The 1999 “Woodstock” movie has been released
Garrett Price’s film “Music Box. Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Fury,” dedicated to the Woodstock 99 music festival. Boris Barabanov looked at how accents in the still very recent history of rock are being placed in accordance with current ideological trends.
The festival, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the legendary Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, took place in 1999 near Rome, New York. The organizer of this festival, like the first Woodstock in 1969 and the second held in 1994, was producer Michael Lang. The third Woodstock was done on the grounds of a former air base. The ready-made military infrastructure allowed to make the festival as comfortable as possible. However, the unprecedented heat, water supply problems, high prices in the food court and a host of other little things increased the dissatisfaction of the audience, and eventually the tension turned into aggression. Audience members took musicians’ calls to “blow off steam” literally: Limp Bizkit’s performance was accompanied by numerous episodes of violence, and during the performance of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, fires blazing in the remote parts of the venue turned into real fires.
While open-air music events in the UK and Europe have long been a clockwork industry, in the U.S. they were just learning to make them, and even with an air base with all the communications, it was possible not to calculate the influx of people and not provide for all their needs.
In 1999, there was a scandal with the impeachment of President Clinton. Moreover, in April of that year, America was rocked by the Columbine school massacre. In discussions of this tragedy, it was often mentioned that the killers were inspired by the music of Marilyn Manson, one of the most popular alternative rock musicians. America hated him and, through him, all new music. People weren’t just going to Rome with backpacks – they were going with a load of social problems and expected Woodstock ’99 to free them from their accumulated tension.
“There seemed to be a dark energy emanating from young white guys in pop culture that the entertainment industry was supporting and exacerbating,” says journalist Stephen Hayden in the film, and it completely changes the tone of the conversation. “The young white guys in the film are not victims of political upheaval. They are a source of “dark energy.” And that energy is expressed in nu-metal, the aggressive music for teenagers that makes the crowd tear down fences, smash food tents and burn everything in sight.
Fans of Korn and Limp Bizkit don’t care about the ideals of the first Woodstock, and when Wyclef Jean plays the American anthem on guitar, few in the audience relate it to Jimi Hendrix’s historic performance at the 1969 festival. Nu-metal has displaced even Nirvana and Pearl Jam from the generation’s top likes. The music of the Woodstock 99 headliners is, as the film suggests, “savage music.” It also includes Kid Rock, the white rapper strutting around the stage in an expensive white coat while the audience goes crazy from the 38-degree heat.
I can’t recall another film in which an entire musical style is actually accused of “incitement” in the most heinous way possible. It is very much like the style of Soviet propaganda that stigmatized “dung beetles”.
More screen time is devoted only to the sexual aggression of the “white guys” directed at the women who came to the festival. “Show me your boobs!” – according to the film, that was one of the slogans of the festival. There are indeed plenty of topless female viewers on screen, but from the point of view of the authors, the women closer to the finale were literally victims. And John Sher, who claims that if you walk around a field full of 20-year-old guys naked for three days, there’s a risk of getting in trouble, looks like a nasty sexist objectifying women.
It’s worth noting that Michael Lang had planned a festival to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Woodstock in 2019, but didn’t pull it off organizationally or economically. That said, the Coachella festival, which also appears in Price’s film, is doing remarkably well – as a positive image of an event with the right percentage of black artists, an event full of awareness, tolerance and empathy. Sometimes it even seems that “Woodstock 99” was filmed on purpose to erase the tale of the good and peaceful “Woodstock” from the minds of a generation. I guess it really wasn’t. But it was a beautiful fairy tale.