Woodstock ’99 and the Rise of Toxic Masculinity

A new documentary examines what went horribly wrong at the music festival.
Still from “Woodstock 99 Peace Love and Rage” showing a crowd walking over discarded plastic water bottles
In “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage,” the spiritual impetus behind the festival’s violence remains hard to parse.Photograph by Catherine Lash / Courtesy HBO

“Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage,” the first installment in a series of music documentaries for HBO created by Bill Simmons, begins with a disclaimer from the film’s director, Garret Price. “It would have been really easy to structure this as a comedy,” he says. “But it played out much more like a horror film.” A director admitting to some degree of mocking contempt for his subject is a provocative starting point, though anyone familiar with Woodstock ’99—which took place at a decommissioned Air Force base in Rome, New York, on three scorching, airless days in late July—likely understands how Price might have toggled between laughing and trembling. “Woodstock 99,” much like “Fyre Fraud” and “FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” two duelling documentaries about the catastrophic Fyre Festival, in which affluent attendees were wooed to the Bahamas by a marketing firm and forced to eat limp cheese sandwiches, briefly invites viewers to feel superior to the kinds of people who attend expensive, ill-planned music festivals. Go ahead and chuckle at the sea of shirtless hooligans bouncing into each other, hurling looted frozen pretzels into a bonfire, and rolling in fresh sewage. Then prepare to recoil in genuine fear at their rising fury.

“Woodstock 99” is far darker than the Fyre films; it evokes not schadenfreude but terror. The grimmest scenes reminded me of watching footage of the Capitol riot: out-of-control white people foregoing decency and rectitude in order to express a kind of deep, nameless, long-festering anger. Twenty-two years later, Woodstock ’99 is generally remembered as a repulsive bacchanal, marred by widespread sexual assault, riots, looting, arson, and death by hyperthermia. It drew around four hundred thousand people to Griffiss Air Force Base, in upstate New York (attendees paid a hundred and fifty dollars each, plus service charges), but organizers failed to account for the extreme weather (airfields aren’t known for offering much respite from blinding midday sun), the need for functional restrooms and showers, and the bizarre placement of the two main stages more than a mile apart, requiring a long, punishing walk along an open asphalt runway. By the end of the weekend, the portable toilets had overflowed, the A.T.M. machines had been torn apart, security had started fleeing the grounds, and various structures were being set ablaze.

The documentary’s chief villain is the promoter John Scher, who himself remains eager to blame everyone else for the event’s problems. MTV “set the tone,” he insists, with hours of sensational coverage. The women “who were running around naked” are part of the reason there were so many sexual assaults. He believes that the fact that there were only three female artists (Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, and Jewel) booked to perform means very little: “You either had to be a rock band or had to have the charisma to pull it off.” But for Scher, it’s Fred Durst—the sneering, crouching, seething singer of the rap-rock group Limp Bizkit—who should shoulder most of the blame. Durst, dressed in a pair of baggy khakis and a backwards Yankees hat, deliberately agitated the crowd by hollering a series of whiny, adolescent provocations—life is hard; people are mean—from the stage. Of course, giving voice to our collective bad mood was always Limp Bizkit’s mission. “It’s just one of those days / Where you don’t want to wake up / Everything is fucked / Everybody sucks,” Durst sings on the single “Break Stuff.”

In the end, Durst did as Durst does, and to afford his appearance that much power and responsibility feels absurd. Scher understands that Durst is a convenient punching bag, in part because Limp Bizkit has not quite aged into dignity; in 2021, it’s hard to find a professional critic willing to argue for the significance or grace of the band’s output. (It feels noteworthy that Rage Against the Machine, a better and more ideologically lofty outfit, were at least as angry onstage; the chorus of “Killing in the Name”—“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”—has been a rallying cry for indignant youth since 1992.) Scher cites a moment in which Durst was briefly carted around the crowd on a piece of plywood as evidence of the band’s malevolent intentions, but the actual riots didn’t occur until twenty-four hours after Limp Bizkit performed. Instead, Rome burned as the Red Hot Chili Peppers played a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire,” and Megadeth launched into “Peace Sells.” (“Peace sells, but who’s buying?” the frontman, Dave Mustaine, growled knowingly.)

For a music documentary, “Woodstock 99” isn’t really all that interested in music. There’s not enough performance footage, and the film repeatedly suggests that the feistier bands acted carelessly, purposefully accelerating a gruesome display of what has since become known as toxic masculinity (the aggressiveness of the lineup is also overstated; the then forty-four-year-old pianist Bruce Hornsby, for example, played an hour-long set). The filmmakers spend a curious amount of time presenting grunge—and especially Kurt Cobain, who, in the early nineteen-nineties, expressed open disgust for male aggression—as an example of how rock music can be sonically explosive but spiritually sensitive, as aligned with femininity as it is with masculinity. That Jonathan Davis, the lead singer of Korn, performed at Woodstock ’99 while wearing a leather skirt, is not directly addressed.

The film does acknowledge that one of the festival’s more enduring legacies is of sexual assault: women were incessantly harassed, groped, and asked to show their tits. While the film is plainly critical of this—how could it not be?—it also doesn’t bother to blur the faces of the girls who are shown topless or being grabbed by men. That decision (and the sheer relentlessness of this footage, which takes up a significant chunk of the film) feels cruel. It’s hard to convincingly defend women while simultaneously shaming and re-exposing them.

“Woodstock 99” does provide flashes of context—the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton’s subsequent impeachment, “Girls Gone Wild,” Y2K paranoia, low unemployment, economic prosperity, the massacre at Columbine—but the spiritual impetus behind the violence remains hard to parse. What cultural or social systems led thousands of young people to feel so entitled and enraged in a moment of unquestionable national prosperity? How did these bands release or amplify those feelings? Were festival goers attempting to rebel, in a particularly clumsy way, against the relentless commodification of art and culture? Against the existence of a plywood and steel fence known as the “Peace Wall”? Against the intrusion of corporate interests into everything sacred and good? Against being sold a four-dollar bottle of water on a sweltering summer weekend? (“If you’re going to a festival, you bring money with you,” Scher offers as an explanation for the pricing.) Perhaps it was an overreaction to the resurgence of polished teen pop on MTV and on the radio; at one point, the punk band the Offspring brought out inflatable dummies dressed as the Backstreet Boys and destroyed them with a plastic bat while the crowd cheered. (That the pop stars of this era—’N Sync, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, et al.—have proved to be far more influential and lasting than nu metal is surely the best and coldest revenge.)

“The organism becomes stronger than any one person,” the rock critic Steven Hyden says at one point. (The documentary’s three critical talking heads—Hyden; Wesley Morris, of the Times; and Maureen Callahan, who covered the festival for Spin and presently writes for the New York Post—provide excellent commentary.) Hyden is talking about the mosh pit that gathered for Metallica’s set, but his description nonetheless feels like the film’s best argument for why the festival devolved into total chaos. Sometimes, bad behavior is a contagion. Enmity and resentment can replicate so quickly. After all the tumult and division the U.S. has experienced the past five years, it’s perhaps easier to recognize those truths now, though it is still hard to understand them.