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The other day I commented on the 3-part Netflix documentary series about the Woodstock '99 music festival. Since then I learned that there are actually at least two entire podcasts that dealt with this particular subject matter. As one of these, Break Stuff, is relatively short I decided to listen to all 8 parts, driven more by a general sense of nostalgia than curiosity I guess. I concluded that there are even more cultural angles to this event than I thought.
Here are my general observations and (I assume) potential fodder for culture war discussion:
In the discussion I mentioned above the subject of festival deaths was raised. Curiously the Netflix documentary ignores it wholly. What I read before is that there was one case of death during Woodstock '99. It turns out that I was mistaken, as there were actually three - coincidentally the same reported death toll as of both Woodstock '69 and '94. One was a traffic accident, the other was a case of an older man, supposedly an attendee of Woodstock '69 as well, succumbing to a heart attack. The third case, the one that received any significant media attention at all, involved a young and supposedly obese man who was an avid Metallica fan and decided to try throwing himself in the middle of the moshpit in the punishing heat as the band played and the massive crowd was naturally going nuts. Whatever we think about his decision, I think it's fair to say the paramedics on site, who were generally undermanned and unprepared anyway, were also somewhat negligent in this case. When the guy collapsed due to heatstroke and was carried to them, they instantly assumed it's a drug overdose as they had no thermometer. There was a lawsuit as a result which was predictably settled out of court. I'm going to guess it was due to the victim being obese that the incident garnered only limited attention. Obese people generally get only low levels of sympathy, especially when they are men who put themselves in danger (keeping in mind that 'putting yourself in danger' is a rather wide category when you're obese).
Either way, I'd argue the whole reason why the subject of festival deaths ever had any cultural relevance in the US was the Altamont incident due to the negative significance of the latter as a watershed cultural event.
In one podcast episode it was argued that Woodstock '99 signified the overall decline of the riot grrrl phenomenon, which was notably absent from it. From a feminist point of view, this sad event coincided with the even sadder event of rampant sexual assaults. What was this cultural phenomenon, you might ask? Mark Ames of the former magazine Exile summed it up in 2005 as:
What to do if you’re an American chick who wants to flirt with the cool college rock crowd, and you’re not comfortable adopting the intentionally asexual angry-dyke-elastic-waistband-whine and bleeding-heart ideology of your PC sisters? Why, you simply rip off the unwashed grunge fashion of the boys who you’re trying to get to notice you, adopting their greasy-hair-in-the-face, their four-chord-Stooges aesthetic, their ratty scream and “body art,” and refurbish the hippie-dyke ideology about empowerment and reclaiming your body in angry “whatever, man” poetics, and voila! You’re a grrl! As they said in the 90s, “You go, grrl! Really, we mean go, as in you go and wash your hair and put on something nice. Seriously, just go. You’re embarrassing yourself. ”
I can't really get hung up on this though, as far as I'm concerned. From women's point of view I guess it made practical sense in that particular milieu to adopt a style that does not alienate either your radical feminist fellow female college students or the male grunge fans you hang out with. It came and went, as these trends usually do.
Apparently it was also standard practice at other music festivals during the '90s not even to allow attendees to bring their own drinking water in. Well, damn. At the same time, almost nothing was done to stem the massive amount of illicit drug trade and use that was taking place at Woodstock '99.
The Woodstock festivals in general can be described as populist/egalitarian in character: they were supposed to make a profit (which they never did) while at the same time targeting all music fans (not just fans of any particular genre) and not charging that high of a price for tickets, so that even average college students and young working adults could afford it. VIP treatment and various expensive perks were not on offer. In contrast, Coachella was incidentally organized for the first time in 1999 as well, and it represented the business model of the future. It abandoned any egalitarian pretenses and was marketed to well-paid middle-class adults, offering VIP packages and various perks. This was a big cultural shift. The new model worked and it was only after two decades that the trainwreck of the Fyre festival happened, reminding older Millennials what a similar trainwreck Woodstock '99 was. (Similar, but not for exactly the same reasons.)
Another cultural shift was taking place at roughly the same time Woodstock '99 bombed. It used to be that heavy metal music was popular among young and white, mostly working-class or white trash dudebros who found in it an outlet for their rebellion against their drab, conservative Christian, suffocating and boring cultural surroundings. This was the case throughout the West and to some extent the Soviet Bloc, not just in the US. It was a young, white and lowly subculture cordoned off from the mainstream. We've long been at a point where none of that applies anymore. This music genre is both consumed and created by mostly middle-aged well-off men. The element of rebellion has completely gone away. I suppose the emergence of nu-metal played a big role in this, as it was quickly co-opted by the mainstream and commercialized, causing a rift between older (purist) and younger metal fans.
It was during the turn of the millennium that the Sexual Revolution seemed to have entered a particularly sleazy period in the US, which was reflected in the usual antics during the festival. The porn industry was mainstreamed, Howard Stern was big, the 'Girls Gone Wild' series was on TV and visual entertainment was getting ever raunchier. I guess this trend did not peter out until after 2008.
As I was listening to these accounts I was overcome by a strange sense of nostalgia. From the mid-nineties to 9/11 times were good overall and I don't think we realized back then how good we have it.
In the late 90s and early 2000s I had friends, a brother and sister, whose dad worked some kind of sales job where he had access to free concert tickets. This is back when purchasing agents weren't prohibited from accepting gifts from vendors, and his company would buy tickets in bulk and occasionally get promotional ones thrown at them for free. While most of these were intended for customers, there were always shows with limited demand that he couldn't give away, so he would get his extended family together and they'd invite a bunch of friends and a huge group of us would go to these concerts for free. But there was one high demand show that he had a ton of tickets to that I went to, because it those demanding the tickets weren't the same as his customer base, and everyone in the group was really into music and had wide-ranging taste and would see anything remotely interesting if it was free.
I bring this up because you talked about how the Rior Grrrl trend was pretty much dead by 1999, and I think the concert I went to contributed to its demise and helps explain why girls of that disposition may have gravitated towards Woodstock '99 type music. For those who aren't familiar, Riot Grrrl was a short-lived movement that had greater purchase among critics than the general public, a situation which makes it seem more important in retrospect than it was at the time. The basic impetus was that there's a lot of loud, aggressive rock music made by men, but when women act like that it's taboo. The bands, whose style was derived from punk, made a political statement out of breaking that taboo. The lyrical themes were overtly feminist and intentionally controversial. However, describing them as "intentionally asexual angry-dyke-elastic-waistband-whine" is rather myopic.
This was certainly the popular perception, such that one existed, but it was not the reality. Calling them intentionally asexual is an odd position to take for a genre with song titles like "I Like Fucking", and when "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill, progenitors of the genre, has overt lesbian themes. This was at a time when the best known lesbian musician was Melissa Ethridge, was a conventional rock and roller who sang about love and loss but always in gender nonspecific terms. The idea that their style was dykey has been overblown in retrospect; they mostly just looked normal. And while they sang about lesbian themes, they were more "queer" in the contemporary sense. Musically speaking, it's not without interest but was very much of its time.
By the late 90s it was already dying. As I said, it had certain cultural cachet, but the fundamental problem of trying to turn music into politics is that when the music is part of the message itself, it will necessarily lack mainstream appeal, since there are no political implications in doing what everyone else is doing. So by saying that it was okay for girls to make aggressive music, there music had to actually be aggressive, too aggressive to have any appeal beyond college campuses and the independent scene. Now, there had already been some successful musicians who had made politics part of their work, most notably John Lennon, but it had always seemed like a sideshow. Lennon's most overtly political record, Some Time in New York City, is almost universally regarded as his worst record, and the agit-prop sing-a-longs were quickly, and wisely replaced with more conventional material on the follow up, Mind Games. The real danger to the Riot Grrrls was that a mainstream musician would make a credible claim to their political mantle.
In 1996, Candaian singer-songwriter Sara McLachlan noticed that concert promoters were reluctant to put two female acts on the same bill. The following year, at the peak of her career, she was able to organize a touring show that would feature an all-star lineup of female musicians. The tour, Lilith Fair, was a huge success, ran for three years, was flogged relentlessly on VH1, and was not shy about being overtly political. The problem with Lilith Fair was that whatever cultural cachet the Riot Grrrls had had been coopted by people who could sell more records. It's hard to evangelize Sleater-Kinney for political reasons when one can get the same sense of empowerment from Sheryl Crow. There was nothing particularly political about any of the artists who toured with Lilith Fair, and the political message was a milquetoast "women can make music as well as men" rather than the more controversial feminism of the riot grrrls.
If you haven't figured it out by now, Lilith Fair was the concert I attended with my friends, in the 1998 installment. If you were a college girl looking to get her freak on and indulge in feminist politics, it probably wasn't the place for you. It probably had more actual lesbians than a riot grrrl show (the Indigo Girls were there), but there were also a lot of families, older people, and yuppie couples. But to the extent that it had a political purpose it was more successful than the riot grrls could ever be, because it appealed to everyone. The 1999 installment had McLachlan, Crow, The Dixie Chicks, and Queen Latifah. Those are four very different styles with very different audiences, but it didn't matter because the kind of people who were likely to attend Lilith Fair weren't the kind of people who made musical taste a part of their identity. And the political message stuck, as it showed that a tour filled with women could make a ton of money, even without any stylistic coherence. And while the artists involved were mainstream, they were also credible; no one doubted that they would sell a ton of tickets with Celine Dion and the Spice Girls on the bill; they had to have people who relatively sophisticated listeners could like unironically.
But Lilith Fair wasn't cool. A 35-year-old systems analyst with 1000 CDs in his collection of all genres may have bought Surfacing after hearing "Adia" on the radio and agreed that it was a good album, but the kind of college girls who listened to it were the ones who majored in English and didn't party. The Lilith Fair acts were credible, but only to adults; they certainly weren't something that was going to get you anywhere in high school. It also didn't help that 1999 wasn't exactly the most divisive time politically. Bill Clinton had a massive approval rating despite having recently been impeached, nobody was excited about the 2000 election, and 9/11 hadn't happened yet. Most young people were apolitical. Lilith Fair was overtly political, yet I don't remember any particular criticism or disagreement.
So whatever else you want to say about the riot grrrls, they had a certain youth appeal that Lilith Fair couldn't replicate. The other thing about them is that they operated on the same wavelength as grunge in the early to mid 90s. While grunge had become fully mainstream by the middle of the decade, there was still a certain punk energy it retained, a certain leftist political lean, a certain don't-give-a-fuck slacker ethos. This is why the forgotten Woodstock 94' never received the same amount of attention as the '99 edition, even though it, too, was popularly considered a logistical failure at the time. Nu-metal had a certain dark rage to it that neither grunge nor riot grrrl had; even if the latter was consciously trying to be aggressive, it couldn't escape the arty subtext that came with the territory of being an indie band in the 90s. By the end of the decade, rock and roll, which had largely established its reputation on the basis of shocking your parents, had reached a terminal state of heaviness. Music can only get so aggressive; it had to end somewhere, and it's no surprise that rock would mellow out in the decades to follow. So what you end up with is people playing really aggressive music with no political subtext to appeal to, that only appeals to a college crowd and has little credibility among adult critics. Then put them in an abandoned air force base with 300,000 kids who are of prime partying age in horrible conditions, and tell them to start breaking things. The violence at Woodstock '99 may have not been inevitable, but it definitely wasn't surprising.
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