All these old hippies cared about was profit.īut the suggestion from one then-young organiser was that someone should have taken a closer look at the lineup seems misplaced. He and others had little appreciation of the rage that would be unleashed from the main stage. Bands were booked based on their popularity alone, seemingly without chief organiser Michael Lang listening to any of their music - you’d think he’d pick a whole different set of headliners if he really wanted to promote peace and love. In true hippie fashion, however, the festival was organised by people with very little understanding of the material and affective conditions of the new present. On the whole, the documentary spends a lot of time focussing on the naivety of the festival’s original organisers, who supposedly hoped to rekindle the “Peace, Love and Understanding” of Woodstock’s near-mythological 1969 event. Jonathan Davis from Korn is perhaps the only nu-metal band member to offer their reflections instead we hear from Jewel and the lead singer of Bush (who, I must admit, I don’t remember at all and who hardly seem representative of that cultural moment). But the silence from many of those directly involved is deafening. How each group remembers the event is telling. The Woodstock ’99 documentary is made up of interviews with organisers, attendees, press, and some musicians (but far fewer than you’d expect). Nu-metal is still fascinating for this reason, even if some of it hasn’t aged too well, precisely because it had a peculiar and quintessentially American melting-pot vibe, crossing lines between pop punk, hip hop, metal, grunge, drum ‘n’ bass… Just about every new music genre of the last two decades was thrown into its particle accelerator, giving rise to a mutant amalgam of sounds as the heat was turned up on popular culture by the anxiety of an unknowable future beyond Y2K. It was a truly postmodern music genre in that regard, with different styles (and even emotional responses) able to exist together, seemingly without tension, making it a genre that seemingly had something for everyone. (My babysitter - my best friend’s old sister - who I can barely imagine as a grungy nu-metal kid now, later played me Limp Bizkit on my parent’s hi-fi, and from that moment I was obsessed with them until at least 2004, when nu-metal was overtaken in the popular consciousness, in the UK at least, by a disparate mix of indie, grime, freak folk and dubstep.)īut around the turn of the millennium, prior to this subcultural fragmentation, it is undeniable that nu-metal captured the zeitgeist and imagination of multiple, interlaced generations and demographics. Everyone liked it, everyone listened to it, no matter their background or usual tastes. The rage on display was like a sonic peepshow: transgressive, taboo and perverse, but still abundantly accessible to anyone with a bit of pocket money. My own first encounter with that sound, for instance, was in the playground at primary school, as everyone gathered round one kid’s Walkman to take turns listening to the sounds emanating from their tinny headphones. Though I was admittedly quite young in 1999, I have no memory of an “In Bloom” of the nu-metal era, pouring scorn on a frat boy rage slowly gentrifying the discontent of the social underdog. Mainstream success, of course, trumped tribal allegiances at that time. The video’s inspired focus on the crowd, moshing out in an oddly clinical and affectless space, reveals their fans to be a racially diverse mix of bedroom-dwelling suburban metal kids and social outcasts kids who would no doubt be actively bullied by the Woodstock frat contingents.īut nu-metal was so huge that its energies were taken up by many different social groups. In the documentary, much of the blame for the rioting that closed out the festival, and the crimes reported throughout its duration, is placed on the shoulders of American frat boys, who bought into the fury of a subculture that I would hardly associated with preppy kids who managed to go to college.Ī year later, the video for Papa Roach’s 2000 hit single “Last Resort” offered a more accurate view - to my mind, anyway - of who this music was most associated with. The nu-metal moment was bizarre in its promiscuity. It was a pivotal cultural moment for me growing up, as a nu-metal kid, the energy from which was dissolved with a frightening speed. Limp Bizkit’s performance of “Break Stuff”, and all the horror stories that emerged from the crowd, are seared into my memory from that time. Discussing it with some friends the other day, some of whom are only a few years younger than me, I was amazed they’d never heard about it before watching the mini-series for themselves. The new fascination with Woodstock ’99, following the release of a new Netflix documentary series, is so surreal to me.
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