The last time I sped through two docs about the same thing this eagerly was Netflix and Hulu’s competing Fyre Fest documentaries, so maybe there’s just something endlessly intriguing about watching music festival-goers suffer, cocky festival organizers devoured by their own hubris. And sure, maybe there’s the nostalgia factor. I was 18 when Woodstock ’99 happened, so the time period is etched indelibly in my mind. It’s always luridly fascinating to relive those days of bare breasts, baggy pants, and ICE spiker, when the biggest political issue on most young white kids’ minds was how MTV sucks now and your moms was always trying to tell you what to do.
Yet there’s more to Clusterf**k‘s appeal than simple nostalgia. The music and fashion is safely anachronistic, but the event itself, the way it plays out and is eventually covered, feels like a cultural harbinger. It feels like a coming out party for a certain brand of feckless post-counterculture liberal that’s still with us today. These eternally optimistic yet clueless ex-hippies transform seamlessly into “the man” without even realizing it. Woodstock ’99 feels like a transitional moment, perhaps the first time that people of my generation realized that the counterculture we’d been raised to worship had become the culture, and they were hopelessly out of touch. That they’d keep trying to recycle their youth for new generations without acknowledging that the material conditions that produced it had changed.
Woodstock ’99 was an attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69, when four 20-somethings organized one of the touchstone cultural events of the sixties. 30 years later, some of the same people, notably original Woodstock organizer Michael Lang, tried to do the same thing. Only instead of putting on a cool free party featuring bands they liked for their friends, they’d sell it to their children’s generation, using all the free love imagery that had been floating in the cultural ether for the previous 30 years.
It wouldn’t feel so relevant if the people who ran Woodstock ’99 didn’t seem so cut from the same Kente cloth as the people currently running the country. Lang died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma three months after shooting his interview. John Scher (whose name is conveniently scrubbed from the Woodstock ’99 Wikipedia page, and Wikipedia in general, which must’ve cost a pretty penny — and didn’t work that well considering most of his other search results are news articles about him blaming women for their own sexual assault) is still alive (he’s about 71, based on this Billboard article) and still working. Both are younger than both Joe Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82), not to mention half the congressional leadership.
It’s not to say that everyone from the same generation is exactly the same (which by implication would make me responsible for the popularity of Limp Bizkit, a band that once released an album called “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water”), but it is hard not to see echoes of that confused hippie lady desperately trying to hand out trash bags in every dire-sounding fundraising email from the DNC. “Won’t you please help us clean up this mess we created?? All we need is a bit more of your money!”
It’s hard not to see a little of Joe Biden in the footage of John Scher and Michael Lang’s increasingly out-of-touch press conferences, insisting that everything is okay, and even if it isn’t it definitely isn’t their fault. The Chapo Trap House boys once described Joe Biden as “the guy who tells you the ice cream machine is broken” and I haven’t been able to think of him any other way ever since. John Scher and Michael Lang were early harbingers of this, the guys who smile and say the shitters are full but they’re working real hard on it. What was Bill Clinton’s famous catchphrase? “I feel your pain.”
These are all people who have clearly sold out their peace and love and flower power values for a comfortable position in society long ago, but if you point out their hypocrisy in any of this or their basic incompetence in any way, it’s because you’re too selfish or irresponsible. The youths are too entitled! They can’t even appreciate being charged for things we got for free!
It’s not so much their hypocrisy or their incompetence that rankles; my own generation is clearly capable of same, as the aforementioned Fyre Fest example could attest. It’s the refusal to relinquish the cultural conversation, the refusal to stop insisting. Nancy Pelosi is in her eighties and has tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars to her name, depending on who you ask. Dianne Feinstein, widely whispered to be suffering from dementia, is almost 90 and even richer. Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ bete noire, is 74 and also a millionaire. Donald Trump looks like this now.
Nothing against older folks, I hope to become one myself some day. But the majority of the political leadership on both sides is well past the age when we would start to consider them incompetent for other jobs. They could just ride off into the sunset for comfortable retirements, on dopily named yachts eating fancy ice creams from custom fridges, and everyone would be happy for them. And yet they don’t. It seems that they can’t manage the one act even Limp Bizkit was ultimately capable of: leaving the stage.
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