Escape to freedom

Woodstock Festival turns 40

Woodstock graft. The rock festival, named after the American town of Woodstock, has turned 40 years old. Some believe that he ended the era of hippies, others - that he became the culmination of the sexual and drug revolutions in the Western world, and others - that it was the apotheosis of the breakthrough to freedom of the generation that is now in power in many countries. The latter is still relevant for us and for the whole world. New Times explored links between past and present
In fact, the Woodstock Festival (more precisely, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Woodstock Music & Art Fair) was held 40 miles from the world-famous place, Sam Yasgur's farm in the town of Bethel in Sullivan County, New York. It's just that in the vicinity of Woodstock itself there was no venue of suitable size - according to various estimates, from 450 to 500 thousand spectators, including 1,500 journalists, arrived at the festival, in which 31 musical groups took part.

Order of Chaos From August 15 to 17, 1969, the most cutting-edge musicians of the time performed for them, including the legendary The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Ravim Shankara, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker , Carlos Santana and the fantastic guitarist Jimi Hendrix who descended onto the stage from a helicopter on a rope ladder.

Unlike subsequent ones, the 1969 festival was free and therefore absolutely unprofitable, since the organizers did not have time to build a fence around the field for the arrival of the first tens of thousands of guests who began to appear near Woodstock a week before the event. In addition to music, he was accompanied by demonstrations of all kinds of mystical spiritual practices (primarily Indian and Indian), the propaganda of various radical political theories, as well as the widespread distribution of marijuana, LSD and plant hallucinogens. Despite this, only three people died of a drug overdose, not even a single fight occurred (with the exception of a skirmish on stage between musician Pete Townshend and radical politician Abby Hoffman). Well, thefts and other petty crimes turned out to be completely in the shadow of the slogan Sex, drugs & rock'roll embodied in reality.

Today, on the site of the youth “breakaway” of 1969, there is a pompous memorial plate, and Woodstock itself has long turned into a place of pilgrimage for both hippie followers and rockers, and for many who are looking for a “real”, different, and not pop culture. But the anniversary festivals in 1979, 1989, 1995 and 1999 did not have a shadow of that unique atmosphere of peacefulness, spiritual unity and a breakthrough to a new consciousness with the help, first of all, of music, which distinguished their progenitor. “Drinking yourself to a pig squeal so that it doesn’t matter who you jerk your limbs under is the whole of modern Woodstock,” poetess Margarita Pushkina noted after the 1999 festival.

Escape to Freedom That Woodstock 69 was much more than a mass gathering of hippies and drug addicts became clear almost immediately. Immediately after its completion, the myth of the ideal Woodstock arose in American and Western culture in general - the place where, in the midst of the Vietnam War, interracial, social and intergenerational contradictions, a “nation of a new spirit” was born, which has so far accomplished the last non-violent cultural and worldview in human history. revolution. The entire post-industrial world allegedly emerged from Woodstock, since it was its immediate and distant participants who invented both the Internet and the liberal economy, put the development of democracy and human rights at the center of civilization, ultimately won the Cold War and gave Francis Fukuyama the right to speak for some time about the end of history.

Of course, all these are myths, although upon closer examination, the significance of the event 40 years ago for the world today is still difficult to overestimate. The counterculture of the 1960s, like the counterpolitics that culminated on the student barricades in Paris in May 1968 and dismissed the charismatic of the charismatics, General de Gaulle, indeed shaped the modern version of civilization in many ways. It was really a movement of the masses, which significantly updated both the Western state system and the system of values ​​of Western man. True, the main goal - victory over the consumer society - was not achieved, this very society successfully digested both the rebellious ideas of the beatniks, and the pacifist and loving protest of the hippies, and sex with drugs and rock and roll, ultimately turning them into nothing more than goods.

However, the Woodstock inoculation that was made to the Western world did not go unnoticed. Having assimilated the values ​​of 1969, the main of which were freedom, tolerance, striving for something new and susceptibility to everything different, civilization in the second half of the 20th century changed irreversibly. It is no coincidence that the ideas of Woodstock and his music in the USSR were equated with ideological sabotage. Because from them there is only one step to the polythinking forbidden by the Soviet government and the right of a person to be what he wants, and not the way his government wants to see him. These two Woodstock messages managed to survive the “scoop”, and, using the example of the collapse of the Soviet system at the end of the 1980s-1990s, they proved that freedom is both better and stronger than lack of freedom.

The problem with Russia is that few of us still understand this, and the “Woodstock nation” (with all due respect to the few hippies of stagnant times) is just being born. This is confirmed, in particular, by the latest, yet unpublished research of the Public Opinion Foundation. According to the FOM, today up to 20% of young people (under 26) prioritize freedom, the search for something new and creativity. Career for them is important not as a way to "make money", but as an opportunity to reveal their abilities. These are the main distinguishing features of the Western generation of the 60s, sprouted 40 years after Woodstock on Russian soil. We can only hope that our future belongs to them.