Even if it's hard to take pity on people who expect to pocket several million dollars, you have to admit the organizers of Woodstock '94 have a thankless job. In more ways than one, the first Woodstock was an impossible act to follow. By bringing together 400,000 people who forever after thought of themselves as inspired outsiders present at the creation, the concert became a high-water mark of a tendency that had been building in American culture for decades. In the years right after World War II, there emerged from the bohemias of San Francisco, New York City and a few other metropolises a loose disposition, a convergence of moods, disaffections, ecstasies and unconventional conclusions, a willful refusal to act sensibly, that could be collected under the catchall term hip.
Though it was always a little hard to pin down, hip was a notion roomy enough to describe flower children in tie-dye as well as bikers in black leather, the impeccable cool of John Coltrane's sax as well as the jerky forward thrust of Abbie Hoffman. All of it was admissible on the principle that it represented a heartfelt rejection of the mainstream. The mainstream was understood to be all-powerful and wrong about everything: politics, art, religion, sex, drugs and music. It was deaf to the beat, blind to the truth and dressed by Penney's.
For those who attended the original Woodstock, it was possible to imagine that they were present at history's largest convergence of the privileged few, the hip minority. Of course, they saw it as the birth of Woodstock Nation, a giant step toward the hipping of the world at large.
It's going to be harder to think of next week's festival that way. Though the crowds will come determined to break whatever mold they are poured into, it won't be easy to escape the feeling that this time Woodstock will be history's largest convergence of the mass market. What else can you say about a gathering of the tribes that already has its own official refrigerator magnet, to say nothing of its own condom and kaleidoscope? Whose organizers . test-marketed the proposed lineup of bands to see which names would get maximum audience response? Which will be brought to you with the sponsorship of Pepsi, Haagen-Dazs and Apple computer, and sold to you via QVC's home- shopping channel?
If Woodstock '94 becomes a triumph of salesmanship over spirit, blame it on the curious times in which we now live. Hipness has become a national paradox, a special condition almost everyone seems to aspire to. And one that, thanks to a lot of shrewd marketing, almost everyone can fancy having achieved.
In the course of four decades, the poses and postures of hip have moved outward from the back rooms of a few cities to the great plains of America's cultural space. Ideas and style statements that 40 years ago might have languished for a while in jazz clubs and coffeehouses now move in nanoseconds from the dance clubs and gangsta corners. Through MTV and the trendier magazines, and whatever other express routes the mass media command, they get passed over to mass-marketers who shear off the rough edges and ship them to the malls. So body piercing and ambient technomusic and performance art and couture motorcycle boots and the huggie drug Ecstasy are shipped overnight throughout the merchandise mart that is America.