A hippie (also spelled hippy in British EnglishHippie Cambridge Dictionary) is a subculture associated with the counterculture of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It originated as a youth subculture that began in the United States and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date".To say "I'm hip to the situation" means "I'm aware of the situation. See: The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies adopted the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.
In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and the Monterey International Pop Festival 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 (the Wave) and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people."The attendance at the third Pop Festival at...Isle of Wight, England on 30 Aug 1970 was claimed by its promoters, Fiery Creations, to be 400,000." The Guinness book of Records, 1987 (p. 91), Russell, Alan (ed.). Guinness_World_Records, 1986 . In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. 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 and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s to mid 1970s teenager and youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asiatic spiritual concepts have reached a larger group. Those who participated in the hippie movement at its height were those born during or shortly after World War II, during the 1940s and early 1950s. These were the youngest of the Silent Generation and oldest of the Baby Boomers; the former who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the early pioneers of rock music.
Etymology
Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie are derived from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The word hip in the sense of "aware, in the know" is first attested in a 1902 cartoon by Tad Dorgan,Jonathan Lighter, Random House Dictionary of Historical Slang and first appeared in prose in a 1904 novel by George Vere HobartGeorge Vere Hobart (January 16, 1867 – January 31, 1926) (1867–1926), Jim Hickey: A Story of the One-Night Stands, where an African-American character uses the slang phrase "Are you hip?"
The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1944. By the 1940s, the terms hip, hep and hepcat were popular in Harlem jazz slang, although hep eventually came to denote an inferior status to hip.Harry Gibson wrote: "At that time musicians used jive talk among themselves and many customers were picking up on it. One of these words was hep which described someone in the know. When lots of people started using hep, musicians changed to hip. I started calling people hipsters and greeted customers who dug the kind of jazz we were playing as 'all you hipsters.' Musicians at the club began calling me Harry the Hipster; so I wrote a new tune called 'Handsome Harry the Hipster.'" -- "Everybody's Crazy But Me" (1986). In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square, meaning conventional and old-fashioned. In the April 27, 1961 issue of The Village Voice, "An open letter to JFK & Fidel Castro", Norman Mailer utilizes the term hippies, in questioning JFK's behavior. In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used both the terms hipster and hippies to refer to young people participating in black American or Beatnik nightlife.Rexroth, Kenneth. (1961). "What's Wrong with the Clubs." Metronome. Reprinted in Assays According to Malcolm X's 1964 autobiography, the word hippie in 1940s Harlem had been used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes".. Andrew Loog Oldham refers to "all the Chicago hippies", seemingly about black blues/R&B musicians, in his rear sleeve notes to the 1965 LP The Rolling Stones, Now!
Although the word hippies made other isolated appearances in print during the early 1960s, the first use of the term on the West Coast appeared in the article "A New Paradise for Beatniks" (in the San Francisco Examiner, issue of September 5, 1965) by San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon. In that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn Cafe (coffeehouse) (located at 1927 Hayes Street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco), using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district.Use of the term "hippie" did not become widespread in the mass media until early 1967, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began to use the term; See "Take a Hippie to Lunch Today", S.F. Chronicle, January 20, 1967, p. 37. San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 1967 column, p. 27
The hippie movement in the United States began as a youth movement. Composed mostly of white teenagers and young adults between 15 and 25 years old,Zablocki, Benjamin. "Hippies." World Book Online Reference Center. 2006. Retrieved on 2006-10-12. "Hippies were members of a youth movement...from white middle-class families and ranged in age from 15 to 25 years old.". hippies inherited a tradition of cultural dissent from bohemians and beatniks of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s. Beats like Allen Ginsberg crossed over from the beat movement and became fixtures of the burgeoning hippie and anti-war movements. By 1965, hippies had become an established social group in the U.S., and the movement eventually expanded to other countries,. Hirsch describes hippies as "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. in the 1960s and affected Europe before fading in the 1970s...fundamentally a cultural rather than a political protest.". Pendergast writes: "The Hippies made up the...nonpolitical subgroup of a larger group known as the counterculture...the counterculture included several distinct groups...One group, called the New Left...Another broad group called...the Civil Rights Movement...did not become a recognizable social group until after 1965...according to John C. McWilliams, author of The 1960s Cultural Revolution." extending as far as the United Kingdom and Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. The hippie ethos influenced the Beatles and others in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, and they in turn influenced their American counterparts.August 28 - Bob Dylan turns the Beatles on to cannabis for the second time. See also: ; Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music, folk, blues, and psychedelic rock; it also found expression in literature, the dramatic arts, fashion, and the visual arts, including film, posters advertising rock concerts, and album covers. In 1968, "core visible hippies" represented just under 0.2% of the U.S. population. and dwindled away by the mid-1970s.
Along with the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement, the hippie movement was one of three dissenting groups of the 1960s counterculture. Hippies rejected established institutions, criticized middle class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, embraced aspects of Eastern philosophy,. championed sexual liberation, were often vegetarian and eco-friendly, promoted the use of psychedelic drugs which they believed expanded one's consciousness, and created intentional communities or communes. They used alternative arts, street theatre, folk music, and psychedelic rock as a part of their lifestyle and as a way of expressing their feelings, their protests, and their vision of the world and life. Hippies opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire ideology that favored peace, love, and personal freedom,.Yippie Abbie Hoffman envisioned a different society: "...where people share things, and we don't need money; where you have the machines for the people. A free society, that's really what it amounts to... a free society built on life; but life is not some Time Magazine, hippie version of fagdom... we will attempt to build that society..." See: Swatez, Gerald. Miller, Kaye. (1970). Conventions: The Land Around Us Anagram Pictures. University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Social Sciences Research Film Unit. qtd at ~16:48. The speaker is not explicitly identified, but it is thought to be Abbie Hoffman. expressed for example in the Beatles' song "All You Need is Love".: "Seven hundred million people heard it in a worldwide TV satellite broadcast. It became the anthem of flower power that summer... The song expressed the highest value of the counterculture...For the hippies, however, it represented a call for liberation from Protestant culture, with its repressive sexual taboos and its insistence on emotional restraint... The song presented the flower power critique of movement politics: there was nothing you could do that couldn't be done by others; thus you didn't need to do anything...John was arguing not only against bourgeois self-denial and future-mindedness but also against the activists' sense of urgency and their strong personal commitments to fighting injustice and oppression..." Hippies perceived the dominant culture as a corrupt, monolithic entity that exercised undue power over their lives, calling this culture "the Establishment", "Big Brother", or "the Man"..Theme appears in contemporaneous interviews throughout .. Noting that they were "seekers of meaning and value", scholars like Timothy Miller have described hippies as a new religious movement.. Timothy Miller notes that the counterculture was a "movement of seekers of meaning and value...the historic quest of any religion." Miller quotes Harvey Cox, William C. Shepard, Jefferson Poland, and Ralph J. Gleason in support of the view of the hippie movement as a new religion. See also Wes Nisker's The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom: "At its core, however, hippie was a spiritual phenomenon, a big, unfocused, revival meeting." Nisker cites the San Francisco Oracle, which described the Human Be-In as a "spiritual revolution".
History
Precursors