Incense and Peppermints -Strawberry Alarm Clockģ7. Crimson and Clover -Tommy James and the Shondellsģ3. Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In -The Fifth Dimensionģ2. What Have They Done To My Song, Ma -MelanieĢ8. I’d Love to Change the World -Ten Years AfterĢ3. Laugh-along with John-or sneer-along with George-as you will, but all these very different songs are very much ‘hippie,’ (in feel, as well as idea) and, improbably, are many of the loveliest, most significant, and most enjoyable songs ever recorded.ĥ. They looked as us expectantly – as if George was some kind of Messiah. Then somebody said, ‘Let’s go to Hippie Hill,’ and we crossed the grass, our retinue facing us, as if we were on stage. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled. Everybody looked stoned – even mothers and babies – and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible – full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. George famously had a bad experience when he visited hippies in California. When George Harrison first met his producer, he told him he didn’t like his tie. The quality of songs on this list does not translate into a ‘hippie’ era that was nice. There were divisions and fears in the 60s, as well as money to be made, and this surely fueled music being made in the safety of recording studios. Two more observations before we present the list: John Lennon wrote more good ‘hippie songs’ than anyone, and yet, in person, he was the opposite of a ‘hippie’ in so many ways: a bully as a kid who routinely made fun of ‘spastics,’ John was too sarcastic and mean to care for anything ‘hippie.’ John was recruited into the ‘hippie movement’ almost against his will by various forces, and, proving how complex and powerful the whole ‘hippie’ sensibility is, John’s extremely complex working-class/art school/inner turmoil/ life became a fountain of ‘hippie music.’ Perhaps it’s this: art responds to popular focus, popular sincerity, popular desire and material accident (length of hair, for instance) art cannot be intellectualized into greatness. So how is it that “hippie,” a demeaned, belittled, mocked, obsolete, term, symbolized by long, unwashed hair, drug derangement, and artsy-fartsy, pie-in-the-sky ideals, translates into such significant and wonderful music, as seen in this list of undeniably great songs-greater than any similar list of popular songs one might compile? Who knows? But there must be a lesson here, somewhere. But in the ’60s, England and America, two great nations, both gave and took, equally, appreciably, in a healthy, natural, intense, rivalry of shouting, stomping, feeling, and sharing. There are movements which are self-consciously internationalist: one country fawns over another nation’s art, like the rich American ladies who in 1905 suddenly hankered for Japanese vases and haiku. The cliches of the 60s are just that: cliches, and should not be used to bash what was a spectacular confluence of events and sensibilities. In an early interview, the Beatles made the astute observation that in England, kids hated what their parents symbolized, but not their parents, whereas in America, it was the other way around. Tender, conservative feelings survive in the frenzy, even as rebellion gets the headlines. Only a few really like chaos, and when chaos threatens, lyric structure and common sense fight back in all sorts of hidden, wonderful ways. Now that we’ve traveled through post-modernism, we know how conservative the lyric is, and the 60s were lyric. It sounds crazy to say the 1960s featured conservatism and restraint, but it did. The 1960s, as one would expect, features prominently, a time which, artistically, happily resembled the great Romantic era in poetry: sensual, but not overly so, intellectual, but not overly so, and perhaps because indulgence was miraculously tempered by a certain unstated restraint, popular. In a thousand years from now, when we look back at this era, all of our popular music will be seen for what it really is: hippie music. And what is amazing is how great and various and popular this list of hippie songs is. We know what “hippie songs” are, even as they expand like a stain. When we mentioned to the poet Marcus Bales we were putting this list together, he immediately assumed a pejorative intent yes, “hippie” has come to mean a term of censor, even in music-but we assured him our research was sincere.Ĭategories are safe, even when they dissolve into others. If Mick Jagger’s hair had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed.
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