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Roughly one and a half years after first reading about it here and elsewhere I decided to finally binge-watch the 3-part Netflix miniseries about the infamous Woodstock ‘99 festival, released as episodes of the Trainwreck documentary series. I guess I’m lazy like that, or there are hard limits to my curiosity. Anyway, as I’ve commented on it here before, I did read and hear commentaries about this documentary and the one released earlier by HBO on the same subject, and based on these I assumed that I’ll be seeing some another tiresome woke Netflix slop about toxic masculinity and nu-metal being horrible and cringe. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised but also found that the rather little amount of woke commentary in the series seemed to be included in a rather ham-fisted and clumsy way.
To first address what was probably driving the dismissals/accusations about the series being woke propaganda slop: the topics of sexual harassment and assault are regularly brought up in it, which is understandable as this was eliciting much of the negative media focus on the festival. Based on the series there were three interconnected phenomena that were routinely taking place. One: women in the crowd flashing their tits, usually while being drunk or drugged, and prompting guys standing nearby to grab and grope them. Also, women who stage-dived were often groped all over. Three: as nudity was completely normalized from the beginning, which I imagine had much to do with the extreme heat, there were many cases of naked or semi-naked, similarly drunk or drugged women stumbling around and then getting surrounded by sleazy guys, usually also drunk or drugged, who also went on to grope them.
Plus there were rapes taking place, usually in tents and vehicles as mentioned by two interviewees, with a featured news segment mentioning 4 such cases being reported to the police. All this is mentioned in passing, except for one probable case of statutory rape which happened in a commandeered vehicle inside the rave hangar. I say 'probable' because the witness who described it said the otherwise blacked-out girl looked underage and it seemed like some guy just finished boning her, but he wasn’t sure. It also bears mentioning the context, namely that naked chicks were getting boned left and right in the dark next to the walls inside the hangar.
To finally move on to the culture war angle: there are two female interviewees relatively extensively commenting on the subject; one is a black former MTV reporter who curiously claims that the MeToo phenomenon was sparked by incidents and sexist behaviors such as these and a former attendee who was 14 at the time of the festival who said she’s just thankful that these behaviors are no longer considered acceptable.
I watched this and thought MeToo was obviously driven by multiple things, but I’m sure average drunk dudes groping drunk naked girls on festivals is definitely not one of them. Also, how do you then explain the 18-year time gap between the two? As someone of some experience at rock and metal festivals I also wondered: surely these behaviors cannot be said to be normal and acceptable during music festivals. What I think is fair to say is that they were routinely occurring on these particular festival, and that social and cultural factors that are peculiar to the late ‘90s were at play.
For example, widespread nudity was not the norm at the original festival, at least nowhere near to that extent, as far as I know, as evidenced by the many pieces of archive footage also included in this miniseries. Only by the late ‘90s did social licentiousness reach such an average level that such behaviors were normalized. Girls flashing their tits during music shows (and/or getting drugged on Ecstasy) is another expression of this, and I don’t think this was considered normal until the ascendance of nu-metal and rave, with both genres dominating Woodstock ’99. But still, it’s not like groping and touching was seen as a routine pastime during every similar festival in those times, I guess.
To mention some other things:
Curiously no member of Limp Bizkit was interviewed even though many Millennials apparently scapegoated them for the entire, well, trainwreck. Their former manager, on the other hand, was featured and he predictably denied any allegations, and it didn’t appear to me that the show’s narrative was trying to contradict him. However, it appears to be clear that him and the RHCP are responsible for cluelessly inflaming an already agitated and destructive crowd even further when an orgy of vandalism was already poised to break out, their only excuse being the organizers clearly not communicating effectively their request to help tame things down. On that note, no member of RHCP was interviewed either.
The incompetence on display on the part of the organizers is just hilarious, especially in included news segments of the bosses giving press conferences. A complete and delusional denial of the reality on the ground, one rosy and baseless statement after the other, refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame to a small number of evildoer attendees even on the morning after the disaster already happened. The mayor of the host town also came across as a complete dunce during those events, putting on an optimistic façade and actually having the temerity to even openly invite the organizers to return and put on another festival sometime later, doing all this at a point where everything already went to literally shit and things were to fall apart completely in a few hours.
While not openly naming late-stage capitalism as a culprit, the documentary creator clearly consider it to be the main culprit, and for a good reason, I think. Despite all the bullshit and pretense of doing everything to honor the great legacy of the original Woodstock, the overriding objective was to make maximum profit, driven by the bad example of Woodstock ’94 not turning any profit at all, and this went hand in hand with cutting to the bare minimum the budget for any services, facilities, staff and security, while at the same time banning the attendees from even bringing their own drinking water on site.
Where three people died, eight women miscarried, and the logistics were so badly planned that the organisers had to appeal to local farms to provide food and water?
I still don't understand why Woodstock occupies such a vaunted stature in the American imagination. "Hendrix played 'The Star-Spangled Banner', but he made it all, like, distorted and stuff. Far out." Okay?
Boomer Lore, basically.
They had some great music, that much is true.
Woodstock was a last big hurrah before reality set in. The Altamont free concert where some Hells Angels killed a concertgoer (and a bunch of other stuff) happened a mere 4 months later.
So they go from genuinely believing that free love, free drugs, and free music had the power to change and fix the world, to eventually facing down the fact that all of those things had some major downsides.
I understand that the Altamont free concert is widely understood to have served as the death knell of the optimism of the 1960s hippie movement. But I genuinely don't understand why Woodstock hadn't already accomplished that. Three people died. I appreciate that three people dying from negligence is less dramatic than one person being stabbed to death: but still, what kind of exchange rate is this?
Huh: in addition to the lone stabbing at Altamont, there were also three accidental deaths I hadn't heard about. The hope was that Altamont would be the "Woodstock of the West". I guess they got what they wanted, and then some.
Woodstock was planned for 50,000 people and ten times that number showed up. There were a couple accidental deaths, but no violence, despite the fact that security was woefully inadequate on paper. The myth was that a half million well-meaning people could overcome hardships like bad weather and traffic nightmares and still have a good time. Altamont was completely different from the beginning, with fights breaking out throughout the show. One of the biggest problems was that the stage was only about 3 feet off the ground, and there was a crush of people trying to climb on it throughout the show. The Hell's Angels they hired (for $500 in beer) to protect the stage area were drunk and unqualified, so there were constant scuffles in front of the stage. Even before Meredith Hunter was killed, the atmosphere was so bad that the Grateful Dead noped out. That this only happened a few months after Woodstock meant that the juxtaposition was fresh in people's minds, and it was easy to paint Altamont as the end of an era. It didn't help that across the pond, the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was beset with similar problems.
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Well the original Woodstock had the benefit of there being a Documentary crew on site and, in the final cut, basically valorized the entire thing rather than focusing on the controversies or failings.
And I'm sure most people formed good memories of it in retrospect.
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