Woodstock at 40
Woodstock at 40. Every 80-100 years events like this can happen. It certainly did change what music could be as hindsight is always 20-20. But Woodstock was preceded by several years of a metamorphosis that led up to the event. It was not a beginning of a period—it was the end—at least for psychedelia.
40th anniversary of the lunar landing, 40 years since the Beatles break-up, 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, the death of Les Paul, Michael Jackson, remembrances ad infinitum. In a sense, these are smaller versions of millennial thinking, i.e. that our lives are intimately organized by arbitrary increments of time, and beginnings and the endings of things.
We are intricately woven into the cycles of dying, forgetting and remembering. Like standing on the surface of the moon, watching our contemplative thoughts spin in our minds as we gaze back at earth, reminding ourselves of where we really are. Remembering Woodstock must be like that: looking up at the moon thinking ‘I was there looking back at where I am now’ and then getting back to the mundane flow of time, meaningless and intractable, like the blackness of space.
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8/15/2019
To celebrate Woodstock@50 I’m taking it to its Centennial and looking back on 2019 in the voice of a character in my short “Reset”. The underlying premise is that if history does repeat in 80-year cycles, posited in the book The Fourth Turning (1997), the 2040s would be a repeat of the 1960s on the cusp of a slow decline, through 2025.
Turn Turn Turn
Woodstock@100
By: Ramona A. Stone
August 15, 2069
Back in November of 2039, I was in Berlin with my husband to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. At that point, I was ten years into my immortality (DOI 2029).
My grandfather was a Boomer, born in 1955, and came of age right after Woodstock. They must have been heady times with Ziggy Stardust, Queen, Elton, Led Zeppelin, Todd Rundgren, but in retrospect, the early 1970s were the beginning of the unraveling of the idea of globalism, even though things looked as though history would never end or repeat. But it, in fact, did repeat with a return of authoritarianism and its subsequent demise. In some ways, Woodstock was the last hurrah as the world entered its "Second Turning", the second "season" of society as set forth in the 1997 book The Fourth Turning, but the same zeitgeist re-emerged in the 2040s like clockwork.
In 2019, I was still living in Rio, and was 11 at the time. I recall sitting with my father, glued to his phone, nostalgically watching videos of the acts at the original Woodstock and following what was known then as "Twitter" and "YouTube", watching the world in extremis with global protests. My father was born in 1975. He would have celebrated the 20th Anniversary of Woodstock in 1989, still a fan of all those artists. When I was producing Neone in 2045 and 2046 at Hansa, we again waxed nostalgic for a time when people had actual souls, and we reminisced about those times and tried to channel it in the music, specifically targeting the early-mid 1960s. Neone loved Joni Mitchell and her fierce individualism. But it is also ironic that Joni Mitchell did not perform at Woodstock, and rather watched it on TV, and was critical of its cultural message. In retrospect, the seeds of dissent begin to emerge when even the most liberal people revolted against the excesses. Joni Mitchell was incredibly smart and conservative in many ways—essentially a left-leaning centrist. The somber tone of her song “Woodstock” was the augur of what the last decades of the 20th century would entail. The 1970s just as much as the 2050s were a wake up call, but we didn’t hit the snooze button in 2053 as we did in 1973.
But today is a day for generational milestones, even though we have to conjure them artificially from restored memory erasures. Had I not become immortally 21, I would be 60 years old today. I wish I was 60 years old in 2019 and could fully appreciate the nostalgia. At 21 I should be able to access the zeitgeist of youth, but it is a soulless activity as an Immortal. All it is is a remix of history and not ever fully knowing who my elders were and how they lived through their purely mortal hearts.
Neone said it best in her song Question Y:
I loved the time in which I lived
I lived in a time in which I loved
If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes
If only you could feel what I've felt with your heart
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8/15/2024 Possible extracted poem/lyric:
Woodstock
Woven into cycles of dying
Forgetting, remembering
Standing on the surface of [life]
Gaze back at the earth
Reminding ourselves of where we really are
I was there looking back, where I am
