Had the Hippies not so arrogantly seen their movement as the apotheosis of youth rebellion, had they not had such sweeping agendas and lofty rhetoric, they would not be eligible for the sort of analysis which I am about to undertake. However, they posited themselves as a political or countercultural movement rather than a merely stylistic or subcultural one, and must therefore be investigated as such, and judged by the same standards. I intend to illustrate the incongruity between the rhetoric, the style, and the reality, and to show that Flower Power ultimately succeeded as (and should be viewed as) a subculture rather than a counterculture.
The Hippies claimed great empathy with the poverty stricken and destitute, the social outcast, the wandering Bohemian. Yet the whole notion of ‘turning on, tuning in and dropping out’ was an intentional contrivance on the part of the Hippies, in that most would have had the means to ‘drop back in’ to the mainstream of society had they so desired. Thus Hippiedom was quite removed from the existence of those members of the community who were permanent societal exiles through real educational, social or material poverty. The Hippies’ glib, synthetic association with the underclasses did nothing to improve the latters’ situation – in fact, by glorifying the aesthetic of poverty, the Hippies trivialised the cause of the poor, by converting a social concern into a style.
The exponents of the counter-culture attacked the work ethic, and the notion of having to work in order to earn the privilege of leisure. They condemned the mundanity of the typical nine to five job, and sought to avoid this horror in order to enjoy the higher pursuits of enlightening their consciousness. In this they alienated the working-classes, who did not have the comfortable financial position necessary to be able to choose pleasure over work. In their leisure, they unwittingly lived off the toil of the working classes whose cause they were supposed to champion, and existed on the social system which was there to support the genuinely needy.
Another contradiction of the vague Hippie rhetoric were the simultaneous cries for the communality of a “global village”, contrasted with the yearning for the triumph of individualism and the importance of ‘doing your own thing’. The ideal of a commune is very much ‘counter-cultural’ in the sense that it rejects free-enterprise, capitalistic competitiveness and selfishness and the bourgeois individualism of the dominant society. However, the cry for retreatism and the ‘each to his own’ mentality appears to have been much louder – and it triumphed. This concept runs in direct contrast to the plight of the factory worker, for whom the solidarity of the union is a vital source of political power. As Hall comments “Hippie individualism is rooted in the same soil as the American Constitution and the manifold myths of free-enterprise, every-man-his-own-president society. From these roots many wild and contradictory variants have flowered – populism, frontierism, free-enterprise capitalism, resistance to the gun law, and the cowboy to name but a few.” In short, Hippies, in many ways, embodied the American Dream, rather than being – as they would probably would have preferred to have been viewed – the antithesis of it.
The rhetoric of Equality constantly propagated by the Hippies seems more a matter of style than a true counter-cultural concern. The littering of words like love, peace, freedom and everything being trippy, groovy and beautiful seems to be at best a sub-cultural trend, at worst a heavily mass-marketed, exploitable cultural style, completely divested of any political significance, or true egalitarianism. The travesty of the so-called equality of the flower children was the almost irreconcilable gulf between the sign and the practice. Perhaps the most stark example of this was the treatment of women by the Hippies, which at the time seemed “liberating”, but is now viewed by a body of current feminist theory as having had the effect of undermining the right of a woman to say ‘no’ and be respected, rather than be viewed as ’square’, ‘uptight’ or ‘frigid’. The concept of ‘free love’ included the notion that sex should be obtainable wherever and whenever the average (male) Hippie desired it, without going through all the necessary preliminaries (such as asking first?) which were seen as inhibitions of the parent culture. Ultimately, it would seem that love was only “free” to males. Yet the fallacy of the Hippie rhetoric of equality extended to all who were less privileged than the Hippies. The basic assumption that everyone is equal, with the same access to resources, and similar social status and political influence actually breeds inequality in failing to recognise certain power imbalances, which need to be addressed before all social groups can truly be equal. Certainly, not all social groups were able to purchase the sub-cultural paraphernalia described below, (or, if they did, were not educationally equipped to impute its higher cultural importance) which may indeed have granted Hippies a degree of implicit exclusivity.
Drugs – which had earlier been used by the Mods purely for fun, and as an escape from their daily lives – were, according to the Hippies, to be used for the purposes of exploring the mind and expanding the consciousness. Thus, the cultural tools of the two groups were in this instance the same, but the Hippies attempted to justify and glorify, through rhetoric, their reasons for imbibing drugs, arrogantly believing their cultural practice to be of greater social significance.
Acid rock and protest music was similarly glorified by the Hippies as the music of change and revolution; it was not simply pop music, which has always been used by sub-cultures as a form of mute rebellion, but music which would be instrumental in a worldwide revolution. In this the Hippies failed to see mainstream music as an inherent part of the same capitalist system which they sought to undermine. Ironically, by the time psychedelic music had percolated down to the lower classes, the mass media had bought into the Hippie idea, and rendered it politically impotent for mass consumption. Flower power became a hugely lucrative consumer industry, spawning hideous would-be drug-inspired album covers to boost the sales of bands who had no concept of ‘hip’, let alone psychedelia; and creating new markets in tie-dyed T-Shirts and kaftans. If this was a counter-culture, then mass culture certainly had no objections to it in its incarnation as the insipid “love generation”. A disgusted member of the revolutionary underground press in London noted that “Hippies represent about as powerful a challenge to the power of the state as the people who put foreign coins in their gas meters”.
The flower children were particularly fixated by the costume, culture and lifestyle of the American Indian. They did not, however, stretch their multi-racial empathy to include the plight of the Black American whose cause was too current and sensitive. It is telling that their interest resided in cultures with a remote actual presence in American social life – this illustrates their inability to confront real issues directly. It is also distinctly subcultural in that it involves the reappropriation of a cultural symbol into a sort of bricolage in which the original meaning is lost, or at least absorbed into the new meaning. In this case, the visual manifestations of the ideal of an alternative lifestyle, rather than the lifestyle itself. Thus, the Hippies’ lingering legacy is style, much in the same way as the lingering memory of the Mods, Rockers and Teds is style. Perversely, style was also the major political contribution of the Hippies. They created “activist fashion”, which is still very much in evidence on university campuses today; where the wearer lives out, or wishes to be seen to be living out, an alternative, or counter-cultural lifestyle.
The Hippie phenomenon refused to acknowledge its status as a subculture, or its location in youth culture as being primarily stylistic in nature. Its exponents consistently, articulately asserted the ascendency of its signifiers, in order to imply a radical difference between it and other youth sub-cultures. Whereas the inarticulate aim of most youth sub-cultures was to pervert the symbols of the dominant culture, the counter-culture claimed to go further, to subvert them. It claimed to have an alternative to the dominant culture, yet its manifesto consisted of simple binary oppositions which were naive reactions to a complex structure. This resulted in fundamental contradictions, which caused the ultimate failure of the movement.
