Gregory McNamee: Remembering Woodstock: That Festival of Peace, Love, and Consumer Capitalism
[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. An editor, publishing consultant, and photographer, he is also the author of 30 books, most recently Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger, 2006).]
In the global economy of plastic and petrol, anyone can sell anything, no matter how useless.
So goes the premise that has fueled capitalism for generations. Even the supposedly revolutionary 1960s, which altered so many aspects of international culture, did nothing to diminish that basic truth. Witness all the swag that came from Woodstock, the music festival (August 15-17, 1969) celebrating its 40th anniversary: posters, T-shirt, peace-dove-adorned accoutrements for the pre-Altamont aspirational generation, having only doffed Nehru jackets a few months before.
And no one ever went broke turning slogans into commodities, words into products, in the hype and jingle discourse-replication of postmodern TV and the Web. This is the great lesson that confronted us when, in 1997, it was revealed that Bill Graham Presents, the San Francisco-based cabal of rock ’n’ roll promoters named after the late king of pop-culture capitalism, had trademarked the phrase “Summer of Love,” turning a piece of the common lexicon into glorious cash.
The phrase, now 42 years old and in fairly heavy rotation a couple of summers ago, on its 40th anniversary, was a media sound bite to begin with, coined by who knows who in the purple-hazy Haight to denote the mass migration of young hipsters to San Francisco. But it was a freely shared sound bite, like so many others of the day, on the order of “Have a nice day” and “Jesus loves you”—or even, “All you need is love,” a bit of word candy that the surviving Beatles seem in no special hurry to reserve exclusively for themselves, though I wouldn’t want to plant any ideas.
That was the ’60s for you, all shared dreams and shared pipes. No longer. Today, as Todd Gitlin, the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, points out, “We live in a culture in which everything that starts out original turns into a theme park.” Just ask the denizens of midtown Manhattan, if you don’t believe him.
It figures: every chicken eventually comes home to roost, after all. With so many of the Weathermen dead and gone, never mind Sarah Palin’s “palling-around-with-terrorists” bleatings, the term “Days of Rage” is probably up for grabs. It would make a fine sobriquet for a theme restaurant, its walls lined with gas masks and checkerboard cop caps. And just think of the ride Chicago/Czechago ’68 would make.
So many of those pop-culture chickens were hatched in the era of free love and sunshine, so many of the bizarrest of goods, the strangest of services. The late ’60s and early ’70s introduced some of my mondo favorites: EST, pet psychiatry, coffins on the installment plan (as the advertisements said, “at pre-need prices”), edible underwear. You can’t blame these things on the Summer of Love generation, I suppose, but it’s still reasonable to assume at least a little guilt by association, given that so many of them turned into dreaded Yuppies in the following decade and went for capitalism in a big, big way. (Just ask Jerry Rubin, smushed by the locomotive—or Lexus—of history.)...
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
In the global economy of plastic and petrol, anyone can sell anything, no matter how useless.
So goes the premise that has fueled capitalism for generations. Even the supposedly revolutionary 1960s, which altered so many aspects of international culture, did nothing to diminish that basic truth. Witness all the swag that came from Woodstock, the music festival (August 15-17, 1969) celebrating its 40th anniversary: posters, T-shirt, peace-dove-adorned accoutrements for the pre-Altamont aspirational generation, having only doffed Nehru jackets a few months before.
And no one ever went broke turning slogans into commodities, words into products, in the hype and jingle discourse-replication of postmodern TV and the Web. This is the great lesson that confronted us when, in 1997, it was revealed that Bill Graham Presents, the San Francisco-based cabal of rock ’n’ roll promoters named after the late king of pop-culture capitalism, had trademarked the phrase “Summer of Love,” turning a piece of the common lexicon into glorious cash.
The phrase, now 42 years old and in fairly heavy rotation a couple of summers ago, on its 40th anniversary, was a media sound bite to begin with, coined by who knows who in the purple-hazy Haight to denote the mass migration of young hipsters to San Francisco. But it was a freely shared sound bite, like so many others of the day, on the order of “Have a nice day” and “Jesus loves you”—or even, “All you need is love,” a bit of word candy that the surviving Beatles seem in no special hurry to reserve exclusively for themselves, though I wouldn’t want to plant any ideas.
That was the ’60s for you, all shared dreams and shared pipes. No longer. Today, as Todd Gitlin, the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, points out, “We live in a culture in which everything that starts out original turns into a theme park.” Just ask the denizens of midtown Manhattan, if you don’t believe him.
It figures: every chicken eventually comes home to roost, after all. With so many of the Weathermen dead and gone, never mind Sarah Palin’s “palling-around-with-terrorists” bleatings, the term “Days of Rage” is probably up for grabs. It would make a fine sobriquet for a theme restaurant, its walls lined with gas masks and checkerboard cop caps. And just think of the ride Chicago/Czechago ’68 would make.
So many of those pop-culture chickens were hatched in the era of free love and sunshine, so many of the bizarrest of goods, the strangest of services. The late ’60s and early ’70s introduced some of my mondo favorites: EST, pet psychiatry, coffins on the installment plan (as the advertisements said, “at pre-need prices”), edible underwear. You can’t blame these things on the Summer of Love generation, I suppose, but it’s still reasonable to assume at least a little guilt by association, given that so many of them turned into dreaded Yuppies in the following decade and went for capitalism in a big, big way. (Just ask Jerry Rubin, smushed by the locomotive—or Lexus—of history.)...