ABSTRACT

This chapter attempts the memories and meanings of Woodstock, to see how its myths and realities form part of past and present cultural politics, and explores the significance of it and Live Aid for the power of popular culture. Politics is part of performance as well as rhetoric and organization, and Woodstock provided a number of platforms for performing politics. 'Woodstock' lives, as do many events, as a website. What is intriguing about Woodstock websites is the aura of 'heritage' that pervades them. If the website memories of Woodstock are almost exclusively devoted to its utopian, life-changing power, the mass media represent it as an altogether more ambiguous phenomenon – a symbol of success and failure, of the aesthetically good and bad. The politics of Woodstock are undoubtedly confused and ambiguous, whether we talk about the memories it evokes, the legacies it left, or indeed its place in the history of the late 1960s.