Do You Think Many People In The 60's Were 'hippies' Because Of Marketing?

Like, do you think it became a 'cool' thing to do?

Or was it essentially, and always, a subculture?

thanks

 

There was a subculture, but there were also those who were just looking for other people's dope and easy sex, and it was the cool thing to do. Or at least the cool thing to look like.

 

media's attempt to portray the moral high ground of pacifism and civil rights as self serving hedonism, backfired, creating a bandwagon many jumped on, swelling its ranks and making it a political force to be rekoned with.

advertising? an unintended kind of reverse advertising maybe. sure relatively young musicians promoted it to, and a few pacifist preachers, and so on, but mostly it was establishment opposition (and civil rights martyrdom) that fed the flames.

 

As a child of the 60s in UK - from what I saw of it
The 'media marketing' influence was indeed there, although I saw the squats, the protests, the prejudice and culture of change.
Unlike the "Mod" fashion - 'Hippism' was based on conscience and pro-active deed than looking the part and Fad

 

As the advent of TV began to expose the overt racism remaining in the south, so the advent of the net has exposed that racism has endured.

The Hells Angels saw the conformity of mainstream -(in 49 )society and refused to participate. What they eventually became, is another story. the

beatniks-(coined by a writer for an SF newspaper, combining the term beat--which described the attitudes of those societal "miscreants" who

were "beat down" by the same conformity as the angels saw and the 'nik part, which was taken from the first satellite to circle the earth-

Sputnik.) Same writer coined the term hippies, figuring I suppose that not caring much about clothing or hair styles--these new folks were

somehow 'hip and 'avant garde. Just some kids having some fun and being "cool." What the writer and others didn't realize, is the young were

tired of the war machine, the racism, the don't fuck, don't cuss, go to school and join the rest of the conformists on the treadmill,

Do NOT BE CRITICAL OF THE GOVERNMENT--the get to church and repent society that their parents had grown up with and accepted wholeheartedly.

The artists came forth and made music that actually discussed the ills of society and the efficacy of drugs in turning on, tuning in and dropping out, etc.

We can thank Ken Kesey for "unleashing" LSD on an unsuspecting populace which helped us to SEE society as it was and further the disconnect between the counter culture and the mainstream culture.

However, the mainstream culture is very efficient at absorbing and negating counter cultures that threaten the capitalist system. there was real panic when Nixon was in office and the talk of internment camps was being taken seriously some of those at "the top" and those of us in the counter culture.

Soooooo--most of the hippy counter culture has been absorbed and forgotten with the exception of some that try and keep the ideas going, such as the rainbow folks and what communes are left from the era.

I think had the mainstream culture, represented by our bought and paid for legislators had instituted a military draft for these wars they've been enjoying---the 2000s could have had a resurgence of the type that took place in the 60s-70s.

Marketing?? Don't know.

(going to find the writers name-old and forgot!)

 

Yes my Dad was sold hippiedom by a door to door salesman.

 

Herb Caen in the SF chronicle in 65 made it mainstream, but the term was in a book before that in '47 by another author

 

become a hippie and we'll give you free love and drugs. that's a $125 value for only $19.95 plus shipping. but wait, there's more! become a hippie in the next 10 minutes and we'll give you a second free love for free!

 

Wow! The very fact you ask this question makes me paranoid!

Marketing has everything to do do with everything... but there is a difference.

As an old hippie in the days the ideas being spread were marketed. Anything to do with advertising is marketing, and hippie philosophies were being advertised. The advertising (marketing) were that you had a choice, and to wake up to the fact you had a choice.

So you still have a choice. It is a choice of conscience in what your heart tells you, and what society tells you. What you do with that wake up call is entirely your own affair.

I am still a hippy, if that is what thinking for yourself, having an independent conscience, and having empathy for the planet and everything on it means.... Which these days to me is a very painful road to be on.

"Old Talk" I tell my children, grandchildren. and great-grandchildren... "you can have the most expensive diamond in the world, but if nobody knows you have it it is not worth anything"! So I guess that is what marketing is all about. Shouting from the rooftops to let the whole world know what you have got... even if it is a belief, and a vision...

 

op....you're fucking right it was the cool thing to do.....

 

i used to read his column in the san francisco chronic all the time. people used to read news papers in those days, and not just the sports and comic sections.

 

Janis Joplin always called herself a beatnik. Yet she was considered a hippie by millions. Just goes to show how labels are a huge mistake

 

From everything I've read, like using ken kesey as an example for the time period. It was one of the first times where the american culture started to have a mistrust in it's government. Kesey was like the average high school football playing honor student who pulled a complete 180°.

Prior to this, america had just been apart of two great wars in which it was impactful to the world. As much as anyone hates war, you have to admit some parts of the two world wars were necessary. People carried a sense of honor for fighting in these wars, and now we (americans) are fighting again in vietnam, and we're not even entirely sure what for. Even today you can ask people to point to Vietnam on a map and most can't find it.

There's more than vietnam and LSD to the 60s though, spiritually most people came from broken families from the wars too. Seeking escapism, meaning, and acceptance, was a common desire. All of these things happening at once is just a snowball effect to what we saw as the hippie movement. Counter-culture has, and always will exist. Since the beginning of time and always.

 

well kesey, the thing that happened there, was a streight up scientific survey, that came back with real answers that weren't what the establishment at the time wanted to hear. i don't think that was a matter of anyone doing a 180 in the spiritual sense you imply, so much as simply having to recognize and acknowledge what they found.

 

I didn't mean a spiritual 180. Kesey was like the model student, then he went on to experiment with LSD in a clinical study to which he then turned on most of the country with his famous magic school bus from cali to NY.
That's the 180 I'm reffering to, and it's not so much an opinion as restating what he said in interviews of his life.

 

i had forgotten about that, you're absolutely right of course. that was one of the major factors that lead toward woodstock. and it was woodstock and 60s nostelgia, that led to my stumbling on this place, almost 20 years ago now. i was living rural, not agricultural rural, but semi-wilderness rural, my dad working for the railroad making that possible, so at any rate, i wasn't directly aware of most of these things while they were going on, but only learned of them two to five years after the fact.

i was always attracted to the bright colors of creative free thinking, that media could never do right, but by shere force of demographics, was forced to attempt to emulate. and so yes, i must admit, my focus was never on the individual personalities involved.

 

Of course you realize that Keruac also went to Colombia on a Football Scholarship. Hippie is just a label put on another coming of the same calvery.

C/S,
Rev J

 

well the 60s made the 70s possible. to me, what was unique about both those decades, is how much people were looking forward into the future, instead of only walking with their heads turned around saying the past was somehow magically better as they were doing before and have been since.

we make the future. we live now. the past made the now we live in. so today, which will be tomorrow's past, is when we build, what will be tomorrow's now.

the 60s, a lot of people, especially young people, understood that.

if we want things to be good again, we need to look forward again. not to carry how things are now, with all its rights and wrongs in tact, into it. which i don't believe nature is going to let us do anyway. but to pay attention to and make sense of what we are building.

its not sufficient to go along with ideologies and beliefs. we need to think about what kind of world do we really want. all the little side implications of how the different things we want will interact with each other. but most especially what conditions which ways of acting will create, and then trying to set the example for each other based on that.