We’ll never really know what was a huge cultural event until many years after the fact, but what event of the past say 40 years is going to be the equivalent of being at Woodstock?
A couple of guesses:
If you’re talking about a single big event that a lot of people personally attended, and will probably claim to have attended in the years to come, it’ll be Obama’s inauguration.
I’m not sure 9/11 should really be likened to Woodstock. The single most consequential event of the past decade, sure, but not really a cultural happening per se.
No one’s going to give a shit about 1 or 3 in a few decades. Remembering number two is a big deal, but not the way Woodstock is; obviously, the closer analogy would be things like Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination. Number four is a moment to remember as well, but it’s not a Woodstock-type “I was there” moment (unless I suppose you actually were there); it’s like “Everyone in the world at the time was equally aware of it”.
So, I dunno. None of these things are really like Woodstock. Number 1 and 3 are the one’s that are actually related to popular culture, but watching a TV show or a movie that huge numbers of people across the country watched from the comfort of home or their local theatre… that’s not really got the same cachet. Number 2 and 4 are the things that are more historically memorable and politically relevant, but that’s not really the same thing as Woodstock either.
The way I see it, to be Woodstock, you have to be the sort of thing where large numbers of people have to lie after the fact about having been there because not that many people actually were…
?!?
Woodstock wasn’t even the Woodstock of its own generation. Big ass concert? Yes. World changing event? No.
I dunno. Attending (or watching live on TV) Live Aid? One of the Live 8 concerts?
Being at the insipid, riotous Woodstock '99 (many thanks, Korn and Limp Bizkit, you fucking mook rock cretins)?
The yang to this ying question should be “What will be our Altamount”?
This generation (and future generations) will not have anything like Woodstock, because getting together in person is not something they need or want to do. Being face-to-face in the flesh at a live event isn’t something this generation values or understands.
All the events suggested by the OP were media events, not in-person events.
I was on the internet before everyone else.
Mhmm.
Katrina.
If by Woodstock you mean “big-ass important event that everyone will remember being somewhere watching it at the time,” then you mean the 9/11 bombing. Everything else is cheesecake at best.
Pearl Harbor -> JFK -> 9/11
Absolutely. Nothing else even comes close.
Monterey '67, perhaps?
I’d say those two festivals were culturally significant, at the very least.
No generation will ever match the self-righteous egocentrism of the children of the 60s. Today’s young people largely know better than to think that doing a lot of hallucinogens at a concert constitutes some sort of transformative social statement, and usually lack the “the entirety of human history is either a prelude or an epilogue to the birth of my high school graduating class” gene entirely.
The way things are going, it could be more like the people who actually were at #4 will start claiming they weren’t…
Woodstock gave rise to the term Woodstock Generation as a loose term for the counter culture.
I don’t really hear any of the choices in the OP working like that, except mabe the Star Wars Generation as shorthand for the modern media/collector culture.
Obama Generation? Possibly. Far too early to tell.
Y’see - the whole point was that it wasn’t ‘egocentrism’. It was loving each other and ‘We Should Be Together’. Egocentrism was so '80s, dontchaknow.
Taking hallucinogens at a concert was transformative: you should have seen what society was like for us before we took them. It certainly changed our social scene.
I will sidestep the whole 9/11 issue; like other posters, I think of it as a different category.
For “pop culture phenomenon that defined an era” - well, I have long said that the internet is the rock music of today - e.g., it is the source of new thinking, and what parents are more concerned about in terms of not understanding the web the way their kids do - then I would say:
Or I would go with the ascendence of video games as a dominant category, e.g., the blockbuster release of video games like Grand Theft Auto
My $.02
9/11 is more analogous to the JFK shooting than Woodstock. EVERYBODY remembers what they were doing when they heard.
Live Aid was the Woodstock of Generation X. I don’t think Gen Y had one.