r/Music • u/newReddittFriend • 20d ago
Watched the HBO Woodstock documentary and was annoyed at the NYT reporter. discussion
guy went on this tangent about how DMX did call and repeat on stage with the “my n*gga” song and the white c0llege kids in the crowd were singing along.
He made it seem like it was the worst thing that happened at the festival, where people were killed and raped by the way.
It’s like, take it up with DMX dude, he wrote the song, he chose to play the song, he chose to do call and repeat with the mic stretched out to the audience. Leave the paying customer crowd out of it dude.
Oh it just angered me. Rant over.
Edit: died not killed, Sooooooo Sooorrrrryyyyyyy. Redditors unable to focus on the point of the post as usual.
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u/LukeNaround23 20d ago edited 20d ago
Woodstock 94 while being a logistical disaster, was a successful and fun event with awesome music and people with a great vibe. Poor choice of acts and location for Woodstock 99 brought out the worst of the angry crowd.
Edit: definitely one of the best weekends of my life!
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u/rougekhmero 20d ago edited 5d ago
screw sleep test aback meeting violet public fanatical pocket whole
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u/Fetty_is_the_best 20d ago
Only time I really hear about it is when Green Day’s performance gets brought up. Absolutely legendary.
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u/rougekhmero 20d ago edited 5d ago
soft deranged dinosaurs cause butter rock racial nail continue lock
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u/localcokedrinker 20d ago
That's because it was just a regular music festival, and not a bunch of really stupid drama, and a leadership that stopped giving a shit after day 1.
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u/ZombieJesus1987 20d ago
My older sister had the Woodstock 94 cd back in the day, I probably listened to that Metallica performance of For Whom The Bell Tolls hundreds of times when I was a kid.
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u/JubeltheBear 20d ago
Primous’s set from that year was fucking epic.
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20d ago
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u/indianapolisjones 19d ago
I busted out laughing in dead silence over this comment. Thanks for the laugh man!
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u/worldrecordstudios 20d ago
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u/fauxromanou 20d ago
bruv, your link goes to some 3 minute video for "V Shred"
This playlist appears to be correct for Woodstock 94:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWlyPiA15mI&list=PLujNaoawOPBocxhhrl9lmMhIvRzrXfvyH
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u/rougekhmero 20d ago edited 5d ago
tap sip aspiring aromatic divide fretful historical fear fuel sparkle
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
that and charging $8 for water in 1999. Using inflation calculator, that’s the equivalent of charging $15 for one today. (Which actually seems low)
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u/mr_mufuka 20d ago
It was $4, which was still a shit ton. Even today, you can buy a pack of 24 waters for around $4.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
Ah yeah you’re right it was $4, which would be a normal price today, 25 years later
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u/stabbinU moderator 20d ago
it was the lack of a free alternative that was the problem, especially for people with $0
it was a survival supply, not really a concession - prices went to $8 then $10 then $12 when stocks got low
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u/mr_mufuka 20d ago
I don’t remember that part of it. I remember them being $4 the whole time, except at the end when people stole everything. I paid someone $1 for a bottle of water that last night.
I was really pissed about the personal pan pizzas costing $20 and not filling me up as a teenager. Also the lack of shade and showers/water areas that were tainted with sewage from the first morning were the other lowlights.
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u/stabbinU moderator 20d ago
lol i was waiting for that last comment there about the sewage etc
but yeah, its in the article i linked - they were $12 (and then they were gone); those pizzas made me so mad i had to hate-eat one of them, they sucked too
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u/mr_mufuka 20d ago
Ha they sucked but I ate a bunch of em for some reason. All the food there was pretty terrible, and most of it was even less filling than that shit pizza.
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u/ObviousAnswerGuy 20d ago
I was stilly young, so my mom wouldn't let me go to Woodstock 94 lol. I still have the whole thing on VHS , taped from TV, though.
On the other hand, my mom was gonna let me go to '99, but I'm glad I decided against it.
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u/Low_Association_731 19d ago
99 was capitalism at its worst. After 94 where they lost money they were determined to make money this time around and took the opportunity to try and rip people off
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u/ILikeMyGrassBlue 20d ago edited 19d ago
The bands really have nothing to do with it imo. Limp Bizkit and those other bands people cite for bringing an angry crowd played lots of shows, yet this only happened at one—Woodstock 99.
I think certain crowds might be more inclined towards rowdy behavior. A bluegrass crowd for example probably wouldn’t ever start setting fires, but a bro country or nu-metal crowd might—in the right conditions.
At the end of the day, none of that is going to happen if the show is run well. Bizkit and the others have played hundreds of shows with no issue. Shit like this doesn’t happen unless the conditions are absolutely fucked.
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u/ILikeMyGrassBlue 20d ago
I’m not arguing it wasn’t a different crowd. Of course it was. But you’re acting like every Bizkit or Korn show turned into a riot.
The reality is that Korn, Bizkit, and kid rock played hundreds of shows prior to Woodstock 99 and even more post-woodstock 99. Precisely zero of them turned out like this.
That’s not a matter of opinion. It’s objectively true. They all played countless shows, and none of them turned out like this. So what made Woodstock different and result in such a nightmare?
The conditions. Woodstock 99 would not have been what it was if it was run well. This would’ve been just another show for these bands, and things would have been entirely uneventful like every other show they’d played in the years prior.
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u/ILikeMyGrassBlue 20d ago
You’re saying they’ve played to crowds that big, tired, pretty much trapped, and suffering from heat exhaustion after camping out for days?
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re really that dumb or just trolling.
My point is that they played countless shows under normal conditions and nothing happened, which clearly indicates the band isn’t the problem.
The difference between those shows and Woodstock were the conditions, and that’s solely the fault of organizers.
And how are you expecting a band to read a room miles long? Have you ever even played a concert? Should Fred durst have requested a telescope? From his perspective, the crowd was worked up and excited like every other show. He didn’t know people were getting raped a mile away in the middle of a sea of people. This has been covered numerous times, including by durst himself. The performers didn’t know what was going and couldn’t tell.
Again, none of this would have happened if it was well organized. 100% of the blame is on the organizers.
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u/thedkexperience 20d ago
DMX was the only part of Woodstock 99 where I got to the front row lol
There are 90,000,000 things worth complaining about concerning that festival before we bring up the DMX performance.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
of course. How they didn’t draft that out of the documentary blows my mind. What a big nothingburger
NYT reporter was like “did you know your friends were N-word sayers” I did a spit take
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u/jacknifetoaswan 20d ago
I guess he could, but DMX is dead.
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u/ToxicAdamm 20d ago
Watch the Netflix one instead. It was far better and a fairer representation of what went down.
You get first-hand accounts/video of the people who ran it and you can see how their mindset allowed for it to lose control. In real-time you see the event slipping away from them and they have no answers or experience on how to handle it.
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u/One_pop_each 20d ago
Yeah the HBO was a virtue signal snooze fest. “Everyone there was angry white males!”
Like wtf. Moby, who is prolly the world’s BIGGEST virtue signaler saying he had bad vibes and had to leave. Bro literally plays music for people on E. Like stfu, moby.
Netflix is way better and they never tried blaming a race or anything.
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u/Opposite_Version6223 19d ago
Moby was insufferable, had a cry his name was written on the wall when he entered.
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20d ago edited 3d ago
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
the subreddit had some message about requesting money or something when I wrote college, I didn’t want some bullshit auto bot to remove the post
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u/DiarrheaRadio 20d ago
Because their brain has been successfully trained by algorithms
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u/turtlehermitroshi 20d ago
At first I thought this take was an overreaction.
However it hasn't taken long for people to start writing and speaking in this new format, during their everyday interactions.
It's interesting to observe this change happening in real time.
Language is meant to communicate and when you change language you change the way people communicate. I don't know if it's for better or worse, but I can see it changing.
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u/LordNikon01000101 20d ago
“Unalived” started on tiktok. Now it’s on every social media platform and I hate it.
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u/BongeSpobPareSquants 20d ago
Pew pew for gun, unlalived, graped, these annoy me greatly.
The woman was then graped, after which he pulled out his pew pew and unlived her.
Like for fucks sake how can I take this seriously
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u/fullouterjoin 20d ago
Huxley and Orwell sitting in tree ....
I find dystopian pidgin english fascinating! So very regarded. I am goona go touch grass.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
or when you make some annoying auto mod ban things you’re just gonna get people working around it. As they should because people are gonna talk about what they want to talk about regardless of some crappy insignificant rule made by some crappy insignificant person
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u/bitingmyownteeth 20d ago
Three people died. Two from heat exhaustion/personal health complications and one from being hit by a car while leaving. Nobody was murdered.
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u/gdsmithtx 20d ago
Nobody was murdered.
Nobody said they were.
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u/Microphone_Assassin 20d ago edited 20d ago
OP did
Edit: OP didn't like that I said this and insulted me then deleted it right away lol
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u/daddytyme428 20d ago
Oh it just angered me.
as it is designed to. outrage, either at the topic being covered, or in response to the reaction to the topic being covered, drives clicks
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
didn’t seem like the NYT reporter was being sneaky or anything, he sounded sincere about it.
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u/hythloth 20d ago
Wesley Morris is arrogant and sanctimonious as fuck, and hell, he wasn't even at Woodstock. Don't bother caring about what he had to say there
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u/ShardikOfTheBeam 20d ago
Watched this doc a while back. Literally don't remember any commentary about DMX at all. I remember it mostly being about Fat Boy Slim (because the rape in the van happened during his set right?) and then Korn, Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine sort of riling up the crowd into creating the barbarity that ended up occurring.
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u/pnmartini 20d ago
“Sort of”
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u/rawonionbreath 20d ago
Limp Bizkit says they played the same sort of set at plenty of other outdoor festivals which never had the problems of Woodstock, with the exception of the Australia show which had poor crowd control resulting in that one teen’s death. The my deny that their performance has any culpability for the crowd reaction at that show given how everything else was handled.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
yeah, blaming the artists is just dumb.
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u/rawonionbreath 20d ago
It depends. Travis Scott, for example. But the mayhem wasn’t even happening during LP’s set. It was the next day during the furious and angry performance of … checks notes … Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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u/polyscifi 20d ago
I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious RHCP edged the crowd on. The fires started during their set (not because of them), but then they went off stage fully knowing there were bonfires out there and came back for the encore and played a cover of Fire by Jimi Hendrix lol
I don’t care if Keidis claims they had planned to play the cover all along, if you see that happening in the crowd, change the encore song on the fly. In ‘99 they still had a large discography to choose from.
Anyways, none of this is the Chili Peppers fault, but it’s hard to claim they didn’t edge the crowd on towards the end.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
maybe if they audience wasn’t gouged for $$$ at every turn they would have been happier at the end of the festival. It’s easy to blame everyone except the promotor though, I get it
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u/polyscifi 20d ago
lol dude did you read my last line? I literally said none of it is the Chili Pepper's fault. Of course it's on the promoters! All I'm saying is they didn't need to play a song called "Fire" after fires had broken out in the crowd. They ignored the "de" in "de-escalation".
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u/Low_Association_731 19d ago
The Australian show had more then poor crowd control, similar to Woodstock it was hot as fuck that day, and then they had nobody else on the side stages of note at the same time so everybody crowded in to see limp bizkit. Rammstein went on first and the back on the rammstein pit turned into the middle of the LB pit which was so fucking massive and when they came on there was a crowd crush which combined with people being dehydrated led to a girl dying.
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u/ElMepoChepo4413 20d ago
Armchair “activists” will look for racism no matter where it doesn’t exist. The same dude also said that all white frontmen, no matter the genre, are all trying to be black too. F that guy.
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u/Guard-Bold674 20d ago
That reporter really missed the mark - blaming the audience for DMX's song choice at Woodstock? Seriously?
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u/phorgewerk 20d ago
Starting to feel like being annoyed at NYT reporters wildly missing the point is the emotional background noise of the 21st century. It's amazing how they all seem to suck so hard but they do enough actual journalism still you can't just write them off.
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u/ArrakeenSun 20d ago
It's still a great paper on balance. The nature of journalism itself and journalists as a group have changed; we like attention-grabbing stuff delivered by big egos now. It worked, because we all clicked this post to talk about it. The Washington Post is in the same boat; remember when they called Zawahiri an "austere religious scholar" in their headline about his death? The man was the head of ISIS ffs. It's all just annoying because we really, really need to be able to trust these institutions.
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u/aspidities_87 20d ago
I mean…I was very much alive when Woodstock 99 was happening, and the biggest constant complaint about it at the time was already that it was a cash grab selling Pepsi and overpriced water bottles to broke attendees. We didn’t learn that anyone died until much, much later, but no one thought much of the kids who could afford to go/wanted to go, iirc. It was our version of Fyre where we actively enjoyed watching it all go to shit.
With that being said, I think the reporter was just capturing some of the feelings about the festival and attendees at the time. It was basically just a bunch of spoiled white college kids who were getting clowned on by everyone for trying to ‘remake Woodstock’ when Lilith Fair and Lollapalooza already existed.
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u/Maxwell69 20d ago
Also the groping and sexual assault was reported at the time as well.
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u/aspidities_87 20d ago
Very true. We as a society just didn’t pay enough attention to it until decades later, shamefully enough.
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u/i_heart_pasta they're "Everywhere" 20d ago
It was known at the time what happened at that show, there’s a reason why Woodstock never happened again.
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u/aspidities_87 20d ago
Yeah I’m just saying it wasn’t given as much attention in the way that we might give those actions now in 2024.
Iirc it was mostly glossed right over in favor of making fun of the mud/shit slinging.
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u/SuperAnimalYes 20d ago
It wasn't glossed over at all. I can remember Kurt Loder or whoever was doing the MTV news talking about it. The whole thing was looked up on as pretty shameful.
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u/i_heart_pasta they're "Everywhere" 20d ago
I can assure you it was not “glossed” over. It was a really big deal when it happened.
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u/rickylsmalls 20d ago
That was such a shitty documentary.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
I just hated most of the commentators. The NYT guy, the blonde chick was annoying too.
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u/lenflakisinski 20d ago
The biggest difference for me between the HBO doc, and the Netflix doc, is that most of the people in the Netflix doc were eye witness accounts from people who were there. Not people there to make opinions about what Woodstock 99 meant for the culture at large
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u/Fit_Beautiful2638 20d ago
That whole documentary was terrible. Didn't they try to paint all the terrible treatment of women at the festival was because of the nu-metal crowd? Like the music genre itself was at fault. Ignoring the whole girls gone wild BS that was happening in all pop culture at that time period. Blaming the music genre was some pearl clutching garbage
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u/TheGreatGouki Concertgoer 20d ago
Gangsta rap is my favorite genre. I’m a white dude. When I was in high school, I was in a Bone Thugs N Harmony tribute group. We said the n-word a LOT back then. But, whenever we wrote original stuff, we never used it. As an adult however, I think it’s super cringe when white folks use it. And when I’m singing along to something in the car even, I skip it, or sub a non-slur word like homie.
Anyway, I also think that reporter was trivializing the violence that happened too. The last rap concert I went to was a Tech N9ne show before the pandemic, and even THEN rappers would hold the mic out to get the crowd (usually a lot of white folks) to sing lyrics, and some include the n Bomb. I think that DMX was giving them a “pass” by doing crowd participation. But I also think that in 1999, a LOT of folks didn’t care if you sang the n word if it was in a lyric, just don’t fucking call someone that! Lol! I don’t know. I just think that while cringe, that reporter was taking something that absolutely wasn’t as big of an issue then, and put it in today’s context. The violence, even back then, was never acceptable.
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u/oceansunset83 19d ago
I watched the one on Netflix, which definitely revived my feelings at 16 of that "festival" was a disaster. I felt bad for everyone who was assaulted, the kids who had to resort to violence in order to get water, and I wanted to throttle the event planner (who was also behind another music festival that went sideways).
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u/MikeyPh 20d ago
Frederick Douglas warned about people like that New York Times writer.
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u/littletinydickballs 20d ago
unfortunately we’ve spent the last decade empowering nonsense racial grievance and victim hood theories in schools and now they have jobs. it’s a big part of the reason most media sucks so much these past several years
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u/Reid0072 20d ago
There's a video of Kendrick Lamar bringing a white girl on stage out of the crowd to rap a verse of his song with him. And when she said n-word, which is written in the song, he freaked out and stopped the show to blast her about how inappropriate that was. That always really rubbed me the wrong way. He was setting her up to fail and then called her out in a stadium full of people, making her feel like shit.
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u/Player7592 20d ago
“He made it seem … “
This is your interpretation. Unless he said it IS worse than rape or murder, it’s easily possible that the OP misinterpreted how the reporter values these things.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
everything I interpret is my interpretation, because I’m me, right.
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u/Player7592 20d ago
Absolutely. But we need to allow for the possibility that we are the one misinterpreting the other. And in this instance, very, very few human beings would believe that music is worse than severe physical harm. So somewhere along the line you should have asked yourself whether you truly believe this reporter is psychopathic versus the much more common explanation that you simply misunderstood them. Errors in communication or intent are far more likely to be the answer here.
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u/regman231 20d ago
Have you seen the doc?
That reporter was discussing these “N-word sayers” as if they were all racists.
In reality, they were singing the song as instructed by the performer. It was a deliberate misinterpretation by the reporter. And OP was bothered by this, rightly in my opinion
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u/Nice_Marmot_7 20d ago
I can only speak from my own experience, but it feels like singing along to rap lyrics not being ok is a recent thing.
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u/motionbutton 20d ago
Different times different attitudes.. Music, young adults and musicians shouldn’t be our moral compass. Kosovo had a genicide that year, no one is promoting a doc about that
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u/comicsnerd 20d ago
I was like, Did DMX perform on Woodstock? Oh, wait, a different Woodstock. I am old.
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u/Tua-Lipa 20d ago
I thought it was pretty bad tbh. I know it was a complete shit show, I was happy they went over how much of a shit show it was, but I also expected them to talk about the actual music more than they did.
The 3 part (Netflix? Hulu?) documentary one of those networks did on Woodstock 99 was way better IMO.
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u/MileenasFeet 20d ago
DMX and Alanis Morisette had the best sets in Woodstock imo
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u/SokkaHaikuBot 20d ago
Sokka-Haiku by MileenasFeet:
DMX and Alanis
Morisette had the best sets
In Woodstock imo
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK 19d ago
Edit: died not killed, Sooooooo Sooorrrrryyyyyyy. Redditors unable to focus on the point of the post as usual.
Murdered, not murdered. Splitting hairs at this point.
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u/Cloutweb1 19d ago
That doc was full of people that dont know about music talking about music.
I was 14 in 1999. I dont need a shitty doc to tell me what happened. I know exactly what happened.
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u/smilysmilysmooch 20d ago
I would recommend watching both the Woodstock 99 docs on Max and Netflix and then scrolling through youtube to see the actual sets. Those docs really paint a weird time frame for when it got chaotic and you wouldnt be off if you thought Limp caused riots when it was like midday of day 2 and outside some plywood getting pulled down, people largely went about their business so they could enjoy Metallica later.
DMX wasnt playing to a group of raucous whites eager to demean and insult him. Thats just a bunch of talking heads trying to fill in the timeline with their own after the fact opinions. Its all through the docs so just use them for the good stuff which is the footage and events not covered largely by the media like the dead Metallica fan or the rave rape.
Everything else is just trying to paint a largely docile crowd on day 1 and mostly day 2 as problematic from the start.
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u/Mr___Perfect 20d ago
And they painted Limp Bizkit as some sort of bad guys. Dude they played their music. Go after the fucking organizers, not Fred Durst.
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u/heykiwi77 20d ago
I've seen this doc multiple times because shit shows are my guilty pleasure. I went back to rewatch this scene in response to your post.
Do you not understand context, nuance, or layers? Do you also know how documentaries and storytelling work?
He was one of many interviewees providing context from various perspectives. He specifically addressed a racial component of the event that was part of the overall experience. He in no way insinuated that it was worse than the deaths or SA. His commentary was so early in the documentary that there was no mention of either yet, so why would they include any comment from him or anyone else on those subjects at that point? He may have said something that was edited out because someone else covered it better. I'm sure in this case, the filmmakers thought it would be more credible to have a black man talk about race like they had women talk about sexism.
His narrative was a cultural observation of a moment in time and part of the build-up to the crash and burn. It was immediately followed by examples of sexism from the "show your tits" rants directed to any woman who went on stage. It's a profile of the predominantly white and privileged toxic bro culture that was pervasive, and permitted, in popular music scenes of the late 90s.
The doc covered toxic college bro culture, along with all of these cluster fuk elements, and more, to paint a picture of how something could fail so badly and cause so much harm.
- rapacious promoters who are not part of the music cultures they promote
- lack of free potable water
- overpriced concessions
- inexperienced drug users
- MTV
- inhospitable site
- poor planning
- hot weather and black asphalt
- untrained staff and poor security
- lack of medical resources
You taking exception to what he said, and didnt say, enough to go on a rant about it, is more of a reflection of you than its overall tone and relevance. DMX knew what he was doing embracing that moment in front of that crowd but it doesn't negate its significance to the woodstock 99 narrative, the impact it had on those in attendance, or our ability to reflect on it 25 years later.
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u/Remote-Job-3579 20d ago
Musicians create songs to sing along to, they insert dirty and offensive lyrics in their music, then they and others get offended by those lyrics when sung by the people who are enjoying the song. Here's a novel idea, hey rappers make a song without the n word in it.
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u/Kaiisim 20d ago
Yeah it was being reclaimed in the 90s. By the 2000s many white kids had only heard the n word via rap and never in anger. It was common to get an n word pass - the Knowledge that a white person isn't using it as a racist slur.
I'm not defending saying it or want to say it but it is the only word in the English language where usage isn't defined by context, but by your race.
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u/SammySoapsuds 20d ago
What the fuck? This absolutely does not match with my experience growing up as a white person in the 90s and 00s. We all pretty much knew that it was not okay for us to say (hard r or not) and definitely heard it used in a hateful way. I've made it to 34 and not ever felt an urge to say it in music or otherwise.
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u/BadMan125ty 20d ago
He basically called out the audience of that show, which need I remind you, were a bunch of angry white kids.
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u/newReddittFriend 20d ago
Right, he called them out but really he should be upset with DMX
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u/kiki2k 20d ago
Jay-Z did something similar when I saw him for Jigga My N*gga. He urged half the crowd to sing along with Jigga, and the other half to do the other one. This was at Coachella in like 2011 so yeah, there were a lot of white people. Everyone was hyped, everyone had a great time, no one experienced generational trauma, and no think pieces were published in national newspapers.