40 Years: Individuality and the Summer of Love

Editorial Opinion by Paul Korda
As the Summer of Love 40th Anniversary celebration in Golden Gate Park approaches on September 2nd a suggestion about the commercialization of individuality







Looking at the past forty years, one wonders how successive generations try to resolve the mistakes of their forefathers and foremothers, for that matter. From my own point of view, being born of two European musicians on a gig, in 1948, in colonial Singapore, leaving a British boarding school to join the Original London cast of Hair, in 1968, I had been fortunate to be able to express my feelings and my individuality through writing songs. My hopes, fears, my parent’s divorce, at age five, together with all the tests that life gives to us all, expressed through music.

Throughout my growth, rigid people often tried to get me to conform, sometimes using ruthless methods, such as a music publisher ordering me to have a haircut before he would pay me an advance on a hit I had written. When I refused to accept that kind of behavior, I faced hardship and homelessness, but I refused to give up my individual nature. After all, I knew no other way of objectively seeing things. I wrote songs against pollution, war, repression of individuality, and all before the Hippie revolution got under way. To me, these issues were no fad; they were, and still are very important to me. I was branded a troublemaker for wanting to be paid on my songs, and described in adjectives quite unbecoming to my integrity, by people who resented my liveliness, curiosity, and creativity, because they themselves were caught up in acting out what they thought other people would prefer to see them as, and not who they really were. In other words they had given up their individuality, and often for a paycheck.

As I prepare to join the cast of the musical HAiR for Golden Gate Parks “Summer of Love 40th Anniversary” on Sunday September 2nd, an event proclaimed by San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom, to celebrate Individuality, I look at my perspective of the past 40 years. The colorful individuals of the 60s who expressed their feelings, their love, their hope for an end to all warring and a pollution free planet. They enjoyed the uniqueness of everyone, it was far more interesting than mass produced entertainment. The nurturing of individuals was far better than their persecution, but now individuals are often punished for their unique perspective. Individuals are still picked on by “anti-life”, who would rather pretend that everything is going well, believing it would be too revealing to tell the truth, when in actuality they are lonely, worried, frustrated and would really like to tell someone their truth. They choose leaders with huge egos and not unique individuals whose actions are louder than their words, like JFK and Al Gore. The expression of Art has been commoditized until its message goes unheard in the empty halls of consciousness, even though many of its prophecies, forty years ago, have come true. There’s little doubt that humanity faces the decline of our paradise – Earth.

We’ll probably need to end all wars due to our troops being needed to help with disasters caused by climate change, and God forbid fighting over the ownership of water. So as the 1967 Summer of Love reminds us of a direction we could have gone, toward human reconciliation, Peace, Love and individual expressiveness, it seems important to embrace 2007’s Summer of Love with all our hearts and not look at it as a fad or a product for commercialization.

Paul Korda is a music artist and independent columnist whose work has been published by the ECT News Network whose daily publications include TechNewsWorld, E-Commerce Times, Linux Insider, MacNewsWorld. He is also the editor of International Entertainment News.

His songs have been recorded/sung by Roger Daltrey, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Elkie Brooks, Italy's Patty Pravo, Robert Palmer, Dave Edmunds, PP Arnold and many others.
He was also a member of the Original London Cast of the musical “HAiR”.

Other related article by Paul Korda
HAIR EMPHASIZES PEACE AT SUMMER OF LOVE