Hippie Culture Essay

fewer social movements marked the twentieth century in the United States as the baulk movement of the 1960s. However, despite the scope and scale of such a wide movement that encapsulated so humansy different peoples and causes, including voting rights, womens rights, civil rights, and ending the war in Vietnam, the movement is better cognise by a stereotype of the type of people that seemed so instrumental in perpetuating the movement hipsters.Though the great majority of those in the protest movement were non hippies, the movies, music, and cultural events that marked the times were dominated by hippie kitchen-gardening, and few events represented this f guess as the stereotype-reinforcing Woodstock Music Festival. By the time Woodstock happened in 1969, the hippie movement was already something that had been growing the full decade and most people who were not hippies had a computable idea what a hippie was. If one would have to describe a hippie then, it could be said to be a schoolgirlish man or woman that was dirty, hairy, unemployed, and on drugs.While these are only(prenominal) a few attri exclusivelyes ascribed to a few hippies, the stereotypes became so strong that they were hard to sequestrate from the other significant contri besidesions they made, including in music, art, culture, and social awareness. So, while hippies were fara course more complex than most people chose to see them, they were pigeonholed to the stereotype of high-risk middle-class kids with too much time and freedom, and who refused to do their patriotic duties as their mothers and fathers had done before them, most specifically by starting families and combat in the countrys wars.However, the decade leading up to Woodstock only helped rein troops m each of these stereotypes. Hippie culture could have been said to mystify the words and ideas of the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. These writers laid the arse for the upriselious, anti-establishment ideals that would come to be so strongly embraced by the hippie culture during the 1960s. However, it would be Bob Dylan, who was strongly influenced by the Beats, who would use their ideas in his home music.Dylans popularity not only made mob music popular, but his songwriting also tackled some of the issues of the time, including war, civil rights, and the basic questions of whether America was heading in the right direction, and if not, why. Dylans music influenced the songwriting of almost every major preserve artist that came after him, or at least any that achieved any amount of success. Through Dylan and those he influenced, music became the first formation character of hippie culture, showing a coarse history of music defining cultural movements and times through its almost religious effect on those that listen to it.Religious forces, like art, music, and everything that inspires classification as sacred, Emile Durkheim (1965) writes do not translat e the manner in which physical things affect our senses, but the personal manner in which the collective consciousness acts upon individual consciousnesses (1965, p. 254). Music has the ability to act as a symbol of this collective consciousness, bringing the masses unitedly to celebrate a shared philosophy or perspective. While more contend that art and music is nothing more than an escape from the ordinary anxieties that life offers up, it is far more than that.Similar to the sacred in religion, which Durkheim asserts is not rooted in fear as humanist and existentialist theorists claim, but in the idealism of the collective mentality, music becomes sacred when presented in a way that appeals to the individual and the collective. Music and those who perform it act in ways similar to religious totems, representing the ideals of the collective and how they inhabit the individual, and take their roots in exhalation and celebration. According to Durkheim, In fine, the sentiments a t the root of totemism are those of contented confidence rather than terror and compression (1965, p. 56).Music became the inspiration for hippie culture and gave them the confidence to fight back against ideals they saw as wrong, including the Vietnam War. in that location was no better representation of this than Woodstock. The Woodstock Music & Art Festival that took rate on a farm near Woodstock, New York, August 15 through August 18, 1969 not only assembled some of the greatest rock, pop, and folk musicians of the day, but also had a half million enthusiastic young and old fans celebrating life and music in a concert that changed the way the younger generation was viewed.After Woodstock, the burgeoning counter culture exploded into the mainstream, as the entire United States realized that the hippie culture was a force that could not be ignored, and its icons such as The Who, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix reinforced many of the stereotypes of long hair, reckless behavior, and familiarity. Woodstock would become a legendary orgy of drug use, sexual intercourse, nudity, and mud, but also of peace, love, and a general togetherness that also characterized hippie culture. other popular stereotype was the hippie general disregard for all authority, and Woodstock was no different.Over one-hundred thousand tickets had been sold to the event, but soon fans were crashing over fences and patently began streaming in to see the show (Woodstock. com, 2009). However, there were very few incidents of violence and the festival went on to become one of the iconic points in the culture of the 1960s. It also marked the beginning of the end of hippie culture. Woodstock was the pass away hurrah for a generation of young men and women that did their best to rebel against the previous generations and create their own persona.Unfortunately, stereotypes were rich and long concerning hippie culture, and Woodstock did soundly to encourage both the good and bad s tereotypes. They displayed their amazing music and free-loving culture, but also their drug abuse and contentment with filth. By the time the mid-seventies began, hippie culture was all but dead, even though many of the hippies continued to live on. Today, hippies are seen as mostly a joke and very superficial, which may speak of their ultimate unsuccessful person to live up to their own ideals.The country is still largely conservativist in many regards, still refuses many of the ideals of peace and love that the hippies inspired, and is still at war with foreign countries. Hippies are at once seen in modern form as environmentalists, annoying activists for un-American or unethical causes, potheads or vegetarians. Hippies are no longer seen as a viable threat to the conservative ideals of the United States, and have in essence become all style and no substance. While stereotypes helped continue the romantic notion of the idealistic hippie, they just as equally helped prohibit a notion that never really existed in the first place.