Tell me you've never seen Fight Club without telling me you've never seen Fight Club
Some thoughts on the new Woodstock '99 doc on Netflix
There’s a new Netflix documentary miniseries out, Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, that attempts over three episodes to get to the bottom of how a music festival intended to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Three Days of Peace & Music descended into something out of Apocalypse Now.1
There’s a tendency to connect this disaster to some grand commentary on the changing tides of society, as if this was the first time a music festival ever descended into appalling violence (look up Altamont, kiddos). I think there’s a simpler explanation for what happened.
The organizers invited mayhem at every corner and then expected the mayhem to have manners. The very definition of “irony” is Fred Durst performing a song called “Break Stuff” at a commercial event, in front of a crowd that’s been squeezed out of every nickel and hacked off from basic amenities like water, shade, and toilets. Broken windows theory took over really quickly and then escalated catastrophically out of control.
Anyways, at the beginning of the first episode, the doc attempts to set the tone by talking about some of the things contributing to the testosteroned-up macho male culture at the time. Among the influences cited is the movie Fight Club, the cult classic antihero film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
That’s a bizarre connection to make.
For one, the movie didn’t come out until almost three months after this festival ended.
For another, the author of the book, Chuck Palahniuk, was a pretty obscure unknown, at least in pop culture, until the movie came out. Famously, he only got a $6,000 advance for the book, which was published in 1996. When the movie started filming, Palahniuk still worked at a truck manufacturing plant. He’s pretty open about all this.
Which is all to say, it’s not like legions of frat guys were sitting around reading the book for summers leading up to Woodstock ’99. Nobody I know had ever heard of the book until the movie came out. The timing of Palahniuk’s meteoric rise reflects this.
Finally, the movie itself is a commentary on a lot of societal issues, but above all else, it’s really a dark satire on consumerism. And in turn, a commentary against the very culture these rioting concertgoers were said to embody.
Nothing about this makes sense. Palahniuk responded on his own Substack:
I mean really, tell me you never watched Fight Club without telling me you never watched Fight Club.
A few other thoughts about Trainwreck…
Would you rather have a loss leader or a lawsuit?
That’s what I’d ask anyone, rhetorically, who watches this doc and then wants to go out and act on a big idea.
In the Fyre Fest documentaries that competed for our attention during the early days of COVID-19, we were reminded that the original Woodstock was a chaotic logistical nightmare. History’s been quite kind to an event that lost millions of dollars at the time. But they eventually broke even years later in merchandise and record sales. Hell, merchandise sales are still going strong 50 years later, fueled in part by its legacy as arguably the most culturally significant music festival of all time.
As for Woodstock ’99? Reports at the time estimated ticket sales in the neighborhood of $60 million, and at least one outlet reported an operating budget of $38 million. That seems cheap, even by 1990’s standards, for an event of that magnitude, especially considering how many corners were cut on essential things like security and sanitation.
Which event would you rather own? No question, right?
And here’s the thing: Some of the music at Woodstock ‘99 was legitimately awesome. DMX’s set still makes your hair stick up on end. Heck, a few years ago I was at a New Year’s Eve party where someone pulled up Oleander’s set on YouTube — I kid you not, Oleander — and half the room just sat there mesmerized.
But those are far from the first things anyone will ever remember. There is no longtail with Woodstock ‘99, other than a new documentary every few years to remind you how horribly it was run.
Festival organizers got what they wanted in the short term. But the long-term consequences have been devastating to this day, because there will never be another Woodstock, and nobody’s buying keepsakes to remind them of the time they survived one of the most infamous shitshows in modern American music.
John Scher should stop giving interviews
We’re now in a society that not only wants to be entitled to its own opinions but its own facts too. Scher, one of the lead promoters behind this event, teeters that line.
In last year’s HBO documentary on this debacle, Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love and Rage, Scher does himself no favors with self-own after self-own — including, most notably, blaming the women themselves for the sexual assaults.
I don’t know if the Scher interview footage in Trainwreck was shot before or after the HBO doc, but he doesn’t make himself look any better. More than two decades after the event, he’s only doubling down on his delusions.
Among all the looney quotes from Scher, this one is the most diabolical:
Woodstock was like a small city, you know? All things considered, I’d say that there would probably be as many or more rapes in any sized city of that… but it wasn’t anything that gained enough momentum so that it caused any on-site issues, other than, of course, the women it happened to.
Are you kidding me?!?
Question for Mr. Scher — do you have any daughters? I have two, and I would not let them anywhere near you.
Scher clearly will never have any regrets about what happened. And every time he opens his mouth, he finds a new way to embarrass himself. Somebody needs to step in here and just cut him off from the press.
This was the beginning of the end of MTV as a music thought leader
Younger generations must look back on the 90’s and think it’s utterly preposterous that you had to spend millions of dollars making a music video just to sell a record.
But by Woodstock ’99, the music industry’s business model was rapidly changing with the advent of MP3’s. Listeners were discovering new music on their own, or from their peers, without the need for curation from radio or music videos. For MTV, that meant a hard pivot to something consistent and reliable: assembly line teeny-bopper music that, love it or hate it, whipped teenagers into a frenzy.
Labels were also getting smarter, and starting to charge MTV more dollars to play their content. That in turn meant MTV had to start coming up with more original programming to keep costs under control, which led to a tidal wave of reality shows throughout the 2000s.2
This got overlooked at the time, but seeing fans pelt MTV’s booth with debris throughout the weekend should have been a signal that this was the beginning of the end of “Music Television” as we knew it. Real music fans had had enough of their bullshit and were letting them have it. The network that once turned the world on to Nirvana had sold out and become unrecognizable.
A year after Woodstock ’99, Radiohead’s Kid A debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 despite not releasing any singles or producing any music videos. It sold more copies on its first day of release than the next 10 best first-day sellers of the year combined. And again, no singles to promote, no videos to push to MTV, no nothing. Hundreds of artists must have seen this and thought, “Why are we wasting all this time and energy on some goofy video?”
Am I wrong? Tell me something, what influences your listening habits today on Spotify? The music or the video?
Anthony Kiedis’ words, not mine.
For those of you who read the headline and immediately thought, wait wait wait, but Jersey Shore, Laguna Beach, Jackass…. you’re making my point.