By Elizabeth Whitcombe | 10 Comments | 
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Resurrecting Woodstock?
From The Occidental Observer, September 10, 2009
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. A time-proven recipe for poor choices. Forty years ago this summer a group of young promoters organized what is regarded as a milestone in popular music history. The result was a celebration of free love and tuning out.
The Woodstock Music Festival’s original producer Michael Lang had planned a revival for its 40th anniversary. The festival was canceled at the last minute due to lack of interest from sponsors.
If the festival was simply a money-making scheme, it was spectacularly ill-advised. The last minute rollback was unprofessional and unexpected considering Lang’s seasoned career. Could it be that the revival was aiming at something more?
The hippie generation was the death knell of what remained of traditional America. Woodstock was an advertisement glorifying that betrayal. So why do we need to relive it? Because the Obama-rose is fading.
What was Lang Selling?
The counterculture of the 1960s celebrated self-destructive behavior. Young people were told not to trust their parents, but to trust their university professors and pop culture figures instead. It was the flowering of Saul Alinsky and his anti-Western propaganda campaign. But behind the mask of flowers there was a warped and twisted face.
The 1960s drug culture has its roots in the US government’s truth-drug experiments for the MK-ULTRA program. The CIA contracted professors to test out various drugs, often on student volunteers. These programs were carried out at almost every elite US university.[1]
John Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State, argues that the 1960s LSD craze was at least in part started by drugs leaked from University laboratories. The coordinators of these student-guinea-pig projects were Sidney Gottleib and Harold Abramson.[2]
It is ironic that the generation which claimed to be rejecting ‘the man’ was actually “the man’s” most abject stooge.
The Piper Gets Paid
In “Anger in White America — Again,” Prof. Kevin MacDonald points out a political trend that isn’t going away soon: disenfranchised Whites getting mad and hitting the streets. The situation has come to the point where the powers that be can no longer ignore it — see Lexington’s recent Economist editorial, Still Crazy After All These Years. Yes Micklethwait, we do want our country back.
Trick question: if your tax base is angry enough to make The Economist nervous, what do you do? More of the same, of course. Enter Mr. Lang and his magical mystery bus.
Mr. Lang promotes events — he is a professional crowd-manipulator. He made his name advertising the same lifestyle choices as Theodor Adorno and Ahmet Ertegun. Atlantic Records was keen to help the Woodstock project: The firm issued the original “live” festival album. Ertegun had money coming out of his ears — and so did Lang!
In fact, the creators of Woodstock had the money before they had the vision. On March 22, 1967, two of the festival’s four founders, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put the following advertisement in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal: “Young Men with Unlimited Capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”
Lo and behold, an investment opportunity found them — by way of Ray Charles’ lawyer Miles Lourie. (Charles was Atlantic Records’ star performer.) Lourie sent Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang to meet the pair. In February 1969 the quartet embarked on the project that would become The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Incidentally, Artie Kornfeld was a friend of Alan Livingston, president of Capitol Records.
Despite limited festival experience, the boys signed up a roster of A-list performers. 300,000 people turned up to get baked and express their collective individuality. It was an orgy of expressive individualism. . . . Read the whole article.
Elizabeth Whitcombe
Elizabeth Whitcombe is a graduate of MIT in Economics with a concentration in International Economics. She is a financial analyst and free-lance writer living in New York City.
There is an ancient Swedish legend that fits very well to this. It is called the Hårga legend. Here is a rough non-poetry preserving translation of one version:
“It is night before Sunday. The gray timbered houses lies compactly together to obtain protection from each another in the little village just below the Hårga Mountain. In one of the houses the youth of the area has gathered to dance, and when the joy is at its peak a stranger enters. It is a wandering bard/scholar. He asked for the fiddle and played a polka of the like they had never heard before, whilst playing he says:
Here dances the blue, here dances the gray, but it is on top of the Hårga Mountain the dance should lay. Bewhiched by his enchanting music they followed him through the door and in a queue dance they progressed towards the mountain top. One of the dancing men noticed that the fiddler had a cloven hoof. He pulled his knife and stabbed into the wood above the door, and by the power of the steel he managed to free himself from the diabolical grasp. He held his girl’s arm but the door shut and the arm was separated from the body. Up on the mountain Old Harry had placed himself on a wretched pine tree and continued to play, and everyone was forced to dance, no one was let free. When the church bells rang for Mass on Sunday, the dance was still going on, but now only the skulls remained, which were still dancing in a circle.”
The seductive power of music was not unknown, not even in the outskirts of Europe deep in the Swedish forests.
This is exactly what happened: the stranger, the eternal revolutionary, was energized by the Devil and led the European/Euro-American youth to their doom, amongst other things, through music.
Here is a contemporary youtube version of the song that encodes the legend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKeX4VxPmJ4
Isn’t it embarrasing that we fell for this old trick of our traditional foe; this trick which was famous throughout the until-very-recently-world?
Even my great great great great great … great grandmother who probably could not even read, who had never seen a library and lived deep in the Swedish forest would see through the deception of “sex, drugs and rock’n'roll” without the slightest effort.
To moderator:
can you please change
Here is a contemporary youtube version of the song that encodes the legend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKeX4VxPmJ4
into
Here is a contemporary youtube version of the traditional folksong which encodes the legend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKeX4VxPmJ4
” The Woodstock Music Festival’s original producer Michael Lang had planned a revival for its 40th anniversary. The festival was canceled at the last minute due to lack of interest from sponsors.”
As a Gen. Xer that was raised in an enviroment of cynicism towards the Bolshevik Boomer project it is heartening to hear of this cancellation! (” Everywhere I look it seems that someone’s getting butt surfed by the system. Parents are always talking about the system, and the sixties and how cool it was. Well look at where the sixties got them!” — Pump Up the Volume, 1990)
Sadly however Ang Lee has made some Woodstock flick that is making the rounds so there will still be an impact.
It is good to note that my own generation did manage to contribute… WOODSTOCK ’94! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_%2794 ) If anything the antics of this edition helped to prove once and for all that the degenerate White hippie thing just won’t work. Take a look at some of the events that happened: Nine Inch Nails – People got into huge mud-fights. Sheryl Crow – Male concert goers yelled at her to take clothing items off! There were huge bonfires and people going into Lord of the Flies mode.
YES we managed in our own way to show that the degenerate White hippie way would be dystopian and dysfunctional!!
It does not surprise me after the events of ’94 that an ’09 version would have to be cancelled: One can imagine Type O Negative getting up there with huge Vinland Flags (which has become a quasi-White Nationalist Symbol) scaring boomers with their gothness and Danzig performing ‘White Devil Rise’ as well! Maybe Slayer could do their version of ‘Guilty of being White’. Seriously these are bands and songs that could have potentially been on there!!!
The Boomers would be horrified at some of the sub-cultures that have developed since ’69 that include implicit or explicit Whiteness (Heavy Metal, Goth, Black Metal…)
“I am not being facetious when I say that sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll create the perfect cocktail for poor decisions. Political philosophers have recognized this for millennia. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Sirens and the Lotus Eaters were not mere literary fancy. They were an open warning to Greeks about the dangers of opting out of life in a competitive world. Ulysses lost his reason to the Sirens’ seductive songs; the Lotus Eaters lost all thoughts of their home. “Having lost all thoughts of their home, tradition and identity” is an apt description of the Hippie generation and their progeny.”
Fascinating way of looking at the Odyssey…
One of the posts above mentions a band called Slayer and its song “Guilty of Being White.”
Being unfamiliar with it, I searched for it on YouTube.
Even for rock and roll (if that’s what it is), it’s pretty bad:
<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X87ig7cfFbA” (Slayer version.)
However, the lyrics are intriguing:
Guilty of Being White
I’m sorry
For something I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I didn’t know who
You blame me
For slavery
A hundred years before I was born
Guilty of being white [4x]
[repeat intro]
Guilty of being white [4x]
I’m convicted
Of a racist crime
I’ve only served
19 years of my life
[repeat intro]
Guilty of being white [3x]
Guilty of being right
[End lyrics.]
Apparently Slayer is a mainstream group.
Nevertheless, “Slayer has been accused of holding Nazi sympathies . . . Slayer’s cover of Minor Threat’s ‘Guilty of Being White’ raised questions about a possible message of white supremacy in the band’s music. The controversy surrounding the cover involved the changing of the refrain ‘guilty of being white’ to ‘guilty of being right,’ at the song’s ending. This incensed Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, who stated ‘that is so offensive to me.’ King said it was changed for ‘tongue-in-cheek’ humor as he thought the allegation of racism at the time was ‘ridiculous.’” <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slayer#Controversy”
Listening to Minor Threat’s original version of the song is easier than listening to Slayer’s. In other words, the first one is better–except for Slayer’s word change and major emphasis of “right,” which is shouted, and does improve the lyrics.
Listen to the original here: <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0tzZ__Z5Qw&feature=related”(Minor Threat version.)
Minor Threat was a hardcore punk band that existed from 1980-1983. It’s lead singer subsequently made politically correct noises with respect to his youthful indiscretion, according to Wikipedia:
“Minor Threat’s song ‘Guilty of Being White’ led to some accusations of racism, but MacKaye has strongly denied such intentions and said that some listeners misinterpreted his words. The song was inspired by his experiences at Wilson high school, which had a 70 percent black student population, where he and his friends would get picked on by black students on a regular basis. Slayer later covered the song, with the last iteration of the lyric “Guilty of being white” changed to “Guilty of being right.” In an interview MacKaye has stated that he was offended that some perceived racist overtones in the lyrics; “To me, at the time and now, it seemed clear it’s an antiracist song, of course, it didn’t occur to me at the time I wrote it that anybody outside of my twenty or thirty friends who I was singing to would ever have to actually ponder the lyrics or even consider them.”" <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Threat#Early_years”
The allegations of white supremacy on Slayer are absolutely ridiculous.
It is blatantly obvious that it is ironic; have you seen the singer? He’s Chilean American; he’s obviously been the target of racism rather than anything else.
People will honestly make up conspiracy theories about everything nowadays. Evidence first, chaps!
(sorry for double post but ’60s are really important to critique!)
“So why do we need to relive it? Because the Obama-rose is fading.”
Ah yes this may also be the reason behind ‘The Beatles: Rock band’. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_Rock_Band ) Introduce Gen. Y/ millenials to this stuff via contemporary video games. Like some vampire the sixties keep coming back to life!!
Speaking of the Beatles:
” The 1960s drug culture has its roots in the US government’s truth-drug experiments for the MK-ULTRA program. ”
I have heard rumors that the Beatles were a creation of the Tavistock Institute! TOQO is a reputable blog, however there does seem to be evidence many aspects of ’60s culture were manipulated into existence by nefarious forces in a quasi-conspiracy!
When Apollo went off to Hyperborea for the winter months, wasn’t Dionysus allowed to remain in charge at Delphi?
According to Fr. Thomas Berry (recently deceased), the Black Plague so traumatized Europeans that their search for an explanation for such a catastrophe led them into two separate camps. One group explained the event in completely religious and spiritual terms, ie., a curse/punishment from God, and the other sought an explanation based on observations of the natural/physical facts. The division of science and religion began.
Science, reason, logic, etc., became dominant in the West and religion and mysticism receded. If Dionysus isn’t allowed his time in the picture, our need for release and transcendence will simply take the form of raw, atavistic impulses.
“Yes Micklethwait, we do want our country back.”
I think you’re missing the point. The country never belonged to us. It has always belonged to a small ruling elite, who have and probably always will promote their interests at the expense of ours.
News flash: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll are three entirely separate phenomena. One can indulge in one without doing so in the other two. (Personally, I could do without the drugs, but that’s just me). In any event, yes, there was sexuality on the fairgrounds. What does one expect? Put a half-million young adults in a shared open space for three full days, and you’ll jolly well get some copulating, whether in sleeping bags or elsewhere. The huge turnout, by the way, was unintended.
If Elizabeth Whitcombe wanted to express her hatred of rock (not that she knows much of the subject), she should have come out honestly and stated her intention — perferably, in the pages of The New Criterion or The American Spectator. The Occidental Quarterly shouldn’t be publishing this sort of thing.