Freak flag

In the 60s one was aware of oneself as a "freak," which essentially established one as a counter-identity to the mainstream, along with all of one's fellow freaks, whose company made it quite a bit more palatable to be freakish. Not only did the word acquire a positive connotation, it was a metaphor that turned the established value system on its head. In other words, one could only be real if one was different, if one established for oneself modes of dress and behavior, and philosophies and cosmologies that suited one's own idiosyncratic vision.

This is why the references to flying one's "freak flag" in Jimi Hendrix's "If Six Was Nine" and David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair" transcend any literal connection to hair or flags; it is really representative of being in one's own space, a separate space from society or from anyone else, really; a symbol of that ontological zone where one has license to explore the structure of the individual quantum which some freak of nature bestowed upon us.