I came across a 1967 TIME magazine article titled "The Hippies," and I thought it'd be a good source to use for my final paper, in which I'm going to first track the evolution of Pink Floyd from a psychedelic/hippie rock group to a progressive rock group, establish how the punk rock movement sprung up in opposition the progressive rock genre, and then show the implicit, hidden connections between punk rock and progressive rock. The article states, "the hippies have emerged on the U.S. scene in about 18 months as a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos from which it evolved. Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence" (1). I thought I'd look up "mysticism," and I found that it's defined as, "A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience." The TIME article talks about the hippie movement in relation to hallucinogenic drugs and notes, "With those drugs has come the psychedelic philosophy, an impassioned belief in the self-revealing, mind-expanding powers of potent weeds and seeds and chemical compounds known to man since prehistory but wholly alien to the rationale of Western society" (1). The article notes that through these drugs, hippies achieve a sense of liberation in opposition to the values of contemporary Western society.
Later, the article revisits the relationship between the hippie movement and the middle class. It turns out that the hippie movement was in opposition to what is referred to as the middle class straight jacket: "The middleclass ego, to the hippie, is the jacket that makes society straight, and must be destroyed before freedom can be achieved" (4). The article offers up these "hippie guidelines: Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun" (4-5). The article also touches on the "key ethical element" of the hippie movement: Love. This was my favorite snippet from the article (hence my blog title): "The key ethical element in the hippie movement is love—indiscriminate and all-embracing, fluid and changeable, directed at friend and foe alike. SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH LOVE! proclaims a sign in Los Angeles' Sans Souci Temple, a hippie commune" (5).
The article goes on to discuss "hippie art," which I touched on in some of my earlier blog posts. Hippie art is described as "improvised music and irrational posters, its spontaneous light shows and ditto-machine 'automatic' writing, its quippy axioms and somnambulant dances, relies more on inspiration than discipline" (6). What is somnambulant, you might ask? It means "walking, or tending to walk while asleep." It's basically referring to those fluid hippie dance moves.
You can find the TIME article here: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899555-10,00.html.
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