Fake Modern Hippies

The social settings of the 60's that spawned the hippies are gone. Technically, only those who lived through those times and chose the hippie "side" of the equation are the true hippies.

I don't mean to say that racism, war, or bad politics are gone, but the overall social picture is much different today than it was back then. Today's "hippies" may or may not share similar attitudes as their predecessors, but then again, they are not the same thing - so they shouldn't necessarily be expected to be the same. The bygone hippies are the closest thing they have to identify with, so I suppose it's not unusual that they do. Plus, who wouldn't like to wear bell bottoms and flowers in their hair, eh? heh.

Trying to compare today's hippies with the 60's hippies is like trying to compare a Neurosurgeon to a Podiatrist. They may have some cross-over similarities, but they ain't the same thing. Despite the differences, thank god for both... you know?

 

Hey look, hippies!
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=23498313

 

Story time!

 

Well, I started telling my story here ...

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=356551

 

I agree completely with this, however, even back then there were tons of fake hippies. I mean, really, one of the things OP seems to think is the pinnacle of hippie is the music. Including the Beatles. The Beatles weren't even hippie, really. They were psychedelic. Some of them went off to write hippie music, some of them went off to write more pop. Lennon was the only true idealist in the group.
Hoffman got kicked off the stage at Woodstock. Some hippie concert that was.

 

Hard to say what exactly "hippies" were, in retrospect. I always felt that I was one, but not entirely "real", like the people living off the land, in communes and such. I wore the garb, listened to the music, and took the drugs, but as far as being completely commited to a "hippie lifestyle", I don't know. I traveled quite a bit, hitchhiking around, dropping in here and there for a time, playing my music (mostly guitar and harmonica) just to say I had some part in the whole thing. I did eventually join a commune/cult. Stayed for 2 long years. It wasn't entirely communist in the ideal sense, but had a hierarchical structure, which eventually took it down a rather dark path. But then, it had a religious side to it, which wasn't entirely true to the hippie ideal.

Amongst those conidered hard-core "hippies", there were various fringes, like the activists, and the farmers, and the musicians, and the dealers (who weren't really "hippies" in the strictest sense, due to the fact that they were in it for the profit motive, and therefore "capitalists").

I think there's probably degrees of "hippiedom", if you care to preserve the title for posterity.

 

I don't think that sort of aggression towards someone is really necessary, especially over something as silly as fashion preferences. If s/he needs to grow up for disliking someone wearing a sign proclaiming peace while acting in violence, than what of someone who calls people names and swears at them for disliking fashion preferences?

I also doubt that the elitist bullshit is the reason that so many people don't like hippies. I believe that has a lot more to do with the hippies being a symbol of a progressive social movement and, in general, we're living in a very conservative social climate left over from the eighties although - I have to add that I believe we are even in these moments seeing that swing back towards a more liberal social attitude. However, over all, society does not embrace change. Rightly or wrongly, the whole of the anti-war movement and the progressive social attitudes of the sixties were thrust upon the image of hippies. So even though I believe most people now, to a certain extent, believe in a lot of ideas that took root during the cultural revolutions of the era such as racial equality, feminism, gay rights, body acceptance, youth involvement, student government, cultural acceptance, and probably a hundred other things that are so ingrained in me that I cannot even think of a time when they weren't observed - even though all these ideas are now mainstream (or getting there) the fact is that hippies were a "counter-culture", a culture that goes against and challenges the mainstream and, well, the mainstream does not appreciate those seeking to change it. That, I believe, is why even now a days people poke fun at hippies. It has nothing to do with elitist attitudes (although, surely, looking at the hippie movement now one can say there was definitely an elitist attitude. Most of these kids were white, male, and middle class. They had been raised to believe they were inherently the elite, in many ways. So reading and watching scenes from this era, it does become apparent that there was a sense of righteousness, sometimes earned and other times simply unquestioned and likely unintentional) or, in fact, any actual action of hippies but rather with the cultural understanding of what hippies represented.



I also agree that fashion shouldn't dictate how you think of someone, but then again I know that with our current culture, it is impossible to avoid. Indeed, if we want to argue real hippies verses fake hippies, let's not leave out the fact that long hair and a difference of dress were something that hippies were proud of and used as indicators of their free thoughts. You can say fashion taste don't matter and ideally this would be true, but many people of the original hippie movement used what was considered this wild, unclean fashion to shock the mainstream out of complacency and draw attention to themselves and their ideas. Reading almost any work from the time - Hoffman, Ginsberg, Wolfe, Von Hoffman, Leary, Albert, Sanders - all of them bring up how their physical appearance is freeing and symbolic (and those are just the ones I've read and remember central passages about the hippie/beat dress). Off the top of my head, I believe both The Who and Crosby, Still, And Nash have songs called "Almost Cut My Hair" or something similar, and I'm sure there must be many more songs where dress is brought up to the same effect, such as in "Signs" where the lyrics tell of a boy who sees a shop saying long hair freaks may not apply, so he tucks his hair under his cap and goes in to ask why. "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman must include no less than fifty suggestions through out on how to dress up "straight" and "clean" with notes on how to hide your long hair and acquire what he refers to as costumes of the Pig Nation.

So, please, let's not pretend that physical appearance was not, in some ways, central to the hippie movement - if you want to claim that there even was really a movement at all. Either way, it was used as a symbol for something - both by the media and by those who wore it themselves. Purposefully or not, we all do this. We endow clothes and signs and all manner of things with symbolic meaning, and we pick and choice which ones best represent us, what message we wish to send out to others with the understanding that, at some cultural level, these symbols are understood and will relay information about us to them on an immediate, visual level.

Of course, this falls apart in many ways, and by no means am I suggesting that anyone goes out and acts with any prejudiced based solely on clothing. First, and most importantly, because this is wrong. Even if they chose clothes with the conscious decision of the statement that they want to make and even if you see them and understand without any doubt what those clothes represent, it is still wrong because most all these symbols that we use to identify and classify each other by are not indicative of any behaviors that deserve viral action or thought. There are, depending on your own philosophy of prejudice - some exceptions (for instance, I have no shame in announcing that I will discriminate against someone wearing a KKK uniform as I hold this to be symbolic of a type of bigotry that I find so completely unethical that I think my anger in this case has logical and sound reasoning) but over all, even things we personally greatly dislike in the abstract do not mean that a person, real and specific, should be hated.

There are other reasons as well, perhaps that sound more practical to some people than "because we should love on another", although I certainly think that one holds the most merit. Still, though, even if you only look at it from a very technical, sterile sort of view point there are plenty of reasons not to judge someone for their appearance. For one, certain fashions are worn because they are endowed with cultural meanings and while mass media and group believes help to nationalize and popularize these meanings, there is still a chance that what might symbolize specific behavior/ideals to you might very well have a different meaning to someone else or to the person wearing it. On that level, judging someone based on their fashion taste is simply illogical, as it makes the assumption that your symbol is their symbol when this obviously may not be the case. To use an example from before, some poster mentioned he would rather see a fake hippie than someone dressed up in "thug" clothing. This makes a lot of assumptions about what those clothes represent.

1. They represent "thugs" or a street life that may include violence and illegal activity. Specifically, illegal and violent activity against each other, authority and - most important in the making of this stereotype - unwilling and unrelated people. This is really the catch of this negative image. Belief me, if America believed these thugs to only hurt one another, there would be very little outcry. If they were violent against the establishment, there would be an negative reaction but we would consider these actions to be political. Where the real viral for this group comes from is the idea of personal violence against strangers. That is where we, as a country, draw the line.

2. They represent black culture, which for racial reasons our cultural values align with "thug" as well. Of course, the truth is much more complex than this as obviously that very idea is insulting and wrong, it also implies that black equates lower class, and one can quickly see the class discrimination present in these ideas as well. I say complex because, yes, some of these fashions did come from black culture but, and this really should not need clarification, that does not mean it came from a lower class, violent culture as is otherwise implicit in the word "thug". I know African Americans who may wear their hair in dreads and may dress in such a manner or listen to rap or one of the hundred things that mainstream (understood to be Middle Class Heterosexual Christian Male of European Decent) media labels with negative values. They don't see it that way. They see it as something that is culturally theirs and that they wear in opposition to this belief that to be a good person they need to dress like white, middle class, main stream Americans. This is the same reason many African Americans give for wearing traditional African clothes (as with any decision, this varies from person to person and even with in an individual is often times complex and based off any number of things).

3. It could be considered to be fashionable in their particular group in which case, yes, perhaps you personally have a problem with people dressing in a certain manner only because they are following trends but that does not make a person dangerous, does it?

Why DO people have to wear the costume of our culture to be considered good? It is especially apparent that these decisions on fashion are made arbitrarily when you divide out the trends and see what falls under "Successful (Good)" "Trendy (Good)" "Trashy (Bad)" and "Dangerous (Bad)" and see how big a role race and class play into these.



Because I'm sure I have lost every single person's attention here that is not one of my professors (in which case: hey Dr. Watson or possible Dr. Thomas! Yeah, I know you guys are kind of secretly hippies. You don't make it much of a secret, really...) I just want to say that my dad grew up in the sixties. He had hair down to his hips. He lived out of a cave with a commune of people, one truck, and a very happy looking dog. He went to music festivals, he hitchhiked from Ohio to San Francisco before settling in Nevada (in, I repeat, a cave). He does not have a single picture of himself from the time where he isn't holding either a drink, a joint or in a majority of cases, both. To my distress, he doesn't seem to own a single shirt at the time, either.

Yet he didn't consider himself a hippie. Actually, he didn't even like hippies. He had a brother in the war and was nearly drafted himself. He said he hated how the hippie movement would treat soldiers especially since most of them had not chosen to go into service, which I'm sure comes from him having his brother drafted. He liked the music and, obviously, the experience that most people would connect to the hippies, but he didn't identify with them at all. Yet he wore the clothes, he looked the part, his physical appearance was symbolic of this wider social movement that he really didn't care for. Why? Well, because it's my dad and he's just the sort of crazy that hitches from Ohio to California. Because he's always liked good music. Because when you're living in a cave with a bunch of friends, I'm thinking hair cuts are not big on your list (but God, for the sake of your children, please try and buy a shirt - or pants, at least pants. Or, you know, skip that picture in the album).

 

Abandoning the traditional meaning of the term "elitist", one may imagine, if one allows oneself to do so, that the hippie movement was, and still is, indeed, "elitist" in nature, since hippies, and perhaps rightly so in some contexts, do think themselves smarter, more creative, more ecologically aware, etc.,,just "better" in so many ways. To admit elitism is a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

It's also a step in the right direction to stop judging people on the basis of their appearance. Some who have adopted, even embraced the "look" of the hippies are nothing of the kind, but rather, simple followers of fashion.

But be honest. Hippies are elitists, in their own way.

The evil of elitism isn't in believing oneself as better. It is in automatically believing others as worse.

 

It's the deeper lying message of "I am hippier than you" and "you're not a hippy, so you can't wear a peace sign" crap that i disagree with, her choice of fashion is of no consequence to me, read the context and sub-context of the text before replying, otherwise you look foolish.

Trust me, it is. I wouldn't say we live in a conservative society, most of the people I've met are very liberal. It's just that the people in the important positions are conservative.

True, but I fail to see how this is relevant?

I'm sure the irony of this statement isn't lost on you. You can denote free thought by doing what everyone else in the sub-culture is?

Dressing for "shock" factor is stupid, and 9 times out of 10 is just an indicator of extreme insecurity. Non-conformism is about doing what you want to do, not doing the opposite of everyone else just for the sake of it.

I never said physical appearance was unimportant. Yes, you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress. You can judge a book by it's cover with relative ease (for most people anyway). It was used, because other hippies dressed that way. The first handful of hippies who wore colourful clothes and peace signs may have done it for a reason. The rest were just following trends, regardless of whether or not they want to admit it.


I didn't read the rest of your post, was far too long.

 

I don't think this has any relevance to the conversation going on but back in '66 in a university professor's [ no- not Timothy Leary] house , written on one of the bedroom's walls there was a hippie saying:

THERE IS NO THEM. THERE IS ONLY US.

PAX

 

this

 

i just dont like the fact that people are using the peace sign as a fashion symbol. the peace sign is anything but a fashion statement. it is a symbol of unity, peace, respect, ect. not to be worn because its "cute".

 

It's a piece of jewelery, when you look at the big picture it means absolutely nothing. It is, and always has been a fashion statement in the hippy culture. Like I said, the first handful of people who worn this probably done it for a reason. Everyone is (including you unless you were one of the first few) done it for fashion and convinced themselves otherwise.

Don't be too quick to judge others for shortcomings you fail surpass yourself.

 

It has not that meaning for everyone, and if they wear it for other reasons than you doesn't mean they degrade the meaning of the symbol. Don't be so eager to judge, and of course, not every hippie wear it neither solely for the meaning.

 

as i`ve understood it lately, the peace sign is supposed to be upside down from what it generally is. & modern hippies generally tend to smell flowery, which isn`t necessarily the original intent either. most of the "flowery" smells are chemicals which elder hippies would & DO ABHOR. so, yes the whole thing has somewhat degenerated into a fashion statement or bling if you will. & many moderns have fancy, yuppie vehicles too.

 

The green plastic gravity bong...

 

and thats why im a deadhead and not a hippie... a hippie will let u push em around..and i wont put up with that shit.

 

*sigh* yes, but a man is neither the car he drives nor the clothing he wears, but the sum of all his decisions throughout life.
I don't eat meat, don't cause trouble with anyone, will spend hours talking to someone who is in trouble, and generally care about everyone I come in contact with.
I also happen to drive a yuppy car that I bought second hand to help someone else out of a bad situation and I smell flowery.

But the flowery smell I wear is strictly from a blend of coconut oil and essential oils (extracts from natural plants, not chemicals). The car I drive I drive in service to all around me and will use in a heartbeat to do good for my fellow man.

I sometimes even leave the house in a button down, slacks, and a tie!

What is?
What is not?

See the fish beneath the surface, not the surface.
The soul beneath the flesh, not the flesh.
The being behind the costume, not the costume.


I honestly don't even know if I really know too many "hippies" anyway. I used to think that dreadlocks and weed and music and all this outward stuff somehow signaled "hippie", and I know a lot of folks like that, but I'm seeing that the truth behind a hippie is in their heart and soul. You will find someone with compassion for ALL living things and that is what makes a hippie in MY book.

 

What are you talking about? Its about the mind set, not the music you're listening to. I don't listen any 60 or 70's bands, I don't even know much of them.

 

I don't think it's even about the mindset, it's the combi of mindset and action. And for me personally, a hippie IS someone from the original movement, since that is what a hippie was/is: someone who was part of/indulged in the hippie movement in the 60's. Not that I care if someone wants to be a hippie right now, but to me you aren't anyway.
It's a thing from the past. You can have the same ideals (which does not involve nostalgic jibberish) and that is a great thing, seriously. But there's no such thing as a fake modern hippie to me. Just people who look like hippies or have things in common with them. Not necessarily something wrong with that by the way