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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3851 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 19, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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In 2021 through 2022, why did Netflix, Rolling Stone and every major media company make a giant coordinated push to portray the 1999 Woodstock festival as the worst thing that’s happened since the Tiananmen Square massacre? It seems like such an obscure event to signal boost, and I don’t see any obvious culture war angle.

I can see that you already received multiple responses, so I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned the legacy of the Nu metal genre as a factor. The view that it was all basically a directionless, destructive and embarassing outburst of American suburban middle-class White male rage and toxicity was probably a view shared by hardliner feminists from the beginning, but it wasn't adopted into mainstream culture roughly until 2021.

It's just the Grindhouse and Mockbuster traditions of different studios putting out content on the same topic around the same time to take advantage of each other's marketing budgets. Back in the old days of the studio system, when Cecil b Demille style historical dramas were the blockbusters of the time, you'd have these minor studios that would get wind of a big movie about Greece or Egypt and pop out a cheap quick movie about Greece or Egypt, and count on audience confusion to lead some people to go see their movie thinking it was the one they had heard so much about.

Netflix and Amazon prime released documentary series on the Twin Flames cult around the same time for the same reason. Or the movies Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, which came out in 2011 with identical premises. Audiences see marketing about the one product and are curious, so consume the other product. Writers read one article and boom half their research is done right off the bat, add a twist or a new angle and it's done. Content created.

One of the positive feedback loops of diversity politics is the acceptance of "How did [event] impact [group]" as publishable material in media and academics. Writing a new analysis of the tactics of the Peninsular Campaign is hard, writing a new analysis of how the Peninsular Campaign impacted women and minorities is easier.

Because many of their reporters would be elder millennials, ie. would have been in their teens when 1999 Woodstock actually happened, and as such found it a memorable enough event, symbolic of the perceived nadir of the state of music back then (among the sort of proto-hipster, "I only listen to older music" style teens that would later presumably become Rolling Stone writers or Netflix tastemakers)?

the perceived nadir of the state of music back then

I suppose this means "completely commercialized pop music marketed to angry white guys".

It's about the additive effect of multiple culture war angles:

  1. Corporations are greedy and bad. The concert organizers didn't think through a lot of basic logistics and pretty much just sold tickets for attendance and not much else. This led to;
  2. Price gouging for basics (most notoriously, water). This led to;
  3. Pissed off people being pissed off without water. This was abetted by some of the more popular music of the time (Nu Metal) acting as an accelerant to the mood in the crowd. This led to;
  4. SA and Rape of female concert go'ers.

All of this was on top of;

  1. The name and symbolism of "Woodstock." The original Woodstock in 1969 held a place of amazingly high esteem in multiple generations of American popular culture. It was the Zenith of the counter-culture and Youths being Youths in the 1960s. It like, ended the Vietnam war, maaaan. So, to have it's directly sequel (actually there was one before in 1993, but whatever) turn into a literal orgy of SA and arson with some corporate greed overhangs was pretty jarring.

Were all of the bad things that happened at Woodstock '99 unique to it and no other large outdoor festivals? Obviously not. Were they an order of magnitude more extreme? I would also be doubtful. Were they more publicized? Absolutely. The original sinner here is actually MTV (specifically MTV news) who aped the Woodstock chaos non-stop for several weeks after and, I think, would occasionally do retrospectives on it or otherwise weave it into their programming even years on.

Now, as for the timing over the past couple of years, that I do not know. Maybe part of it were the deaths at Astroworld (with Travis Scott) serving as a memory refresher? That's just off the top of my head.

Are there any Mottizens who are regular or semi-regular festival goers? I most certainly am not, but would be very interested into what the median level of price gouging / blind eye to drug use / criminal activity / hostility and violence goes on at these kind of things.

Corporations are greedy and bad. The concert organizers didn't think through a lot of basic logistics and pretty much just sold tickets for attendance and not much else.

They also chose a venue (a defunct air force base) completely unsuited for such an event in the July heat (concrete surfaces everywhere and no shade anywhere, pretty much no foliage at all). Security was also wholly undermanned and undertrained.

Are there any Mottizens who are regular or semi-regular festival goers? I most certainly am not, but would be very interested into what the median level of price gouging / blind eye to drug use / criminal activity / hostility and violence goes on at these kind of things.

price gouging - Yes, but not for water. Water is free. I think this is a legal requirement these days where I live.

blind eye to drug use - Haha that's one way to put it! At many festivals the assumption is that the majority of attendees are high.

criminal activity - Drug related only

hostility and violence - Not at the festivals I attend.

I mean I get all the various reasons why they thought it was bad, some of them seem quite reasonable. But why did everyone get together and plan out a coordinated strategy for the role out of dozens of simultaneous hit pieces about how a relatively obscure music festival from the late 90s was bad bad BAD? I don’t even follow this stuff and I couldn’t escape the constant torrent of hate for Woodstock 99. It reeks of the kind of preplanning and agenda that you typically see for obviously political stories about geopolitics, and I don’t understand why they bothered and what the larger angle was.

To be fair, the level of vandalism that characterized the end of the festival was extreme and out of the ordinary. Also, MTV was huge back then, so the event received enormous publicity from the beginning.

I think it came off the back of Fyre Festival, the "worst music festival since Woodstock 99". Once everything that could be said about Fyre Festival had been said, there was still a market for festival schadenfreude so it was the obvious next choice.

Woodstock is not some "relatively obscure music festival", it was perhaps the most well known music festival in history. I'm not American, but everyone knew about Woodstock 99 - it was international news for weeks (both the hype and the fallout).

This kind of thing happens all the time with non-political things as well. I don't think there is any coordination, these people just move in the same circles, talk about generalised ideas together and then develop them independently.

Additionally, it someone sees something doing well they'll go around shoppong for some semi-finished production that they can rush to completion to get in on the craze.

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