The Impact Of The Musical Play Hair On Society
The Love-Rock Musical play Hair has become a summarized synopsis of the 1960s. The Ragni-Rado songs show all of the social issues protested and embraced by the youth of empowerment of the 60’s. This musical embraces the human body, love, marijuana, and sex which are glorified by the characters while they showed their disregard for war, racism, and just social inequality in general. Although Hair, does portray the controversy of the 60’s, it still resonates in today’s society.
One of the central themes of this musical was pacifism, which is followed throughout the entire musical. Claude receives his draft card and has to choose what he would do about it, whether he would burn his draft card or whether he would obey his parents and fight for his country. While fighting his inner dilemma, Hair offers a freethinkers view on war as complete nonsense and the worst crime ever known to man. Songs such as “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” “Don’t put it down”, “Hare Krishna”, and the ending song “Let the Sun Shine In” reflects on the hippies calling for peace. The political activities of the youth movement had enduring effects in today’s society. Universities became care-free, ending dress codes and curfews and recruiting more minority students. Students also contributed greatly to the movement against the war in Vietnam. Both the unconventional and student activism, finally, fueled a movement that finally happened in the 1970s and 1980s.
The women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the youth movement changed people's lives. This also created a time of rebellion, confrontation, and catastrophe. However, Hair continues to speak about racial segregation, racism and discrimination in a blunt matter. One thing I noticed during the musical, was that there were African-American whose characters are portrayed equal to the white characters of the tribe. Hair deliberately ignored the demand for politically correctness of speech or the politeness of society. It worked with racist labels very openly to show how grotesque they were and wanted the audience to face them. Songs such as “I’m black/Ain’t Got No” and “”Colored Spade” adresses racism and racial issues theme as a whole. Other songs such as “Black Boys/White Boys” exploits and portrays sexual preferences and mutual attraction with people of various races. Hair uses their platform to show how offensive and absurd this language can be- and yet in today’s society this is considered normal. Racism still plays a major role in society, it may not be a huge issue as it was in the late 60’s but it is still relevant. In today’s society we see excessive numbers of certain ethnic groups being pursued by the justice system and given harsher sentences for their crimes, or even convictions for crimes that have not been committed. We tend to even see discrimination in the education system, with those from certain backgrounds being unable to access to the best schools and therefore unable to access or gain the right qualifications that they need to advance and progress into higher level careers. Hair decides to break the platform of sexual revolution, sexual freedom and the fight for women’s equal rights.
In “Abie Baby” Abraham Lincoln is portrayed not only by an African American but by a African American woman. Hair uses this to show the importance of a women’s fight for equal rights and that is still very relevant in today’s society.
“Black Boys / White Boys” was used to show expression of the sexual revolution point of view in the 60s’. Women express their feelings about men in such a way that was considered normal only the other way around. Hair clearly shows that women have the same rights as men and not only in the field of expressing their feelings. In today’s society this issue is effective. Women are still fighting for equal pay, reproductive choices and women’s health and that’s just to name a few. Furthermore, Sexual revolution is directly connected to sexual freedom that became apparent in the sixties which played an importance of the youth empowerment movement. These misunderstandings are ostensible in the song “Hair”.
“My Conviction” which follows is about embracing their long hair and their hippie flags. It also symbolizes the idea of discrimination and restrictive gender roles. Nudity can also included with sexual freedom played an important role in Hair, because being naked symbolizes freedom, openness and acceptance for who we are. Hair reflects it in the controversial naked scene at the end of Act I, containing both male and female nudity. Homosexuality and nakedness are considered a “taboo” in today’s society, where in Hair they were not afraid to highlight these social conflicts. In conclusion, there is no doubt that Hair was inspired by America’s society of the 1960’s and it was it had every intention to portray it, in the rawest form. Hair spoke on many social issues that people were too afraid to make a platform and speak about. In my opinion, Hair does continuously resonates with today’s society even fifty years after it has been portrayed, because we still have the same social issues with women’s rights, youth empowerment and racism just to name a few.
Do I think Hair brought social change in today’s society? No, it may have had a strong influence on the audience and society to dig through their conscious, but it did not truly change society. Nonetheless, peace and love will always be shown throughout society no matter if it’s a musical, protest or even a song. In the final act “Let The Sun Shine In” whereas you can feel the beaming of emotion from the audience just floating in the air.
