From “Rock Is Dead,” which appeared in the November 1999 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
I am standing in my red, white, and blue kill rock stars T-shirt on the Griffiss runway with tens of thousands of kids trudging past me, bearing knapsacks and suitcases and kicking up dust like a herd of dispossessed extras in a made-for-MTV version of The Grapes of Wrath. Wandering through the carny landscape of empty pizza boxes are college kids on summer break as well as their less fortunate peers, who have taken long weekends off from their jobs reshelving videos at Blockbuster outlets and serving the $5.99 breakfast at Denny’s. Sullen, bare-chested guys push through the crowd with the elastic waistbands of their boxers pulled up hip-hop-gangsta-style above baggy shorts from Polo and Tommy Hilfiger. Bare-midriffed girls counter the dirty-girl allure of their tight shorts and white, pink, and blue baby-doll T-shirts by hunching their shoulders and staring blankly down at the melting asphalt in the ninety-degree heat, lost in a haze of sexual discomfort that makes me feel like the worst moments of my adolescence have been captured in some highly concentrated form and sprayed out over the runway like cheap perfume.
On the main stage, Woodstock ’99 has officially begun. Looking up at the bright orange blimp hovering over my head, I wonder whether its message—fried dough—might be some kind of key to the deeper meaning of this event. If the original Woodstock was about peace, love, music, and making a good movie instead of a bad one, Woodstock ’99 is about feeling the grease soak through the paper and onto your fingers. But the message of Woodstock ’99 went something like this: rock and roll is a moment of instant and lasting communion between the generations, a source of half-remembered trivia like the name of John Lennon’s first wife drifting through the pot-clouded haze of carpeted rec rooms with “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin cranking through monster quadraphonic speakers as you make it for the second or third time with your high school girlfriend on the orange shag rug. In the heat and the dust, the past and the present are one.
As I walk through the artists’ trailer park, I realize that Woodstock ’99 is a perfect microcosm of the greater world beyond. Rock stars are wealthy, privileged people who live just like other wealthy, privileged people do, in places where the streets are quiet and safe, protected by gates and uniformed security guards from the danger, filth, and darkness of a world where everyone wants to be rich and famous and loved. They have come to Woodstock ’99 because it’s the biggest concert event of the summer, a place where they will be loved by two hundred thousand people. Instead, they find themselves penned up in a gated community of people like themselves, cut off from wherever it was they came from.
On the last night, those hundreds of thousands of people start bonfires, the crowd ripping down sections of the media tower to feed the flames. The scene around me will be described in newspapers the next morning as a riot. Yet what is happening now feels oddly light. The real riot happened over the last three days, not as a single, chaotic, explosive event but as a slow-motion disintegration of the bonds that might hold so many people together. What happened isn’t really that hard to describe. The crowd endured the heat, and the sewage, and the trash, and the drugs until all that was left was the feeling of standing in a tired, dirty crowd of people at the end of the day and knowing that you are alone.
What I think now is that safety is an illusion that we use to cover up some larger absence in our lives. The real causes of the Woodstock riot, if that’s what it was, are larger than personal irresponsibility, or bad music, or poor planning, or greed. The riot is a footnote to a larger story. Thirty years ago something vital and lasting—an idea of the good life and how to live it, what marriage meant, what to eat, what family and community were for, and of who was supposed to take care of the kids when the parents both work—broke apart, and now, thirty years later, that sense of connection, of some overarching narrative frame for our lives, still hasn’t been repaired or replaced.