1 gen 1967 anni - Summer of Love

Descrizione:

While the New Left organized against the political and economic system and the YAF defended it, many other young Americans embarked on a general revolt against authority and middle-class respectability. The “hippie” — identified by ragged blue jeans or army fatigues, flowing skirts and blouses, shirts, beads, and long unkempt hair — symbolized the new counterculture. With roots in the 1950s Beat culture of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach, the counterculture was composed largely of white youth alienated by the staid manners and expectations of an older generation, which they rejected in favor of an ethic of personal freedom and authenticity. The early counterculture turned to music for inspiration, finding in song lyrics a new language questioning old ways. A countercultural folk music revival first set an idealistic tone for the era with songs such as Pete Seeger’s 1961 antiwar ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the turbulent year of 1963, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” reflected the impatience of people whose faith in America was wearing thin. Musical artists such as Judy Collins and Joan Baez emerged alongside Dylan and pioneered a sound that would inspire a generation of female musicians.

A photo shows an ongoing concert of 1969 in New York where a woman plays a flute and a man drums with many young people enjoying in the background.
The Counterculture

The three-day outdoor Woodstock concert in August 1969 was a defining moment in the rise of the counterculture. The event attracted 400,000 young people, like those pictured here, to Bethel, New York, for a weekend of music, drugs, and sex. The counterculture was distinct from the New Left and was less a political movement than a shifting set of cultural styles, attitudes, and practices. It rejected conformity of all kinds and placed rebellion and contrariness among its highest values. Another concept held dear by the counterculture was, simply, “love.” In an era of military violence abroad and police violence at home, many in the counterculture hoped that “peace and love” would prevail instead.


By the mid-1960s, other forms of popular music had become the soundtrack of the counterculture. The Beatles, four working-class Brits whose awe-inspiring music, by turns lyrical and driving, spawned a commercial and cultural phenomenon known as Beatlemania. Young Americans embraced the Beatles, as well as even more rebellious bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Doors. This new music, unfamiliar and strange sounding to older Americans, contributed to a spreading generational divide between young and old. So did the recreational use of drugs — especially marijuana and LSD, the hallucinogen popularly known as acid — which was celebrated in the psychedelic music of the late 1960s.


For a brief time, adherents of the counterculture believed that a new age was dawning. In 1967, the “world’s first Human Be-In” drew 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. That summer — known as the Summer of Love — San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New York’s East Village, Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles swelled with young dropouts, drifters, and teenage runaways whom the media dubbed “flower children.” Most young people had little interest in all-out revolt, or dropping out of society altogether, and media coverage often exaggerated their antipathy to social norms. But the counterculture’s general antipathy to authority had a lasting influence on American youth culture — in style, clothes, music, and attitude.

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