Radicals saw Woodstock as commodified containment of the counterculture.

Evidence

Woodstock occasioned considerable analysis—politicos initially saw it as the contrivance of “rock imperialists,” one more way to rip off the counterculture. The week of the festival, Jean-Jacques Lebel warned the readers of Rat that just as Hair, the Living Theatre, and Dionysus in ’ offered “symbolic freedom, to be bought & sold, to be watched or consumed as a commodity,” the so-called Peace & Music festival “plays a precise role in the anti-rebellion strategy of the Police State … They must sell us high-price tickets to their cultural penitentiary and ram their merchandise down our throats. They must exert physical control over us.” … The Motherfuckers took credit for cutting the fences at Woodstock—and, according to Rat, sent scouting parties to raid food caches and bring the plunder back to “liberated campsites”—but as if to prove Lebel’s point, Woodstock gave the Community a designated political area called “Movement City.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1468

Categorization

• XREF: Thesis about avant-garde scenes being absorbed into markets directly echoes the book’s core subcultures-to-countercultures arc and the gentrification-as-commodification frame.
• SEED: Could feed an essay contrasting internal radical critiques of commodification (Woodstock as ‘cultural penitentiary’) with the later real-estate-driven outcome — the critique was right but for the wrong reasons.