Bill Osgerby argues that: the counterculture's various strands developed from earlier artistic and political movements. On both sides of the Atlantic the 1950s "
Beat Generation" had fused
existentialist philosophy with
jazz,
poetry,
literature,
Eastern mysticism, and
drugs—themes that were all sustained in the
1960s counterculture. There has long been a descriptive tendency to refer to sub-cultures and countercultures as "scenes". Examples of this descriptive pattern are "
Beat Scene", "
Hippy Scene", "
Freak Scene", "
Gay Scene",
Mod Scene
etcetera. There is even a subculture specifically called "
Scene". The categorisation of these "scenes" seems to have begun with
Henri Murger's 1847 book "
Scènes de la vie de bohème" which romanticised bohemian life in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Some counterculture scenes attempt to intervene into conventional culture and cause change . Examples of these include
Dada,
Surrealism,
Situationist International,
Fluxus Happenings and
Freaking.
United States , leader of the countercultural protest group the
Yippies In the United States, the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of conventional
social norms of the 1950s. Counterculture youth rejected the cultural standards of their parents, especially with respect to
racial segregation and initial widespread support for the
Vietnam War, and, less directly, the
Cold War—with many young people fearing that America's
nuclear arms race with the
Soviet Union, coupled with its involvement in Vietnam, would lead to a
nuclear holocaust. In the United States, widespread tensions developed in the 1960s in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the
Vietnam War,
race relations,
sexual mores,
women's rights, traditional modes of authority, and a
materialist interpretation of the
American Dream. White,
middle class youth—who made up the bulk of the counterculture in
Western countries—had sufficient leisure time, thanks to widespread economic
prosperity, to turn their attention to
social issues. and, in their early years,
Chicago. New forms of musical presentation also played a key role in spreading the counterculture, with large outdoor rock festivals being the most noteworthy. The climactic live statement on this occurred from August 15–18, 1969, with the
Woodstock Music Festival held in
Bethel, New York—with 32 of
rock's and
psychedelic rock's most popular acts performing live outdoors during the sometimes rainy weekend to an audience of half a million people. (
Michael Lang stated 400,000 attended, half of which did not have a ticket.) It is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history—with
Rolling Stone calling it one of the
50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll. According to Bill Mankin, "It seems fitting… that one of the most enduring labels for the entire generation of that era was derived from a rock festival: the 'Woodstock Generation'." Songs, movies, TV shows, and other entertainment media with socially-conscious themes—some allegorical, some literal—became very numerous and popular in the 1960s. Counterculture-specific sentiments expressed in song lyrics and popular sayings of the period included things such as "do your own thing", "
turn on, tune in, drop out", "whatever turns you on", "
eight miles high", "
sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll", and "
light my fire". Spiritually, the counterculture included interest in
astrology, the term "
Age of Aquarius" and knowing people's
astrological signs of the
Zodiac. This led Theodore Roszak to state "A eclectic taste for
mystic,
occult, and magical phenomena has been a marked characteristic of our
post-war youth culture since the days of the
beatniks."—coincident with America's involvement in Vietnam—and reached its peak in August 1969 at the Woodstock Festival, New York, characterized in part by the film
Easy Rider (1969). Unconventional or
psychedelic dress; political activism; public protests; campus uprisings; pacifist then loud, defiant music;
recreational drugs;
communitarian experiments, and
sexual liberation were hallmarks of the sixties counterculture—most of whose members were young, White, and
middle class. during their sit-in at
the Pentagon in 1967 In the United States, the movement divided the population. To some Americans, these attributes reflected American ideals of
free speech,
social equality,
world peace, and
the pursuit of happiness; to others, they reflected a self-indulgent, pointlessly rebellious, unpatriotic, and destructive assault on the country's traditional
moral order. Authorities banned the psychedelic drug
LSD, restricted political gatherings, and tried to enforce bans on what they considered
obscenity in books, music, theater, and other media. The counterculture has been argued to have diminished in the early 1970s, and some have attributed two reasons for this. First, it has been suggested that the most popular of its political goals—
civil rights,
civil liberties,
gender equality,
environmentalism, and
the end of the Vietnam War—were "accomplished" (to at least some degree); and also that its most popular social attributes—particularly a "
live and let live" mentality in personal lifestyles (including, but not limited to the "
sexual revolution")—were co-opted by mainstream society. Second, a decline of idealism and
hedonism occurred as many notable counterculture figures died, the rest settled into mainstream society and started their own families, and the "magic economy" of the 1960s gave way to the
stagflation of the 1970s—the latter costing many in the middle-classes the luxury of being able to live outside conventional
social institutions. The counterculture, however, continues to influence
social movements, art, music, and society in general, and the post-1973 mainstream society has been in many ways a hybrid of the 1960s establishment and counterculture. Political upheaval made its way into art in the country: film, music and literature were shaped by the ongoing changes both within the country, the Southern Hemisphere and the rest of the world. Bands such as The Master's Apprentices,
The Pink Finks and Normie Rowe & The Playboys, along with Sydney's
The Easybeats,
Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs and
The Missing Links began to emerge in the 1960s. One of Australia's most noted literary voices of the counter-culture movement was
Frank Moorhouse, whose collection of short stories,
Futility and Other Animals, was first published in
Sydney 1969. Its "discontinuous narrative" was said to reflect the "ambience of the counter-culture". Years later, Garner revealed it was strongly autobiographical and based on her own diaries. Britain did not experience the intense social turmoil produced in America by the
Vietnam War and racial tensions. Nevertheless, British youth readily identified with their American counterparts' desire to cast off the older generation's social mores. The new music was a powerful weapon. Rock music, which had first been introduced from the US in the 1950s, became a key instrument in the social uprisings of the young generation and Britain soon became a groundswell of musical talent thanks to groups like
the Beatles,
Rolling Stones,
the Who,
Pink Floyd, and more in coming years. The antiwar movement in Britain closely collaborated with their American counterparts, supporting peasant insurgents in the Asian jungles. The "
Ban the Bomb" protests centered around opposition to
nuclear weaponry; the campaign gave birth to what was to become the
peace symbol of the 1960s.
Soviet Union Although not exactly equivalent to the English definition, the term Контркультура (''Kontrkul'tura'') became common in
Soviet Union (
Russian,
Ukrainian underground and other) to define a 1990s
cultural movement that promoted acting outside of cultural conventions: the use of explicit language; graphical descriptions of sex, violence and illicit activities; and uncopyrighted use of "safe" characters involved in such activities. During the early 1970s, the
Soviet government rigidly promoted optimism in Russian culture. Divorce and alcohol abuse were viewed as taboo by the media. However, Russian society grew weary of the gap between real life and the creative world, and underground culture became "forbidden fruit". General satisfaction with the quality of existing works led to parody, such as how the
Russian anecdotal joke tradition turned the setting of
War and Peace by
Leo Tolstoy into a grotesque world of sexual excess. Another well-known example is
black humor (mostly in the form of short poems) that dealt exclusively with funny deaths and/or other mishaps of small, innocent children. In the mid-1980s, the
Glasnost policy permitted the production of less optimistic works. As a consequence, Soviet (and Russian) cinema during the late 1980s and the early 1990s manifested in
action movies with explicit (but not necessarily graphic) scenes of ruthless violence and social dramas about
drug abuse,
prostitution and failing relationships. Although Russian movies of the time would be
rated "R" in the United States due to violence, the use of explicit language was much milder than in American cinema. In the late 1990s, Soviet counterculture became increasingly popular on the
Internet. Several websites appeared that posted user-created short stories dealing with sex, drugs and violence. The following features are considered the most popular topics in such works: • Wide use of explicit language; • Deliberate misspelling; • Descriptions of drug use and consequences of abuse; • Negative portrayals of alcohol use; • Sex and violence: nothing is a taboo – in general, violence is rarely advocated, while all types of sex are considered good; •
Parody: media advertising, classic movies,
pop culture and children's books are considered fair game; • Non-conformance; and •
Politically incorrect topics, mostly
racism,
xenophobia and
homophobia. A notable aspect of counterculture at the time was the influence of contra-cultural developments on Russian pop culture. In addition to traditional Russian styles of music, such as songs with jail-related lyrics, new music styles with explicit language were developed.
Asia Sebastian Kappen, an
Indian theologian, has tried to redefine counterculture in the Asian context. In March 1990, at a seminar in Bangalore, he presented his countercultural perspectives (chapter 4 in S. Kappen,
Tradition, modernity, counterculture: an Asian perspective, Visthar, Bangalore, 1994). Kappen envisages counterculture as a new culture that has to negate the two opposing cultural phenomena in Asian countries: • invasion by Western
capitalist culture, and • the emergence of
revivalist movements. Kappen writes, "Were we to succumb to the first, we should be losing our identity; if to the second, ours would be a false, obsolete identity in a mental universe of dead symbols and delayed myths". The most important countercultural movement in India had taken place in the state of
West Bengal during the 1960s by a group of poets and artists who called themselves
Hungryalists. ==See also==