the zippy
- psychic surfing* on balanced hemispheres!
'zippy' is getting bandied about pretty loosely these days to describe a '90s hippy.
Tribal Messanger has "Stonehenge zippies", i-D magazine has "green zippies" and "pagan zippies", Time Out has "Hi Tec Zippies", fanzines are describing themselves as "zippy influenced", Magic Muscle Band call their music "zippy", and Channel 4s Club X is predicting that "New Age Zippies" will be bigger than Punk ever was.
Which is all okay as far as it goes, but it goes a lot deeper if you're ready to go with it.
"Mum, what was a hippy? "
"It was sort of like Rock'nRoll - which got knocked off by House Music - oh, eat your muesli."
To define the general differences between yer average New Age person today (zippy) compared to yer average '60s type involves defining what a 'hippy' was.
I participated in that glorious movement (chickenfeed to what's coming in the '90s) and i can tell you that widely disparate types got grouped under the generic 'hippy'. Spiritual types, Romantics and those just getting laid, politicals, biz-heads, rebels, beats, psychologically damaged, End-Of-The-Worlders, tramps, pure Psychedelicists, junkies, intellectuals, academics, speedfreeks. Two of our group wore suits.
The classic Hippy boils down to a vision, really, a meme, of a necessary 21st century New WoMan which maybe no actual humans have yet fully achieved. Freed of the terrors and guilts of the past - that's definitive. Freed of the awe of all authority except spiritual, and certainly possessed of a budding Planetary Consciousness. Tolerant. Cooperative, where possible. And funloving - nobody who experienced the puritan pre-hippy era could ever doubt that the hippies changed the world.
They also made most of our mistakes for us. When he threw off "authority", a thousand new things for which he had no discrimination, no self-limits were suddenly available and even fashionably okay for the hippy. Drugs. Mysticism. Exotic religions and techniques. Political theories. The hippies dragged everything out of the closet and gave or sold it to each other in the market place.
The zippies emerge, then, from a general gene pool which has had twenty years to sift through it all. Where hippy was your prodigal elder brother, zippy is enabled to actualise the original hippy vision precisely because hippy changed the world. Nobody any longer laughs about ecology. Or about consciousness - actually regarded in my pre-hippy university days as only a theory!
You don't believe things were that crazy, listen!
If you don't believe our culture has evolved that far, let me tell you that I was the only student in my university in the early '60s who believed in "free love", and the counter-argument i heard till I was sick, wait till you hear this, was that, once people got a taste for it, they'd abandon all work and it would be "the end of civilisation as we know it"!!!
It's the unvarnished truth, today's zippy starts from halfway up the mountain because, thanks to ol' You Know Who, he never got repressed so deep. Help the ol' Psychic Warrior across the street next time you see him. You'll be an old, out-of-date-zippy yourself one day.
A premature dry-run and seedling bed for the real thing in the '90s, then, the hippies were inevitably a minority cult, though far bigger than anything ever before. Zippies are not a cult, there are
A businessman sticking a funny red nose on his car, a squatter saving up his dole cheque in order to buy wholesale and retail at a free festival, they're both sensing that Harmonised Hemispheres Are Healthier (the first Zippy Principle). Each has the opposite half of the same balance they're both aiming at, they're both zippies.
zippy = tecnoperson (practicality) + hippy (idealism) We can mix our own music, layout and print our own magazines, produce our own video shows and (crucially!) report our own news, We can monitor our environment, even live comfortably in nature. Meanwhile old hippy and new zippy moles are burrowed deep in every field of society and rising. Where the hippy needed to drop out to clear his mind, the zippy must be aiming to grab the reins of power and change millions of minds. Zippy is tecno-savvy. Hence the very word 'zippy' was coldbloodedly tailored to the hard fact that, since the media will give any new movement a tag, let's choose a short, catchy, cuddly one that will work for us. So 'zippy' can be used in a general sense to distinguish today's New New Agers from the Hippies of yesteryear. But it can be used much more precisely than 'hippy' ever could. Zippy is specifically someone who is aiming at balance, at harmonising the hippy and tecnoperson hemispheres, both in hirself and on hir planet. The zippy (you don't have to use the word, but you do have to understand the concept) feels the terror and the promise of our planet's situation today, fully accepts that love and cooperation must become standard, and is prepared to use all magic hippy and entrepreneurial tecno methods short of violence to create a New Age in a very short time. And there's the final difference between the hippy and the zippy. The zippy movement will succeed because now there really is no alternative. up the evolution!
But perhaps the biggest difference of all is that the technology/media which was used to destroy the credibility of the hippies is increasingly falling into the hands of the zippies.
* Psychic surfing is making your own personal psychic wave with the energy you can draw from all the beautiful things in the world, from the brave unselfish workplay of those who have gone before, and from all the amazing New Age possibilities if we can only change in time, then surfing that wave through the depression, negativity and challenges ahead of us in the '90s.