‘Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, And Rage’ Is A Stomach-Churning Look At a Mosh Pit of Misogyny

They say hindsight is 2020, but lately it feels as though hindsight is really 2021. Earlier this year, Framing Britney Spears took a look back at a pivotal time 20 years ago and we all watched in horror at how this beloved woman was treated. With the new HBO documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, we’re about to do the same thing.

Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage is the first documentary in the Music Box series from creator and executive producer Bill Simmons and The Ringer Films, with a handful more to follow this fall. Hopefully those docs, which will focus on subjects such as Alanis Morrisette, DMX, and Kenny G, prove to be slightly more fun than this offering, but not that it makes this one any less important to watch. Directed by Garret Price, this doc tells the story of the fateful music fest which took place this weekend 22 years ago. If you’ve blocked it out of your memory as I have, you’re likely to find it jaw-dropping and anxiety-inducing throughout. If you remember it clearly, and even worse, if you were present, it could be even harder to watch — but you won’t be able to look away.

Ultimately, this film serves as a reminder of what a ridiculous time 1999 truly was. Sure, the Y2K worries loomed, but culturally, there was a whole lot going on — and very little of it was good. The documentary starts off by giving a brief history of the Woodstock festival and explains how the 1999 installment was intended to share themes with the original in 1969 and the subsequent event in 1994, but how those ties were completely broken — well, ripped apart, trampled, and set on fire, really.

It turns out, examining this specific point in pop culture continues to be eye-opening, sickening, and utterly necessary. The entire TRL era is precisely my wheelhouse, specifically, the themes and music discussed in Framing Britney Spears. However, while Woodstock 99 focuses on the rock and nu-metal aspect of that time, it also addresses how two seemingly different genres were so linked (hi MTV!). New York Times journalist Wesley Morris and former MTV VJ and current Decider pal Dave Holmes, who also weighed in on Britney, provide commentary here, as well as a handful of artists, music journalists, attendees, and even those responsible for producing the music festival.

It’s not often that you can pinpoint one event or weekend to really sum up what was happening in the world at that time, but this documentary truly succeeds in painting that picture. Between Clinton, Columbine, and computers, Woodstock 99 was the perfect storm of young, white male aggression, and whatever was happening on stage simply served as the soundtrack. One of the documentary’s central debates is whether Limp Bizkit, and specifically Fred Durst, were largely to blame for mixing in all the ingredients that led to this recipe for disaster.

I wish I was walking away from watching this saying that the most offensive part is when blow-up dolls of the Backstreet Boys are booed and then batted off the stage, but that moment was simply rude at best. Between the disgusting grounds, health hazards, and the obscene amount of sexual abuse that female attendees were subjected to, this documentary will make you want to take an hour-long shower after watching it, and honestly, that still might not be long enough because of the effectiveness of this film.

It’s bewildering how egregiously bad and gross, in all the ways, this festival proved to be, and precisely how ripe it was for the documentary treatment. This film does the subject justice and exposes so many aspects that were either regrettably forgotten, or even worse, not appropriately (or remotely) addressed. Woodstock 99 will likely (and should) put an end to the fact that they somehow keep trying to put on more Woodstocks (?!?), but should continue our discussions about what music and culture are really saying in a much bigger way.

Woodstock 99 is important to watch and important to talk about. Yes, it’s disturbing and disgusting and upsetting, but part of that is because so little has currently changed, especially culturally. It shouldn’t feel so shocking to realize what was brewing and occurring at this festival. It was all over the news then and we saw it for ourselves. So why exactly have those shots of Carson Daly having bottles thrown at him since been shrugged off? Did we need the megaphone of social media, or were we just unwilling to address so many problems of that time that would only continue to get worse? This doc will once again have us thinking about what we once allowed, embraced, and even contributed to, and how we can continue to do better moving forward.

Stream Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage on HBO Max