Expert:
Forty Years Later, the Significance of Woodstock
http://www.smith.edu/newsoffice/releases/NewsOffice09-025.html
April 10, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NORTHAMPTON, Mass. Look up "Woodstock" using any reference tool and
the description will likely read "a music and art festival."
But this year, the 40th anniversary of the 1969 event provides a
moment to reflect upon the significance of "a music and art festival"
that drew a half million concertgoers to a dairy farm in a rural New York town.
"The anniversary is an occasion to look back on the connection
between rock music and the counterculture of the 1960s," said Steve
Waksman, associate professor of music and American studies. "But it's
also an opportunity to think about the ways in which rock music, or
any form of music, can create a sense of collective purpose."
Waksman's most recent book "This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict
and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk" takes the decline of the 1960s
counterculture as its starting point. He recently answered questions
about the historical significance of that rainy, muddy weekend when
Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others
entertained the masses.
What is the meaning of the anniversary?
The anniversary is an occasion to look back on the connection between
rock music and the counterculture of the 1960s. In part, it's an
opportunity to recall a lot of great music and musicians, some of
whom are no longer with us anymore, such as Jimi Hendrix, and some of
whom are still very much with us, such as Carlos Santana and Neil
Young. But it's also an opportunity to think about the ways in which
rock music, or any form of music, can create a sense of collective
purpose. To what extent did the roughly half a million people who
attended Woodstock share a common social or political vision? To what
extent was their connection grounded in something more than rock
music itself? These are questions about which it's easy to be either
nostalgic ("We were all one, man!") or cynical ("Just a bunch of
hippies getting high and listening to rock!"). The real answer to
those questions, though, is not a simple one, and it's something to
take seriously, because it has a lot to tell us about how music
shapes our values and maybe makes it possible for us to relate to
each other in ways we wouldn't otherwise.
What was the significance of Woodstock?
The late cultural critic Ellen Willis described Woodstock as the
culmination of a dream of mass freedom that had arisen in the years
after World War II and was connected to rock and roll. Mass freedom
meant that people believed they could best achieve their fullest
freedom in the context of a group, rather than isolated, as
individuals. At Woodstock, it was precisely the coming together of so
many thousands of young people that gave the event its power, and
that power was at once symbolic and real. People there felt a sense
of connection, and felt that the connection was tied to something
bigger than the fact that there was a big rock festival going on. It
was tied to youth, above all, but it was tied to a particular image
of youth as a part of the population who could transform the existing
cultural and political order, could potentially create the basis for
a culture in which peace was valued over war, in which pleasure was
valued over productivity, and in which rules and conventions were not
to be followed if they were found to be corrupt.
At the same time, Woodstock also showed, in a less utopian vein, that
one could gather enormous crowds of young people together at once and
not have a catastrophe follow. This was an important lesson for the
music industry, which at the end of the 1960s was still trying to
figure out how best to capitalize on the enormous audience that
existed for rock. After Woodstock, rock concerts grew larger and
larger in size; there was less need for festivals after a certain
point, because concerts were routinely happening in arenas and
stadiums that held thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. So
Woodstock also contributed to the further incorporation of rock into
the profit-making structures of the music industry.
What happened to rock music in the years that followed?
Well, most immediately, about four months after Woodstock came
Altamont, the large festival outside San Francisco organized by the
Rolling Stones, which was marked by some bad vibes due to the
presence of a row of Hell's Angels in front of the stage, and
culminated in the widely publicized death of a young black man,
Meredith Hunter. Altamont made the achievement of Woodstock seem to
many a fluke, and made crowds of young people seem dangerous again.
The shift from festivals to arena and stadium concerts that occurred
in the 1970s was in many ways driven by concerns over crowd control
as much as by concerns over profit. It's easier to maintain order in
a space that's enclosed and has clear boundaries around it, where
people sit in rows.
More broadly, rock's connection to its young audience changed. This
was partly because some of rock's audience was no longer so young;
people who had come of age through the countercultural years of the
late 1960s were now entering their 20s and were looking for music
that was still rock but that was more "mature." Meanwhile, younger
fans were looking for something they could call their own, and so a
generation gap of sorts began to emerge within rock rather than
between rock and other styles of popular music. This is where new
genres like heavy metal and punk come into play, as forms of rock
that are still very much concerned with the relationship between rock
and youth, and that try to reimagine what kinds of communal or
collective identity rock might create in the wake of the 1960s
counterculture. That, in effect, is what my new book, "This Ain't the
Summer of Love," is about.
Office of College Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063
Kristen Cole
Media Relations Director
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
[email protected]
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