Culture Watch—Forever Woodstock - problems of Woodstock '99 festival show harmful spirit of Woodstock '69 - Brief Article

National Review, August 30, 1999

So Woodstock '99 came off rather . . . badly. Riotous patrons toppled sound towers, used candles handed out by a group called Pax to set bonfires of litter, jumped naked through the flames, and staged impromptu stripteases and orgies, sometimes egged on by leering state troopers. The promoters were evidently uninterested in maintaining order, and the police took an hour and a half to move in.

Feminist rock critics, reacting to the general rut, which included several alleged rapes, wondered how the rock scene could have ratcheted backwards. After a wave of women rock stars, appropriating male poses and attitudes and encouraging a generation of supposedly more self- assertive fans, here were girls, back in the role of objects.

Ladies, ladies, please. If rock is about anything, it is about lust and indiscipline. When you simultaneously play to the hormones and remove restraints, bacchanalia will ensue-and until young men and women exchange size and muscle mass, women had better watch out. A few passing fads will not ameliorate the blunt calculus of nature, once everything has been reduced to it.

The most interesting thing about the debacle was the surprise it caused. In Sixties mythology, reinforced by decades of nostalgia, Woodstock marked another summer of love; the Postal Service even plans to commemorate it with a stamp. Not until the Altamont festival in 1970, when the Hell's Angels killed a boisterous fan while the Rolling Stones played on, did the force show its dark side. This was nonsense. Woodstock was marked by squalor, dehydration, and overdoses of drugs (and spurious drugs, sold by crooked dealers). The grim scene was glossed over, not just by the teenage baby boomers who attended, but by their elders. The media played up the luscious hippie chicks, not the filth. In the high days of the Sixties, nakedness was a symbol of authenticity. Even as we shucked our clothes, we would show our true feelings and our real selves. But wisely chosen roles, performances, and routines-what Burke called "the decent drapery of life"-are the means by which we develop any character worth having. The only virtue of Woodstock '99 is in showing how harmful the spirit of Woodstock '69 always was.