Woodstock, 1969: and the counterculture became a culture
Story By making rebellion not a political tool but an attitude, the American society of the spectacle has found a formidable tool to prosper and grow.
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Diving planes, whistling bombs, explosions ripping open the earth... At dawn on August 18, 1969, dressed all in white and blue in an end-of-the-world setting, Jimi Hendrix reenacted the war on his guitar. Facing him and his new band, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, the 25,000 spectators who remained among the hundreds of thousands who came to the Woodstock festival were not dreaming. Despite the drugs, the alcohol, and the fatigue, they heard a hallucinatory echo of the conflict unfolding in Vietnam. As a final provocation, these strident sounds burst from the "Star-Spangled Banner," the anthem of the United States. The young man of African-American and Cherokee descent, two minorities martyred by Uncle Sam, did not replay the music supposed to unite the people: he reinvented it, kneaded it, twisted it.
After seeing dozens of artists and just as many pieces of bravery parade, this youth has just found its symbol, its raised fist, its middle finger addressed to the rest of the country. In particular to Richard Nixon, the new tenant of the White House, in Washington, guilty in their eyes of having sent more than 500,000 soldiers to flounder in an unjust war, and to the triumphant American way of life , a hated mixture of exact capitalism…
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