![]() Problem was, the acts weren’t Creedence Clearwater Revival or Jimi Hendrix: they were Korn and ICP and Kid Rock. And in the middle of it all, there was Woodstock ’99, naively trying to evoke the nostalgia of the ’60s event to a generation who knew nothing.Īsk Lang, or fest promoter John Scher (who comes off as defensive and victim-blamey in both past and present), and they were trying to do a contemporary version of the nirvana they felt had happened in ’69. It was the age of Y2K, when Napster was king and MTV moved from grunge to boy bands. Right from the get-go, Price makes his thesis clear, situating the festival in the end-of-history milieu of the ’90s. Instead, director Garret Price ( Love, Antosha) goes old-school with his forensic approach to dissecting the fest, cobbling together an engrossing mixture of archival footage, talking-head interviews, and re-enacted journal entries from one fateful attendee to chart the slow-moving train wreck the fest turned out to be. The difference was, of course, we couldn’t watch it unfold in real time - it was an age before smartphones and social media, where we got our music news from MTV rather than Twitter. Isn’t It Ironic? While the Fyre Festival was infamous for its crowded venue, poor infrastructure, and slowly devolving sense of social order, Woodstock ’99 feels like the OG version of that kind of entertainment trainwreck. It was a social experiment gone horribly wrong, Lord of the Flies set to aggressive bursts of rap-rock. Throngs of shirtless festivalgoers eventually devolved into looting, property destruction, and even sexual assault. Rather than good vibes and great oldies, though, Lang shot straight for the white-boy demographic, getting the biggest hip-hop nu-metal, and rap-rock acts of the time (Korn, Metallica, Kid Rock, Rage Against the Machine) together for a three-day weekend of rock, revelry, and fun.īut by the time Sunday rolled around, Woodstock ’99 became a litmus test for how well late ’90s American culture could handle the kind of idealized bacchanal the fest’s reputation promised. In an attempt to recapture that magic (the kind that, admittedly, comes through rose-colored glasses), co-founder Michael Lang set up another fest in upstate New York in 1999. The Pitch: The original 1969 Woodstock has a deeply romanticized place in the cultural consciousness - the ultimate fairyland of peace, love and understanding, where some of the best rock and folk artists gathered for a once-in-a-lifetime expression of the peacenik hippie ethos. ![]()
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