I’m a big fan of rock music but wasn’t alive during its heyday. I’m looking for books that explore what that time was like, or the way counterculture had an influence on society. Similar to Astral Weeks by Ryan Walsh
I’m also open to autobiographies — I’ve read I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres and loved it.
any recommendations?
American media tends to depict this time as a revolutionary and inflammatory era full of hippies and free love, and the spread of drugs, frequent protests, etc...
How popular was this in real life? Were people living the hippie lifestyle as numerous as tv and movies portray, or were they only a small but memorable section of society? How widespread did drug use and anti-government protests become during this time?
I know exactly what this topic asked is. What I'm looking for is who, how and when did the term "1960's Counterculture" label came about to describe a particular youth phenomenon during a particular time? Also, just how and when did it became associated / attached to the Boomer Generation?
Looking for a present for my dad! He loves Grateful Dead, Phish and art stuff, I was thinking some kind of personalized clothing. He also loves 1960s books and counterculture.
Any ideas on fun things to do for counterculture in the 1960s?
The early 60s (1960-63) was probably the closest we would get to this scenario but what if the 50s never left?
There were massive antigovernment protests in the 1970s and late 60s, in what ways are these current protests similar or different from those ones?
The counterculture still happens in the U.S, with movements like the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, etc. But there's no Sexual Revolution, or Gay Liberation movement (which Wikipedia says is heavily tied to it).
The Sexual Revolution happens in places like Western Europe, Australia, and Canada. But the U.S stays out of it. Because in this timeline, America's puritan streak shuts it down domestically and prevents it from catching on.
Since Feminism is a larger share of 1960s counterculture, the resulting increase in political capital allows Abortion to avoid becoming a political issue. Feminist advocacy allows it, and "The Pill", to gain widespread tolerance (even if Catholics oppose it on an individual level). Evangelicals keep their earlier view that it's ok to have. However, the U.S doesn't normalize contraception. Since that's part of the main branch of the Sexual Revolution and Americans still see condoms as things that enable "Male carnal urges".
Feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Asian American Movement, Etc. eventually grow more intertwined. Becoming the Minority Justice Movement in the 1970s or 80s. This movement heavily evokes religion, arguing that discrimination shouldn't happen because everyone has the same soul despite their external characteristics.
Americans view the overseas approach to homosexuality as disgraceful. With many who are asked about it saying "Even if I don't believe in God, it's a sin for a reason" , and "Being a Minority is about what you are on the outside. Homosexuals have corrupted souls.".
What's America like in 2020 in this timeline?
Lately I've been reading Robert Raskind's Memoirs of an Ex-Hippie: Seven Years in the Counterculture, and it's really gotten me fascinated by the hippie lifestyle and how it shaped American culture and politics during the 1960s. Are there any other books, fiction or nonfiction, that are set during this time period and/or go more into the hippie lifestyle?
The counterculture in America saw a rise in new alternative spiritual movements that attracted youth skepticism of established political, religious, and cultural institutions. Such groups as Hare Krishna, the Manson family, People's Temple, Father Yod, and the many hippy communes can be described as incorporating motifs and symbols associated under the umbrella of the counterculture. Was Scientology considered a part of the counterculture-- did COS attract people that can be described as "hippies"? Did COS attempt to co-opt any of the themes or symbolism of the counterculture?
I’m working my way through the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and loving it, and looking for similar books which chronicle that time period. Really anything about psychedelics and the culture surrounding them.
Thanks sm!
>The consciousness-raising of the Promethean-psychedelic imaginary:
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>There was an immanent transformative immediacy in the music and film of the counterculture that reinforced the feelings of despair, disaffection and rage that bourgeois culture ordinarily makes us distrust.
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>As such, culture - especially music and film - functioned as a form of consciousness-raising, in which a mass audience could not only experience its feelings being validated, it could locate the origins of those feelings in oppressive structures.
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>Moreover, the emergence of a psychedelic imaginary that touched even those who had never used acid ( in addition to the ingestion of hallucinogens by growing numbers of the population), made for a widespread perception that social reality was provisional, plastic, subject to transformation by collective desire.
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>Capitalist realism – in which current social relations are reified to the point that any shift in them becomes unimaginable – could only be fully consolidated once the Promethean-psychedelic imaginary was all but entirely subdued, and gave way to a morose and dejected individualism.
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>Culture – and music and film culture in particular – was a terrain of struggle rather than a dominion of capital. The relationship between aesthetic forms and politics was unstable and inchoate – culture didn’t just ‘express’ already-existing political positions, it also anticipated a politics-to-come (which was also, too often, a politics that never actually arrived).
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>Edited from an essay by Mark Fisher
Hey there, Reddit! I am a documentary director with a back catalogue of films available in the US and elsewhere. Most recently, my Woodstock-focussed feature documentary "A Venue for the End of the World" has been distributed through BrinkVision to major retailers across the US including Target, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Family Video. Many of my films are available on major international streaming sites including GooglePlay, Hulu, YouTube on Demand.
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Can’t wait to show that to the world!
Proof: https://i.redd.it/kea6tws419g31.jpg
EDIT: Thanks everyone! Going to call it a night. This was really fun, and a great first experience on Reddit and for my first AMA. You all asked some great questions, and were so kind! Sorry I couldn't get to everyone's questions. I'll drrop back in later to answer a few more. I'd love to connect with all of you! You can follow me on Twitter @AidanPrewett and I have a Facebook page @DevilBlueFilms. I hope to see you at a film screening sometime, and don't forget to catch the new book “Woodstock at 50: Anatomy of a Revolution” out now! See ya!
Especially the summer of love.
In class we learned out the Vietnam war and I looked deeper into the protests that happened back home with civil rights movements and such, I found that the hippies attended festivals such as Woodstock and Altamont, I what Woodstock helped with in term of the war and what was the purpose of it. I also found a poster of a Woodstock festival and underneath were the words, "No one attending will ever be the same" I was wondering what they meant by that, did they mean that the people who attended would turn against the war or something else?
