It’s nasty, from little details like the lascivious way Dave Matthews says “titties” to bigger ones like the moment Rosie Perez is heckled about showing her breasts when she arrives to introduce DMX’s set. Woodstock 99 attempts to trace the tributaries drizzling fuel on the festival’s inferno, but it’s more notable for being the rare music documentary that doesn’t really seem to care for much of the music it’s covering. Woodstock ’69 co-creator Michael Lang and his Woodstock ’94 partner, John Scher, are criticized for the peculiar venue choice of Griffiss Air Force Base, whose fortifications cut costs but subjected attendees to increasingly uncomfortable conditions, and the lineup, which forced awkward scheduling choices like back-to-back Alanis Morissette and Limp Bizkit sets on the same stage. You learn how one asphalt-covered literal Superfund site, a lax and barely trained security detail, a lack of access to drinkable water, a candlelight vigil gone awry, a rash of jarring July heat, and a few hundred thousand angry Gen-Xers and millennials can add up to destruction, fire, abuse, and death. In its account of how Woodstock ’99, a sequel to the three-day 1969 gig that stands as a testament to the unifying power of the hippie generation, went up quite literally in flames, Peace, Love, and Rage is pointed in attributing blame for the carnival of horrors the weekend would entail, but light on why the dehydrated revelers wanted to go in the first place. Watching HBO’s Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage - the first installment in a six-part series called Music Box, which The Ringer’s Bill Simmons touts as a sister to his sports series 30 for 30 - I looked for an A.J., someone who could explain the draw of the aggressive music that soundtracked the ill-fated 1999 music festival, long understood to be the nadir of ’90s rock (just as it is said that Altamont killed the ’60s). It’s the reason angst-soaked rock and metal music resonated strongly with millennials coming of age at the turn of the century. He’s finding acceptance and expression in the art of troubled kindred spirits. won’t: He feels alienated, misunderstood. The Sopranos uses wardrobe to say what A.J. Soprano is also a fan of Pantera, whose singer Phil Anselmo tussled publicly with his demons, and Marilyn Manson, whose entire project in the early ’90s was teasing out the hypocrisy and dysfunction our veneer of public decency conceals (and whose own dysfunction has come into harrowing focus in recent years). He loves Slipknot, whose singer-songwriter Corey Taylor works through the fallout of abuse and addiction in his younger years. The band tees give the show a poignant sense of time and place, but they also hint at what’s going on behind A.J.’s wan, sullen eyes. The kid acts up in school and lounges in metal merch at home. Their approach is all wrong, too lax one week and too harsh the next. A.J.’s parents don’t get him none of the shit he’s into existed when they grew up. Soprano, the surly son of the show’s titular boss. In that maelstrom of cunning mobsters, careless crooks, and effete, affluent New Jersey socialites, my anchor is A.J. I’ve been watching The Sopranos almost every night this summer.
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