Skin, Noise, and Shit
The wave of nostalgia currently being directed at that part of the population who came of age in the late-1990s and early-2000s was inevitable, and especially to be expected as they are cresting upon middle-age. That it is, quite unlike the brands of their Gen X and boomer predecessors, notably critical was perhaps less expected. But so far as I know it hasn’t been denied by the generation under scrutiny. The “elder millennials” have accepted that they abused Britney Spears, that they perpetuated a toxic perception of society by wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, that they did not do enough to curtail our gun culture in the wake of the school shootings they endured, that they generally watched regressive films and listened to abysmal music. An entire market has arisen around this idea that many mistakes had happened during the transition from Clinton to Bush II; and as far as the culture is concerned, all bystanders are guilty and no participant is unwilling.
The centerpiece of this relitigation was always going to be Woodstock ’99. And why not? If two documentaries seemed excessive for Fyre Fest, two documentaries for its more grotesque ancestor hardly seems enough. Its trashy, grimy context does not belie its operatic scope. And additional treasures, however amusing or disgusting or both, likely remain to be discovered. But critical nostalgia is every bit as limited as celebratory nostalgia. Correcting history as if history itself was a wound doesn’t do much to clarify those impulses that aren’t pushed along by historical forces or cultural trends. While the documentaries stop just short of placing blame on any one person involved, even when they point really hard at someone, I don’t mind going that extra mile, though by no means should that equate with rendering guilt, or that is it strictly limited to anyone directly involved. Facts are facts. It’s only a matter of the proper response to facts.
Woodstock ’99 was not the most significant event of the 1990s. It wasn’t even the most significant event of 1999. Though it provided striking images and opportunities for rhetorical hand-wringing as it hit the next-day news cycle, it could not equal the gravity of either the Columbine shootings that preceded it in April or the Seattle WTO riots that followed it in October. By the following year it was pure trivia. And yet it also laid dormant, as all traumas do, for nearly two decades until a trigger event (the Fyre Festival) made us 15 again, watching Kurt Loder and Serena Altschul gaze grimly upon ever-multiplying lakes of fire in the sea of bodies on that dismal, unbearably hot night in July.
Woodstock ’99 was something that caught people off guard in the immediate moment. In a time and place of relative economic abundance and minimal prospect of protracted war, when issues of supply chain disruption, plague, and techno atomism were all but unthinkable, nothing could have been more incompatible with the national mood than the total destruction and virtual lawlessness that ended the third and final Woodstock. It was very easy to look upon the smoldering husks of exploded trailers, the flipped cars, the vast stretches of trash and human waste, and the remains of raided ATMs in mortified astonishment and fuming indignation. There is at its heart a kind of psychic appeal, as though it was a culmination toward something in the final year of the millennium and in the waining days of America’s vacation from history. It was fair, in that mood, to go out like hooded vigilante in search of blame. And everyone had their favorite scapegoat: the artists, the organizers, and the audience.
Blaming the artist was actually a very popular reflex in 1999. It attended the Columbine shootings when the media had erroneously linked the shooters to the “trench coat mafia” and their industrial rock tastes. Marilyn Manson was condemned by congressmen. KMFDM shirts were blacked out. (Certainly the one I bought in the aftermath was.) This carried over into Woodstock ’99 which, in a bid for both relevance and maximum ROI, dipped heavily into the glut of nü metal and related rock radio acts. The Offspring, Korn, and Bush played on Friday. Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, and Metallica played on Saturday. Limp Bizkit in particular were at their career peak, they were inescapable if you watched MTV or listened to KROQ enough. Their set reflected this momentum with Fred Durst working the 250,000-strong crowd into a frenzy like a Junior Varsity carnival barker, to the point that they ripped plywood off of a sound tower and crowd-surfed on it. Though it hardly constituted a “riot,” at least compared to the following night, Durst’s populist bluster was a magnet for critics.
The recent documentaries on the festival, on HBO and Netflix, are less eager to make that claim. In part because it’s not a good look, but also because there’s plenty of evidence to counter this. Many of the nü metal acts had played together on the Family Values tour around the same time, the only hiccup of which I’m aware of was Rammstein being arrested in Boston for being German lewd and lascivious behavior. And while those bands still (amazingly) make for good copy, they represented only a fraction of the otherwise eclectic roster, which included DMX, Dave Matthews Band, Los Lobos, and The Tragically Hip. Moreover, the actual bonfires that preceded the riots happened in the crowd of the comparably mellower Red Hot Chili Peppers, while the concurrent Megadeth set on the lesser stage was more or less unperturbed.
The organizers are the easier culprits, specifically the figureheads Michael Lang and John Scher, who represent the different expressions of the baby boomers’ Janus-faced personality. Lang, the 1969 organizer, beamed with idealism and naivety about rock n’ roll’s power to change the world. Scher countered Lang with his pragmatism, cynicism, and unwavering commitment to making a profit. Most of the literal and figurative accelerants of the festival’s breakdown derive in some way from decisions they made. For instance, Lang wanted a humane, relatively non-imposing security staff, which Scher assembled from anyone he could find regardless of experience and with a loose certification process. Couple that with the tarmac-laden airbase venue, the subcontracted amenities, the rupturing toilets, and the contaminated water, and the triple-digit heat, these accumulated undertakings created an environment that was exorbitantly expensive, unsanitary to a level unprecedented by first-world standards, and bound by few if any rules.
But it was the audience who were let free. And it was the audience who made all the damage, which far exceeded even reasonable riot expectations. Woodstock ’99 attendees have been subject to as much diagnosis as blame. They were overcome with an End of History-style malaise, with no great cause to direct their immense energy, while at the same time they were exhausted, physically and mentally, by the rigors of the festival. Scher keeps referring to “knuckleheads” who are afraid of adulthood egging on the crowd to greater extremes. Lang was disappointed that the kids were not “able to embrace the social issues of the day” he handpicked for them (gun violence). Today the assessment only complicates. Not many are interested in letting the predominantly white male crowd off the hook for “shifting” the festival’s “vibe” a certain way. But the extreme conditions, the poor or pricey amenities, and the almost passing concern for safety managed to render undomesticated pretty much anyone unwise enough to stay the full three days.
Apportioning blame only matters if you can convincingly show that the disaster in question was anomalous. Perhaps there is a version of Woodstock ’99 that doesn’t have a body count or go down in literal flames. But much happening around it would have to be different in order for that to be the case. Vast environmental factors far outside the festival grounds were at work in order to assure that Woodstock ’99 both existed and took a certain course. It would be melodramatic to say that events and attitudes over four decades in advance had “led up to” the festival; rather it is better to say that the festival was the most logical outcome of those attitudes. It is like the fiery period of a run-on sentence proclaiming the death of hypocrisy.
Of all the projects undertaken by American postwar liberalism, ending hypocrisy was the most sweeping and perhaps the most ambitious. It demanded nothing short of the reform of the national personality and it required a generation of pioneers bold enough to claim that that national personality was far removed in deed from its professed principles. These pioneers saw the American spirit fall from its moral high ground into a pit of decorum that enabled both repression and extreme violence. Those pioneers are made up of several civil libertarian heroes and martyrs: Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce, Abby Hoffman, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Gloria Steinem, and so on. They believed that a society that was more honest about its baser impulses (which, of course, were natural, not base) would in turn be freer, happier, more just, and more at peace with itself. Their approach was negative, using shock tactics to avert the United States from the fate that befell the United Kingdom a century earlier. It was the subsequent generation, Michael Lang included, for whom ending hypocrisy became a creative endeavor. With the repressive neo-Victorian decorum safely dispatched, in came the liberating neo-Romantic authenticity.
One of the repeat criticisms of Woodstock ’99 is how far removed its spirit was from the original festival. Obviously because the musical environment had widened significantly in that 30-year span. Punk broke and was broken; Spin put Limp Bizkit on its August 1999 cover and Kid Rock the following October. To add to that, Scher spared no effort to cover the military-industrial wreckage in corporate logos. And the rising generation, a cross-section of later Gen X and early millennials, was coming of age in a different world, in which boomers were the people in power, no one was getting drafted, and the fervor for revolution was as low as it could possibly get. Performers made explicit references to the 1969 festival during their sets. Wyclef Jean performed the “Star-Spangled Banner” on his guitar à la Jimi Hendrix and set it on fire; Creed featured Robby Krieger of The Doors. Though it is assumed that these references were lost on the audience. Fred Durst put it succinctly when he implored any nostalgists in the crowd to “take your Birkenstocks and stick them up your fuckin’ ass.”
In truth there were probably more nostalgists in the crowd than would be assumed. You don’t grow up with The Wonder Years and classic rock radio without developing a perfectly natural, if misguided, wistfulness for a fake past. And the boomer backlash would not crest for another decade, when it was clear to us that they didn’t ultimately have our best interest at heart. But nostalgia is not the same thing as a spirit, which carried over across those three decades with no degradation, all it needed to do was assimilate.
Michael Lang could bemoan how the young people had not lived up to his own expectations after they destroyed everything he’d built. But he could not, at the same time, have said that he failed to accomplish the broader goal. The audience, whether they realized it or not, had perpetuated the values set forth by the generation of the original festival. They had sought to participate in a free, uninhibited communal experience. And they did. The 1999 attendees rejected hypocrisy and repression as their predecessors had done. And they exerted radical candor in doing so. They were several measures more aggressive in its expression, of course. They were vulgar, nihilistic, willfully stupid, and cruel to one another. But they never lied to themselves in the course of doing so. They were entirely without shame, reservations, or anxiety. There was no past they cared to pay mind to more than they had to, nor was there much of a future. They were in the moment. The moment was awash in skin, noise, and shit.
The documentaries that make this discussion possible have come out in a time that is fraught with anxiety and filled with people almost too ashamed to function and who have, at best, a clinical attitude toward skin and shit. Everything depicted is cast in an unfriendly light. What is actually to be done with this understanding is left unsaid, though perhaps not unthought.
If the late-1990s were marked by a higher measure of candor than usual, that candor did not automatically engender those other outcomes the pioneers of destruction thought were necessary to carry society forward. It did not make people freer, or it did not distribute that freedom equally. It did not make them better citizens; a cheapness of morals had out-priced respect and peace leaving only tolerance and indifference within range of affordability. Only honesty was absolutely free; and by simply being honest, you could do whatever you want and everyone would have to tolerate what you did. Rather than propel society to new heights, it put it in a holding pattern. Late-1990s America was the most boring dystopia until the crowd at Woodstock ’99 took a torch to it. But once creators fall back into destruction, the creation phase reboots.
The purest conservatism is always accidental, always innate, and morally uncomplicated. Though both the documentaries, with different levels of emphasis, plead for progress and equity in the face of the many wrongs committed at the festival, there is just underneath them a humming sort of desire for a specially skewed, manners-based conservatism. There is the tacit admission that the war against hypocrisy had taken too great a toll on the citizenry. Engorged on authenticity, they became somewhat ugly, they reverted to adolescence, they ate ice cream and Fruit Loops for breakfast. Honesty is actually pretty gross. Soon you come around to Jonathan Swift in one of his more earnest moments, promoting, without success, the moral reform of his own age:
[U]nless it should be thought, that making religion a necessary step to interest and favour might increase hypocrisy among us: and I readily believe it would. But if one in twenty should be brought over to true piety by this, or the like methods, and the other nineteen be only hypocrites, the advantage would still be great. Besides, hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice; it wears the livery of religion; it acknowledges her authority, and is cautious of giving scandal.
Dishonesty preserves civilization and promotes the good. Honesty may be morally correct and may make you feel good; but it only gives you license to behave worse.
This civic dishonesty could not be called “conservatism.” Not simply because its proponents are put off by conservatism proper but because the main current of that conservatism is closer to Woodstock ’99, having embraced a kind of combative vulgarity that sees manners as not being sufficiently based. The only difference is that they do not appear to need $4 bottles of water to burn things down if it came to that.
Woodstock ’99 was the final collapse of the Millsian “experiment in living.” People in 2022 are too burnt out to want to be free. They will willfully give any freedom they have to the lowest bidder. No one knows for certain what they want; or they will not admit what they want. Secretly desiring order, they will settle for the perception of order, a lazy, suburban kind of order that puts the Leviathan in a Fred Rogers cardigan.
At least the shit will stay where it is supposed to stay, and only the best Woodstock ’99 would be possible: one that never happens.