Friday, May 22, 2009

A Brief History Of The Counter Culture

By Ned Hepburn

hipster-vs-nathipster-1

I'm glad this "hipster" thing is dying down, at least in its current incarnation, which is a total fucking joke. It used to mean counter-culture, and it has largely become anything but that this time around.

Don't worry. It will reappear anew in the first half of every decade as a reaction to the previous 5 years, as it has done since the 1950's. Hipsterdom in the early part of each decade becomes slightly corporate and marketed outward towards the latter half. I'm not too clear on the 60's and 70's but I'll write what i write. let me demonstrate a couple of things:

late 40s/early 50s

  • Beat poets convene in New York; later to San Francisco. 'Howl' and 'On The Road' are published.

late 50s

  • Beatniks become a in-joke, with caricatures of bongo slapping black turtlenecked coffee drinking thinkers appearing in numerous movies; such as Funny Face (1957), and Bell Book & Candle (1958), not to mention The Wild One (1953) which already preempts the classification of "hipster" / motorcycle / beatnik lingo.

early 60s

  • The Merry Pranksters were a group that lived communally in California. they experiment with LSD and acid far more than the beatniks of New York, who are far more into "uppers". This lends to large acid and LSD taking parties. furthermore, they travel across the country in a multicolored school bus to attend the World Fair in NYC in 1964, turning on many, many people along the way to LSD, acid, and marijuana.
  • Thanks to the ideals of soul searching that the beatniks presented, more and more people are conscious of the growing social trends of yoga and coffeehouse culture. With beatnik figureheads like Alan Ginsburg adopting these eastern philosophies often the two are mixed and what emerges is essentially the "hippie" in the classical sense.
  • Bob Dylan gives The Beatles marijuana and acid upon their first meeting on August 28th, 1964.

hippy-1

late 60s

  • Andy Warhol, while successful during this period, begins to focus less on making actual art and more on the concept of art. His celebrity begets creativity and he becomes more obsessed with the cult of personality than the cult of art. He stops directing any of his own films and leaves 99% of the work of the art making up to the employees of The Factory; his art house.
  • Hippies become caricatures, with movies, books, cereal and shaving cream marketed towards their needs, it becomes a commercial sector.
  • The Beatles turn their fans onto drugs, sparking a whole bunch of people to take drugs that can't exactly handle them.
  • The anti-war movement is mixed up with the drug culture. to make a generalized statement - if you were against the war, you were to take drugs and affect the counter culture mentality. Many, many people take drugs that ultimately shouldnt have, as it leads to - at the tail end of the 1960's - a large amount of people that can't deal with being on drugs going bat shit crazy.

early 70s

  • With hippieism effectively over, the art community after having experienced the eye opening late 60's turns to Hollywood and puts out a slew of great movies - such as Harold & Maude, The Godfather, and A Clockwork Orange. This is in part due to the 'hipster bombshell' of the late 60's, that audiences are ready for that and do not want to be mollycoddled into the focus-group mentality of the elder Hollywood hierarchy.
  • People in general start to want to experience new things, with the "cool crowd" gravitating towards the sounds of the Black and Hispanic and gay crowd - namely, disco. in 1970, David Mancuso, a New York DJ, opens the first disco club in his apartment which he calls The Loft. this leads to a heavy onset of dance culture.
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