Quote Originally Posted by redgunamo View Post
"Sacrificed their values and integrity for money, fame; betrayed their supposed principles for mainstream acceptance."
Which doesn't apply to the original new age travellers nor to the social reforms of Jenkins/Wilson. I fail to see what relevance that quote has to either.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm only talking about the hippies in the UK, not the US cos I couldn't give a toss about Septic history so don't study it whatsoever.

The Hippy scene was a British invention, the academic consensus being we'd created it in London by '66, why the San Fran "be in" wasn't until '67. They killed it at Altamont while we just started Glasto instead. {Which didn't see out until Mean Fiddler took over the security in the noughties. Because me and hundreds of thousands of my mates bunked in free every year, even after they'd been forced to dith the traveller's field.}

They may have been selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, but that doesn't negate the unparalleled social, cultural and political transformation that the latter half of the decade wrought.

In some ways, the Romanticism that replaced the Enlightenment in the period from 1780-1830 didn't reach it's apogee in the decades after 1830, but in the period from the hippy scene, through punk and teknivals until the digital revolution slowly killed it all off.

For better or worse, the modern political world is based on one where divorce, abortion and homosexuality are legal and censorship and racial discrimination aren't. And they are as quintessentially '60s changes and George Harrison playing a Sitar on Revolver.

If you say there was no point to the '60s then you might as well say there was no point to the Reformation, Enlightenment and Romanticism that had spent the past 450 years building up to it.

Western music changed as much in that decade as western art did in the final two centuries of the Renaissance.