SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a cultural, commercial, and financial center in the U.S. state of California. Located in Northern California, San Francisco is the 17th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California, with 873,965 residents as of 2020. It covers an area of about 46.9 square miles (121 square kilometers), mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is the 12th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States with 4.7 million residents, and the fourth-largest by economic output, with a GDP of $592 billion in 2019. With San Jose, California, it forms the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area, the fifth most populous combined statistical area in the United States, with 9.6 million residents as of 2019. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include SF, San Fran, The City, and Frisco.
In 2019, San Francisco was the county with the seventh-highest income in the United States, with a per capita income of $139,405. In the same year, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $203.5 billion, and a GDP per capita of $230,829. The San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area, with a GDP of $1.09 trillion as of 2019, is the country's third-largest economy. Of the 105 primary statistical areas in the U.S. with over 500,000 residents, this CSA had the highest GDP per capita in 2019, at $112,348. San Francisco was ranked 12th in the world and second in the United States on the Global Financial Centres Index as of March 2021.
San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi. The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time; between 1870 and 1900, approximately one quarter of California's population resided in the city proper. In 1856, San Francisco became a consolidated city-county. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, it was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, it was a major port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. It then became the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, the rise of the "beatnik" and "hippie" countercultures, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines.
A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers, fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, and its Chinatown district. San Francisco is also the headquarters of companies such as Wells Fargo, Twitter, Block, Airbnb, Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc., Salesforce, Dropbox, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Uber, and Lyft. The city, and the surrounding Bay Area, is a global center of the sciences and arts and is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the University of San Francisco (USF), San Francisco State University (SFSU), the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the SFJAZZ Center, the San Francisco Symphony and the California Academy of Sciences. More recently, statewide droughts in California have strained the city's water security.
HIPPIES
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in UK English, was a member of the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks[4] who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularise use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date". The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.
In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Monterey Pop Festival popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asian spiritual concepts have reached a larger group.
The vast majority of people who had participated in the golden age of the hippie movement were those born during the 1940s as well as the early 1950s. These included the oldest of the Baby Boomers as well as the youngest of the Silent Generation; the latter who were the actual leaders of the movement as well as the pioneers of Rock music.
In this part of analysis, we will focus on the urban space of San Francisco and in particular to a very famous and popular song named “San Francisco” by McKenzie Scott. This particular song is culturally, historically and socially significant as it mirrors and focuses on the emergence and appearance of hippies’ movement in San Francisco in 1960s. San Francisco as Urban Space became the cultural center of Hippies, who often called “flower children”. Historically speaking, the American “Flower children” were empowered by Vietnam War, as they became famous because of their influence against it. It would be enlightening to accentuate that this artist successfully managed to reflect the whole mindset of flower-power movement and become “a generational touchstone”( McLellan, Dennis, 2012). Already from the beginning, it can be inferred that hippies subculture constitutes a multilayered breakthrough and highlights segregation, as my analysis will attempt to show.
The element of nature and especially flowers dominates the lyrics of this specific song. This is also obvious and eminent both in the title of the song as well as in the lyrics and in some snapshots of the video clip. Therefore, already from the very beginning the listeners become aware of the central and key role that nature plays on hippies’ ideology that McKenzie represents. Nature becomes simultaneously symbol of simplicity, happiness and piece. This is also highlighted by the lexical repetitions of the word “flowers”. Moreover, this can be considered a romantic element and is interpreted by many analysts and listeners as a love song devoted apparently to a woman.
However, according to Gary Burns (2012), this specific song is characterized by the existence of “a lilting, breezy, conversational folk-pop tune that manages to be both optimistic and melancholy” as San Francisco can be considered a peaceful destination where everybody can find hope and love but there is also a hidden message of inevitable escape from interpersonal relationships. The lyric “people in motion” highlights this constant evolution and progress- the need and the natural flaw of human beings to move on or escape, which inevitably entails a change -positive or not- in the field of interpersonal relationships.
Moreover, it would be interesting to focus our attention to some technical information and details being relative to the video clip. To explain, the designer and the director of the video clip that accompanies the song chooses to incorporate to the video clip a variety of snapshots of everyday life in San Francisco that successfully depicts vividly the urban space in the era of 20th century as well as hippies’ ideology and mindset. Regarding to the first, during McKenzie’s performance, the whole video clip is overwhelmed by people -in the urban space of San Francisco and especially in the outer environment, namely in the streets- who obviously have enhanced hippies’ ideology.
All these people despite their personal differentiation in age or sex or ethnicity, they seem to be happy, content and enjoy their life. They have become one with the nature and “wear flowers in their head”. The singer through the lyrics implies that this kind of love, freedom and closeness to each other as well as to nature can be found in San Francisco- indirectly he invites us to join him and the rest people there. Regarding to the last, it is very intriguing the fact that “If you are going to San Francisco, you will meet some gentle people there”. It can be inferred that the song represents a variety of reasons that make San Francisco distinctive and worthy to going there.
In addition to this, this young group of bohemians managed to create a new reality in the urban space of San Francisco in the 60s and hence the element of segregation is obvious both in this period as well as in the song of Scott McKenzie. It is very significant the fact that this video clip as well as the lyrics have historical and cultural importance as they function as markers of hippies’ ideology, the historical events of hippies’ movement and summer of love in 1967. According to the encyclopedia of Britannica, hippies are characterized by casual clothes, unique style, long hair, unconventionality and “dress, sometimes in “psychedelic” colors” and open sexual relationships. This was a time when San Francisco became in a great extend somehow a synonym with free love, use of drugs and communal living as this urban space was overwhelmed by people adopted hippies mentality. This constitutes a historical, cultural and social breakthrough in the America of ‘60s and at the same time we should mention that this ideology and way of life became a major American symbol in ‘60s.
Also, in hippies’ ideology there is the fundamental belief and moto of “Love not War” which appears to be present in the video clip as in the final scene in which there is a balloon with the word “love” written and there is a child that holds this balloon as symbol of naivete and hope for the future. In addition to this, Gary Burns (2012) argues that “McKenzie's vision is undeniably naive, but powerful enough still to prompt a smile, some regret, another listen, and reflection upon the lingering relevance of 1967's songs of innocence.”
This specific singer became very famous at this era because of this song which was a hit and a clear invitation to move to San Francisco and join “a whole generation with a new explanation”—"not a good idea for most people, but an appealing fantasy to many teenagers in 1967” (Gary Burns, 2012).
WORKS CITED
Gary Burns (2013) Scott McKenzie, 1939–2012, Popular Music and Society, 36:1, 119-119, 10.1080/03007766.2012.737590.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "hippie". Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Jul. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/topic/hippie. Accessed 8 January 2022.
McLellan, Dennis(2012), “OBITUARIES; SCOTT McKENZIE, AA.1., 1939 - 2012; Hit song a 'flower-power anthem'”, Los Angeles Times Communications LLC, 21 Aug 2012, Los Angeles Calif, https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/obituaries-scott-mckenzie-1939-2012-hit-song/docview/1034420604/se-2?accountid=8359.