Woodstock 99: Peace Love and Rage

I watched Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 first and I loved it so I discovered HBO has made a similar documentary. I was disappointed, the Netflix one was much better, go watch that instead.

I mean white boys.

Jesus, this documentary doesn't know what it wants to say. On one hand it seems to portray '69 and '94 as utopia. On the other, it briefly recognizes '69 was NOT anything like utopia. What problems were grunge bands fighting against? That was a very nihilistic genre, imho. Also, grunge didn't die with Kurt. Pearl Jam still had 3 great albums to come (vitology, no code, yield) and several ok albums.

The WATER was the reason for the riot and frankly, they were somewhat justified.

Nu Metal as a genre was sort of a lower middle class "white trash" form of hip hop. The 90s were the era of NAFTA and major destruction of the unions. These guys had plenty to be angry about.

There's plenty of archival footage in this doc itself that can tell objectively the horror of what happened. But then there is plenty of pretentious, preachy and warped cultural 'analysis' of the end of the 90's by a triumvirate assembled to shift the blame on the omnipresent angry white man. This is 2020s media at its worst.

I was looking forward to this documentary, having previously studied Event Management and being a regular attendee of music festivals.

Whilst it was really interesting to see so much footage from this infamous event, the documentary crew sadly spent less time focusing on the fact that terrible organisation and conditions were the clear catalysts for the chaos that occurred, and instead were too busy giving air time to washed up DJs like Moby who just wanted to blame it all on Limp Bizkit and white dudes.

Odd that no other metal festivals of that era turned out the same way if it's just white nu-metal fans who were to blame. There were some absolutely horrible people in that crowd, without a doubt, but this documentary would've benefitted on diving deeper into mob mentality and conditioning rather than just trying s desperately to pin it on artists and their fans.

As someone that attended Woodstock 99 I can tell you it was a $hitshow. Most of what was portrayed in this documentary isn't to make some woke agenda to offend white dudes in 2021 cause this crap did happen so get over yourself. It was a disgusting trash dump, and women did get the worst of it. Sorry if that offends you but it was true. It's a story that needed to be told. It was a recipe for disaster and they should have known better.