mainstream Culture and wonder how we go from an age of enlightenment back to the Dark Ages. I am more anti religion than ever - it is still the bane of humanity as it always has been. Racism seems as entrenched as it always has been altho more ppl accept interracial relationships than a few decades ago (another of my counter-culturalisms).

So, yeah I am a counter-culturalist.

 

So many parts of counterculture become culture.

I remember taking my mother to try on her first pair of jeans in 1974.

She wore jeans everyday after that until she died in 2007.