Ty Watches "Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage"

Last night I watched the new HBO documentary "Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage". I have some thoughts.

I watched a few of the trailers before it was released and was interested in watching based on those. Then I saw some of the people being interviewed and was even more inclined to watch. But then I saw Bill Simmons and his company The Ringer were the producers and that kind of threw me off. I do not like Bill Simmons, I think The Ringer is a toxic workplace and it hires toxic men to work there. I am not a fan. In spite of all that, I still watched the movie.

I was 17 when this festival happened, I remembered it being a trainwreck and I have always wanted to watch a documentary that talked about how bad it truly was for everyone involved. And the movie starts out fine. It is your typical doc, but they had some neat little music cues and I even learned some things I did not know about the original Woodstock. I was interested for sure. And when they got into the actual festival, doing stuff like showing the bands perform, showing the destruction early on, showing the heat and the lack of food and water, it all kept my attention. It was as bad as I remembered hearing. To see the stuff some of these people did in the first two days was disgusting. The amount of nudity was gratuitous. I'm no prude, but this was too much. The majority of the bands were trash. We are talking Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Korn, Moby, bands and artists like that that I never listened to. And when they got to some good bands, or even bands I listened to back then, they barely showed them. There was one clip of Wyclef Jean, who I used to love. I barely heard any of Rage perform. Jewel didn't even get her singing voice in the movie. Tragically Hip was just shown performing. It was a drag. This was where my taste for the movie started to wane. Between the crazy amount of male and female nudity and the bad music, I was kind of bored.

Then they started to show and talk about how the attendees started to trash the place. This made my stomach turn. Seeing all the trash littered everywhere was vile. When they talked about the septic tanks not working and the people trashing the porta potties, I literally got sick to my stomach. I was eating some ice cream at the time and I had to put it down when the festival goers started to slide and play in the sewage. It was awful. From there the movie just dove into a milquetoast retelling of Woodstock 99. They showed the rioting, talked about the massive amounts of unreported sexual assaults, talked about some of the attendees that died, showed the promoters being total assholes, but none of it felt resolved while I was watching. It was talked about and then moved on from. It felt kind of unfinished. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why these white privileged dickheads did the horrific things that they did. Why did they feel fine doing this stuff? Why were they not afraid? One of the festival goers said that had this been a hip hop festival he thinks the police would have treated them differently. They could have talked about that for so much longer. They didn't even touch on it except for the one quote. I guess I just wanted them to dig a bit deeper into the real seediness of this whole ordeal.

All in all the documentary was okay but not without its flaws. I think my generation probably wanted to see a bit more, but maybe younger people, the Coachella and Lollapalooza crowds nowadays will see this movie differently. The movie was just fine. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. I will not watch it again, but I do not feel like I wasted my time watching it now. It was a strong C movie for me.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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