It's Earth Day, which for as long as Rocks Off can remember, means one thing. No, we don't mean an enhanced spirit of general cooperation or time to pause and reflect upon our collective impact on our home planet. Nor are we referring to veganism's brief uptick of popularity before it retreats back to the fringe; look, just shut up for a second and we'll tell you what it means.
Hippies.
There's only one thing hippies love more than patchouli: the band Phish. Okay, three things: Phish, patchouli and marijuana. And hackey sacks. Perhaps we shouldn't be trying to put them in order... Anyway, among the other things hippies love, the environment stands near the top. You know, Mother Nature, the woods, being outdoors, swimming/bathing in natural springs...
Scoff if you must, but hippies' environmental influence is powerful: they're the ones who got us to call the jungle "the rainforest" and made us refer to swamps as "wetlands". They continue to influence our culture in ways that, looking back, seem a little suspicious. Nevertheless, in tribute to our rainbow warriors, we've prepared a list of YouTube's Dirtiest Hippies, to illustrate one more thing from which hippies are inseparable (besides dirt): rock and roll.
Green Day Vs. the Mud Hippies: At Woodstock '94, it rained. Hard. Soon the entire place was a churning mass of wet earth. Green Day added to the chaos when they came out and engaged the audience in a protracted mud fight, which climaxed not long into their song "Paper Lanterns."
The constant barrage of muck from the audience frustrated Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong to the point where he angrily hacks at his guitar, slams a microphone down on the stage repeatedly, and shouts "This ain't no public peace, it's fuckin' anarchy!" before lapsing into an improvised ditty: "I don't care what you do/ I ain't gonna be a mud hippie like you."
"Mud hippie" became a popular slur at Rocks Off's high school (and, we're sure, other high schools around the world), Billie Joe and co. left the audience chanting for more, and poor, innocent Primus faced a similar onslaught when they attempted to play the song "My Name Is Mud" (natch). Bonus: at about the 5:58 mark, you can see bassist Mike Dirnt on the right side of the screen taking the tackle that knocked out a bunch of his teeth.
Woodstock '69: The Rain Chant: Of course, we can't mention Woodstock '94 without also mentioning the original. Perhaps due to the romanticizing of the original Woodstock, nobody ever seems to mention that it started raining that Friday night (the first evening of the festival) and continued to rain the entire weekend. The farmland that had been co-opted turned to mud. The stage actually began creeping down the hill upon which it was built, sliding in the wet soil, until it came to rest sagging on one side.
The tarp designed to keep performers dry was blown away in the high winds, and for a while, the sound system didn't work at all. But it barely mattered. All in attendance were so high on peace, love, community and lots and lots of LSD that they beat drums, clapped hands and raised their own voices in an impromptu rain chant. There were approximately 400,000 people at the original Woodstock; what you'll hear in this video is, for better or for worse, quite literally the voice of a generation.
Damn Dirty Hippie Dance Party: At an outdoor Boredoms concert in New York, one concertgoer had the presence of mind to capture on film a rare exhibition of a lone hippie in the wild. Normally, the hippie prefers to travel in packs to rely upon the "safety in numbers" principle, but for whatever reason, this brave tie-dyed lad is all by his lonesome, twisting and gyrating himself through a routine of improvised performance art that would make any tribal drum-circle leader proud.
Although we barely even glimpse his face throughout the entire video, to us he represents the apex of hippiedom: oblivious, stoned to the bejeezus belt, making a spectacle of himself but happier than a pig in shit. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Metalocalypse, "Dethklok Plays the Blues": One of our favorite fictional bands of all time, Dethklok, suffers depression, loses its mojo, goes underground in the deep South to learn the blues, regains its mojo and headlines the Outdoor World Peace Fest to premiere its new take on life.
What kind of take? We'll put it like this: the Devil himself won't get any closer than a nearby mountaintop. The audience full of Bonnaroo-style hippies for some reason doesn't see what's coming, and undoubtedly never knew what hit them. (Warning: contains graphic metal. And also violence.)
Did we just end with a clip that showed a bunch of flower children getting slaughtered? Why, I guess we did. On second thought, screw you, hippies.
