Grosser Hörsaal, English Department, Nadelberg 6
The Prolonged Death of the Hippie, 1967–1969
Remark: The following is an announcement of Peter Price's lecture in December 2018. To go to the conference of the same title, click here: hippie-conference.unibas.ch
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In early 1967, the American Mass Media discovered the counterculture that had been evolving over the previous decade and summarized its style and values under the emblem ‘hippie.’ For the next several months, the media focus of the national phenomenon zeroed in on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and a scene built largely from the widespread availability of LSD, eventually leading tens of thousands of additional young people to move in by the summer, the so-called summer of love.
By that fall, the scene in San Francisco had collapsed under its own weight and a group of the longer-term countercultural residents of the Haight announced ‘the death of the Hippie,’ staging a mock funeral as a theatrical happening. But the hippie lived on in the popular/media narrative reaching its high point with the Woodstock festival in the late summer of 1969. Between those two summers, a mounting carnage of death and destruction, both riots and political assassinations at home and an unfathomably brutal colonial war in Southeast Asia, took its toll on the American psyche. By the time the Manson murders revealed the darkness that had already been lurking in the hippie scene since the summer of love, the mass media was finally ready to pronounce the hippie dead.
From the vantage point of fifty years, the simple narrative of the hippie needs to be reexamined and problematized. Sifting through the timeline for unexpected tropes and resonances and with a focus on the music, film, literature, and art of 1967–1969, Peter Price asks who was the hippie, where did he and she come from, and how, when, and why did he and she die.
Dr. Peter Price (Philadelphia) is a composer, digital artist, media theorist, and sonic philosopher. He and his wife Megan Bridge run and curate ‹fidget›, a platform for experimental, ensemble-derived performance works, both their own as well as those of guest artists and collaborators. Peter Price is Professor of Media Theory and Music at the European Graduate School.
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