Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Woodstock 99: Peace, Love And Rage’ on HBO Max, A Doc About The Fest That Became An Aggro Horror Show

Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage (HBO, HBO Max) is the first documentary to appear from Music Box, a film series executive produced by sports and media poobah Bill Simmons that’s slated to explore such topics as Alanis Morissette’s third album Jagged Little Pill, the lasting influence and polarizing presence of Kenny G, and the legacy of DMX. The debut film is an arresting look at the doomed music festival that screamed into the void of the new millennium.

WOODSTOCK 99: PEACE, LOVE, AND RAGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Emboldened by the scrubbed clean image of the original Woodstock Music Festival he staged in August 1969, and enabled by the relative success of Woodstock ’94, held to celebrate the original’s 25th anniversary, concert promoter Michael Lang and his partners envisioned Woodstock 99 as a hybrid of nostalgia trip and contemporary, MTV-aligned music festival. And so they secured the site, a decommissioned Air Force base in upstate New York that came complete with wide swaths of asphalt runway, vast aircraft hangars, and mil-spec security fencing. (The borders of the first two Woodstocks were famously porous.) They hired kids to paint miles of whimsical murals. And they booked a three-day lineup ripped from the charts of “Total Request Live,” a cross-section of largely aggro late-1990’s alt rock and nu-metal that included Kid Rock, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Bush, Godsmack, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica. (Only three female acts were booked for the main stages: Jewel, Sheryl Crow, and Alanis Morissette.) And when hundreds of thousands of people — many, many of them young white men — started showing up on an oppressively hot weekend in late July, security proved lax, water cost $4.00, sanitation systems imploded, and by Sunday night, bedlam had ensued. “Holy shit, it’s uh, it’s Apocalypse Now out there,” Anthony Kiedis remarked from the main stage as flames erupted from within the roiling masses. And RHCP launched into their cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” as Woodstock burned.

In interviews with organizers, artists, the media who were there, music journalists, and everyday attendees, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage re-tells the star-crossed story of the festival, and connects its end-of-the-century chaotic evil vibes to the damning effects of power structure arrogance, white male privilege, and contaminated groupthink. Director Garret Price gets a ton of mileage out of the available archival footage, everything from professionally shot crane cams and MTV broadcasts to tarmac-level home video and concertgoer interviews with roving film crews. The principal aim here is not to make a concert film. The performances, including also DMX, Live, Offspring, and Wyclef Jean, are often positioned as narrative hinges. “DMX’s performance at Woodstock was unparalleled,” says Tariq Trotter of the Roots, who also played the fest. But in the classic call-and-response of the incendiary MC’s “My Niggas,” New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris says the Black performer was essentially licensing the white crowd to say the N-word with him, an instance that certainly wasn’t common in the public spaces of 1999.

As infrastructure began to crumble and what music journalist Steven Hyden calls “the dark energy coming from young white males” started its dangerous, unchecked crest, Woodstock 99 stomped and stumbled toward what the writers and attendees interviewed agree was its inevitable zenith: a lawless field of wonton violence, rampant mysogyny and sexual assault, and a near total shift in power to the raging mob. “Anarchy,” writer Maureen Callahan calls it. “Straight Lord of the Flies out there,” an attendee recalls. And in the end, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage is more sickening horror show than concert documentary.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Speaking of arrogance, gatekeepers, and power structures, Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (Netflix) documents the disaster that was the supposed Instagram Influencer idyll of the 2017 Fyre Festival. 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything takes a similar tack to Woodstock 99 in its positioning of a set of events as emblematic of what came next. Asif Kapadia’s 2015 doc Amy asks probing questions about media influence, the corruption of fame, and souls caught in the middle. And, of course, you can’t really talk about concerts gone awry without mentioning the disaster at Altamont, as captured in Gimme Shelter.

Performance Worth Watching: Just as the attendees interviewed for Questlove’s recent Summer of Soul added the warmth and insight of their personal memories to his powerful doc, the regular folks and concertgoers who appear in Woodstock 99 often have the most to say about how it felt to be out there in the wilds of the fest.

Memorable Dialogue: Speaking about the ideological handover from Woodstock 99 to the first Coachella three months later, Steven Hyden emphasizes how some things haven’t changed, but instead mutated. “As Coachella progresses, and this is true of all the big festivals now, it’s pretty clear that the power dynamics that come into play haven’t really changed,” Hyden says. “It’s just that they’re cleaner. And if you want to assert your power, you just have to be a really wealthy person who can afford to be backstage and look at all the people out there who aren’t as lucky as you are. And then you’re going to be able to take photos of yourself and show the world that you are someone who literally has a badge on themselves that says ‘Very Important Person.'”

Sex and Skin: A scrawl on a pizza box, “Send tits & acid.” Footage of topless women on men’s shoulders, being grappled from all sides. The impossible normalizing of body paint as clothing. Woodstock 99 casts its gaze on the nudity at the festival, most of it female, in a manner to suggest the all-gone-wrongness of it all, but even this, two decades on, feels exploitative.

Our Take: “It’s time to reach deep down inside and take all that negative energy, and let that shit out of your fuckin’ system!” In the parlance of today, that quote, shouted from a stage, might be followed by an exhortation to lean into your Peloton workout, or expel the negative with a yogafied positive. But this was Limp Bizkit linchpin Fred Durst, hollering into the unbridled heat of Saturday night at Woodstock 99, and the last thing Durst wanted was yoga asanas. “When this song kicks in, I want you to fucking in, Woodstock!” And footage captures thousands of shirtless white dudes emitting a collective yawp as they attack their immediate surroundings. “Fred Durst was a moron,” Woodstock organizer John Scher grouses in an interview, but what Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage emphasizes is that Durst and his dunderheaded nu-metal posturing was only a transmitter for dialed-up cultural rot, an ugly cocktail of disaffection, Fin de siècle fatalism, and the misogynistic “Girls Gone Wild” excess permeating in late-90’s American society that manifested itself wholly on the hot, human shit-strewn asphalt of Woodstock 99. There was no nostalgia here, despite festival promoter Michael Lang’s efforts to monetize it. And once it really skidded off the rails, there wasn’t even any fun, which is supposed to be the natural prerequisite of any music festival. “I’m usually the last person at things I go to,” attendee Mike Elling says in Peace, Love and Rage. “But by Saturday night, I couldn’t take it, and I knew that Sunday was going to be even more brutal.”

This document of the chaos and disorder that bit the head off the Woodstock peace dove doesn’t really project a very high opinion of the era’s music, either. It lets Kid Rock rightly hang himself as a representative clown, all garish fur coats and meaningless DJ accoutrements and reducing Monica Lewinsky to a slur. The Offspring’s onstage bludgeoning of boy band effigies is just throwing meat to the wolves. And neither the Bizkit nor RHCP had any regard for crowd safety. But at the same time, there’s a sense that the artists were in a sort of bubble, approaching the show like they would any big performance while only noting the aggressive vibes of the crowd as an afterthought. Maybe they were too disjointed as a group to hold a collective point of view, or take real action; maybe that’s why the group that did take over Woodstock 99 was the raging mob. Fuck you, they were saying. I won’t do what you tell me. And no one listened until the fires were lit.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage tells its bad news story with incisive criticism and powerful footage. But its most lasting message might be about where all that rage has led us.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Woodstock 99 on HBO Max