By Jonny Dovercourt

Toronto hardcore punk band Fucked Up have had an amazing year. After signing with prestigious U.S. indie label Jade Tree, they released Hidden World, one of the best albums of 2006, and have toured the world to play for ever-expanding audiences. Prior to this success, they got into a hilarious yet probably sincere feud with mall-punks Billy Talent. FU’s diss song begins with the memorable taunt, “we’re going to make a cheeseburger out of this beef… naw, fuck you, a quarter pounder!”

Even more memorable is the song’s ending. “People that like you are worse than Nazis… they’re worse than hippies.” This is the insult that tips the listener off that the song is more of a joke than a serious diss. And it’s pretty fucking funny. I’ve told my share of hippie jokes over the years. (My favourite: Q. How can you tell if hippies have been at your house? A. They’re still there.) The irony is that Hidden World’s cover art could have graced a Jefferson Airplane album sleeve, and the album’s epic feel has been compared to Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü, a band whose long hair and paisley shirts looked suspiciously hippie-ish to the puritanical ‘80s hardcore scene from which they sprang. Hippie-dom doesn’t seem so offensive nowadays. In fact, hippies are back in a big way, with opposition to the Iraq war having sparked a neo-psychedelic movement in the U.S., led by bands like Sunburned Hand of the Man and MV & EE and underground press like Arthur magazine, championed up here by the fine folks of the Bummer in the Summer festival. Despite the excitement around this insurgence, I get the sense that people can’t decide if they’re “okay” with it. The indie scene’s values are pretty grounded in punk, which means that anything that reeks of patchouli and pot stench is still considered laughable at best, if not worthy of outright scorn and contempt. Fucked Up’s song got me thinking: why do we hate hippies so much? It seems kind of mean and excessive, or at least excessively cynical.

The standard defense of the “New Weird America” scene is they’re like the Good Old Hippies, the original political radicals of the ‘60s, rather than the cliché of the Phish-headed college kid who eschews deodorant and thinks it’s okay for white people to wear dreadlocks. We’ve all met that guy. He’s pretty harmless. (OK, someone might find his hairstyle appropriation offensive.) And aren’t a lot of the things that hippies advocate kind of, well, good for you? Indie rockers are a bunch of lethargic out-of-shapes who could stand to learn some yoga, eat some healthy food, spend some time communing with nature or at least go out and get some “fresh air and exercise,” as my Mum (who grew up in the ‘60s) used to say. Just because most latter-day hippies are annoying and badly dressed doesn’t mean we should let them ruin things for us. By “things,” I mean reggae music, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (hippies looove that book) and pondering the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. Oh yeah, and being nice to people.

This has been on mind since my girlfriend and I took a trip to San Francisco recently. One thing I brought back with me was a better understanding of the ‘60s. Some combination of the fresh Pacific Ocean air, the welcoming nature of the locals and the surrealism of this pretty city built on steep hills makes it easy to imagine SF as a sanctuary for misfits, a safe place to escape from a hateful nation at war — then and now. It is easy to mock the hippie platitudes of “peace and love” up here in Canada where the violent crime rate is so much lower, but in the context of hostile and paranoid America… fuck, I’d move there and put flowers in my hair in a second.

The funny thing was, for the first chunk of our trip, we wondered where all the hippies were. The SF hipsters looked just like Toronto hipsters (who look like just like Chicago or Berlin hipsters). Same with the rich people, of which there were a lot. We found all the Bay Area’s hippies in Golden Gate Park, having a gigantic drum circle. Yeah, I know — but it was still cooler than the Tam Tam Jams from Mont Royal or Trinity Bellwoods, this one actually had rhythm. The Park is attached to Haight-Ashbury, the original hippie ‘hood, which is still a pretty cool strip, like Queen West except with more head shops and tie-dye. At least it didn’t turn into Yorkville.

The reason that “we” are supposed to hate hippies so much is that they “sold out.” In a Ninja High School song, Matt Collins says, “hate to tell the boomers but the 1960’s failed.” I don’t know if that’s true. Once the drugs wore off — I mean, they realized that LSD wasn’t going to result in a change in mass consciousness (at least not a useful one) — the original hippies set about making peace with the “mainstream society” they’d defined themselves against. Sure, some of them became rich, insufferable assholes. But I think a lot of them held onto their values and did some good as grown-ups. In San Francisco, you see their legacy everywhere: the city has a deep commitment to environmental protection, with a recycling program that has been going strong since the ‘80s (they even sort the sidewalk bins for you) and one of the best public transit systems on the continent. If that’s selling out, then I want to know, who’s buying? My point is you can benefit from hippie values, without having to be one, or have them around.

Ironically, on the flight out to SF, I read The Rebel Sell, a 2005 book by Toronto authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, in which the “sellout” myth is debunked less sympathetically. The authors think the hippies had nothing to sell out in the first place, and the entire notion of counterculture (anti-establishment, underground culture) is built upon glorification of the individual in place of collective action. With bulldozing logic, they argue that withdrawing from “the system” to create alternative cultures is counter-productive and that real social change comes from working with public institutions. These guys are actually social democrats, despite having the approval of Rex Murphy. I think their view is too harsh, but I see their point. Too much time is wasted by subversive subcultures in identifying themselves as subversive subcultures, and entertaining ourselves as such — it’s more fun to play in a band or stage guerrilla theatre or organize subway parties than it is to deputize at council meetings or volunteer at food banks.

This disconnect can create a sense of vertigo, a vertigo of irrelevance, and as an artist with political aspirations or pretensions, I’ve felt this anxiety myself. Is playing in a “political band” just a placebo to make me feel better about my own selfish apathy? It’s a feeling addressed well in Toronto writer/theatre artist Darren O’Donnell’s long-form essay Social Acupuncture, in which he outlines an “art of civic engagement.” To condense it inelegantly, O’Donnell proposes that the new art that will contribute to positive social change is the art of talking to strangers.

I agree with him, and find his projects (such as Haircuts by Children and Diplomatic Immunities) really exciting, but I also think that lots of old art, like music, still does that. In The Rebel Sell, Heath and Potter go way off base by undervaluing the power of art, and amaze me with their empiricist ineptitude in describing it and its effect on people. Ninety per cent of all art may be pointless wank, but when it’s truly great and meaningful it can be a genuine agent for social change. Think of the late great James Brown empowering the civil rights movement with “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” or even something as mundane as someone watching Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and deciding to change their life. The pressure to be “truly great and meaningful” is a bit off-putting though, which I think is why most contemporary artists and musicians remain apolitical, and focus on art for art’s sake. There’s a vanity in thinking your art is going to affect the world. (Guilty!)

Which leads me to my conclusion. I know why indie rockers hate hippies: they remind us of our embarrassing younger selves. I don’t mean literally, like when I was 13 and loved The Doors, or when you played hackeysack. I mean our countercultural heritage. Indie kids are descended from punks, who are descended from hippies. What? It’s true. The hippies were naïve enough to think their music, art, poetry and protest could change the world. It didn’t — at least not as much as they hoped. The punk rockers of the ‘70s inherited this crushing sense of disappointment, yet many of the original punks, like Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, were carrying on the romantic ideals of the ‘60s. They just didn’t want to be so fucking stupid and naïve and obvious about how they asked for it. The hippie/punk connection is best demonstrated by the band name Dead Kennedys — the ‘60s dream of social progress lying murdered on the ground; a fact to mourn, not to gloat over. I don’t think it’s a coincidence the DKs were from San Francisco. The last 30 years of punk-rock hippie-bashing has been a countercultural case of giving Dad the middle finger.

So where does this leave us? I think we in the indie music scene, with our collective dreams of creative utopia, our urban-space-faring game-playing and abandoned-bun-factory shows, should realize we’re not that different from the old hippies. So we should go easy on their modern-day knockoffs, and think about how we can avoid repeating our shared forebears’ mistakes. I think the realization of encroaching neo-hippiedom may explain the cloud of cynicism that’s darkened the indie arts community in the last couple of years. The dark side of too much freedom is that jerks can take over. In ‘60s San Francisco, permissiveness resulted in men exploiting women sexually, countless drug casualties and a guy getting murdered with pool cues by Hell’s Angels at Altamont Speedway. In ‘00s Toronto, let’s be thankful we only have to deal with people being snarky pricks on Stillepost.