Thirty minutes west of downtown, for example, lies Hippie Hollow, Texas’s only clothing-optional public park. At first glance, it just makes sense there are plenty of “weird” places around Austin that reflect its idiosyncratic culture. The city’s unofficial slogan, “Keep Austin Weird” (KAW), reflects its disdain for societal norms. Austin votes blue, and with its many advocacy groups, gay bars, and cultural heritage events, it seems like a liberal, accepting place. And every year, nearly one million people flock to the city for the Austin City Limits Music Festival and the South by Southwest film, music, and technology festival. Local and touring musicians perform here every night of the week at over 250 venues, more per capita than any other city in the U.S. I’ve seen how Austin’s ‘70s legacy resonates throughout the city today. Austin’s radicals and its establishment began to merge, paving the way for its reputation as a counterculture capital. By the mid ‘70s, the city had elected a “hippie City Council,” led by former campus activist Jeff Friedman, who rose to the mayor’s office in 1975 at the age of 30. The college town’s voting population rapidly expanded as student-run social justice coalitions sprung up, and people of color got elected to City Council for the first time. In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the national voting age to 18. The city started attracting people “who wanted to make music, not necessarily build a career.” Patoski pinpoints this influx of artists and their anti-establishment attitudes as the beginning of the “Alternative Austin Business Model”: people making things for the sake of creativity, not profit or, now, Instagram followers.Īt the same time, Austin’s politics shifted, too. Local author and historian Joe Nick Patoski explains in an interview with Texas Highways Magazine that Austin became a music capital when Willie Nelson and other musicians fled Nashville’s “corporate” country music scene in the early ‘70s. Most importantly, they’d insist that Austin held onto its small-town, artistic roots even as it transformed into a national tech hub.Īustin’s history supports its image as a counterculture hot spot. My aunt and uncle, who lived here until the mid 2000s, used to gush over how the city somehow combined Texan pride with laidback, live-and-let-live liberalism. This wasn’t the scene I expected in Austin. I show her the drink already in my hand, smile passive aggressively, and decide I’m ready to leave. But they’re not: one girl asks me how I “got on the list,” and another one slaps me with her fan when she thinks I’m cutting her in line at the bar. and can’t believe how much nicer everyone is here. I leave the closet and strike up a conversation with the glitterati waiting to take photos in front of an indoor tree. It’s empty in here-too dark for pictures. When I catch a glimpse beyond the other guests’ phone cameras and into each room, I see people posing on a throne of fake flowers, a teal piano that doesn’t work, and a neon pink sign that says, “I NEED SPACE.” I like the “black hole room,” a pitch-black closet with stars projected onto the ceiling. The exhibit, branded as an “immersive art experience,” feels like a glorified Instagram photoshoot. The scene is painfully trendy: loud house music, people wearing sunglasses indoors, and an open bar with four types of exotically flavored tequila to wash it all down. on a Tuesday, and I’m with my friend Grace at the closing party for an exhibit at a hostel turned bar/art museum/tattoo studio/thrift store under the highway near downtown Austin.
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