Madame Pickwick Art Blog Art and media blog of the unexpected

Isis Cult & The Woodstock Campfire Tapes

It was forty years ago today Sergeant Pepper told the band to play…..Did Woodstock change anything? The hyperbole was three days that changed the world at the Woodstock Music And Arts Festival…and the messiah will come again. In retrospect, Woodstock seemed more a diversion. If it didn’t exist it would have to be created. Vietnam war fatalities were at their peak and black ghetto’s were being torched in self inflicted arson. The infernos were a practice for bigger bonfires where the white gentry lived. Civil rights were being exercised in uncivilized extremes.

Woodstock Festival 1969

Woodstock seemed like relatively light fare. Like a day camp sleepover. Something wise and intelligent people  gave the children of their generation to keep them off the hard stuff. the counterculture wannabees dressed in a style more conformist than accountants or policemen. Its simply another form of identity and whether the festival ” defined a generation ” is less clear and perhaps only to the extent of choices in the market place.

The greed, consumerism and general hedonism associated with the Woodstock generation is also a generalization and probably not valid  or justified under scrutiny. Woodstock and the hippies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin  was a natural and inevitable conclusion. Pawns in the end game beginning with Aldous Huxley laying the foundation of counterculture subversion through the beatnik cult of  Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs; concurrently with philosopher Bertrand Russell agressively banging the pacifist drums of war.

That Woodstock defined a generation is like admitting Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall. Woodstock was essentially a deeply middle-class form of entertainment, about as subversive as say, Madonna or Michael Jackson being ”bad”. Woodstock was like a controlled pre-programmed explosion whose calculated detonation had for purpose to pre-empt more unpredictable, uncontrollable and devastating explosions involving greater collateral damage.

Woodstock is a quintessential example of product branding. Mass media and large sophisticated institutions were able to load the event with signified meanings and create a narrative whereby the widespread dissemination of these meanings could be promoted. Ultimately, it became consumption as well, though consumption with an ”alternative claim” compatible and complementary with the fundamental consumer culture. ‘‘The hit parade is organized precisely on the same principles used by Egypts Isis priesthood and for the same purpose: the recruitment of youth to the Dionysian counterculture”.

Woodstock attendance could be seen as a bowing or submission to the ritual of socialization. ...”although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged…The comparison with addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social network” ( Theodor Adorno )