Meg Ryan. Courtesy Electric Forest.
The hatchet-faced Michigan state troopers stood in immaculate uniforms with arms folded, marking the turnoff from the main road to the Electric Forest dance music festival entrance near the town of Rothbury. They didn’t return our eager waves from the car.
But inside the festival grounds any semblance of conformity disappeared. Amid the fields and woodlands a heady mix of escapism and hedonism was in the air, compounded by the near omni-present smell of marijuana that didn’t let up for four days of dance-music mayhem, accompanied by the rapturous beaming faces of revellers, many of whom were high on more than weed.
For many who lived through it—and even among the generations that followed, including myself—America’s counterculture peaked at the end of the 1960s at a “high water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” as Hunter S. Thompson described it his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson has been joined by many others lamenting the fading of resistance to an increasingly market-driven society beholden to risk-averse orthodoxy.
At Electric Forest, though, I glimpsed America’s counterculture lurking under the relentless pounding of the profit margin gospel. Plenty of young Americans are out there, set on sticking it to the Man and corporate culture. This includes millennials, those young things born between 1981 and 1996, and much maligned as the “snowflake generation.”
Setting hard chronological boundaries between generations can muddy reality, especially for those born right around a dividing line. But I can’t deny how my two years off the millennial starting point, and placing me as a Generation X-er, translate into an entirely different trajectory. At the same time, there’s much about millenials that chimes with my values, aspirations, and fears. Hence my exploration at the festival.
Coming as I do, from a repressed and class-bound United Kingdom, it has always struck me how an element of American society—typically the ruling class, but also extending throughout the middle class—can seem terrified about what was unleashed when America broke away from my country in 1776. America’s seemingly ever-burgeoning police powers and draconian laws appear a continued attempt to put that genie back into the bottle.
It has always struck me how an element of American society—typically the ruling class—can seem terrified about what was unleashed when America broke away from my country in 1776.
“Welcome to the most unfree free country in the world,” I was told in 2010 by an off-duty U.S. soldier during a night out in San Antonio. I was halfway through a month-long road trip around the country, and despite the soldier’s cautionary words, America still appeared the standard bearer of unlicensed freedom.
Back in 1968, the counterculture and establishment clashed notably during three days of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Those clashes were a physical manifestation of a wider ideological collision, with a youth revolt steeped in psychedelia and free sex pushing for peace, equal rights, and love for Mother Earth against a mechanistic, greedy, and soulless modern society.
That society had, in the eyes of those embracing the counterculture’s creed, reached its dreadful apotheosis by engineering the possibility of nuclear armageddon, while the ongoing Vietnam War served as a daily reminder of the dreadful harm that could still be unleashed by a remorseless government.
Such episodes of determined and sustained resistance directly against the State became relatively rare during the decades that followed. In 1999, the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Seattle was overshadowed by massive street protests voicing opposition to neoliberal World Trade Organization “free-trade” policies, and advocating pro-labor, anti-capitalistic and environmental agendas. In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement took over New York’s Zuccotti Park, and spread to cities around the country, to protest the dramatic levels of economic inequality.
Since then there has also been the Women's Marches protesting President Trump’s election, Antifa protests against white supremacists, and the March for Science movement advocating for equitable, evidence-based policies that benefit all. But of the more recent protest movements, arguably only Black Lives Matter has come closest to the anti-Vietnam War protests of 1968 in terms of scale and sustained national coordination across all demographics to force the U.S. government to take action over an issue in which it is implicitly involved.
“In 1968 [the police] went in with tear gas and billy clubs—today it’s hard to imagine what might happen.”
“Now there are a range of surveillance powers to increase the intimidation of organized street protestors, while the explicit militarization and increased lethality of the police has been an ongoing issue,” laments University of Texas history professor James Galbraith. He attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a 16-year-old with his delegate and floor leader father, having also witnessed riots in Paris and Prague earlier that year as Europe was caught up in the prevailing mood of rebellion.
“In 1968 [the police] went in with tear gas and billy clubs—today if there was a similar situation it’s hard to imagine what might happen.”
Given that context, perhaps it’s no wonder that millennials are taking a more subtle if not sporadic approach to protesting controversial topics, especially in the public space. Among the numerous placards held aloft at the music festival, I saw few that made any political allusions I recognized. A majority referenced “Krusty Krab Funfair,” a meme based on the cartoon show in which SpongeBob SquarePants unwittingly goes on strike, perhaps suggesting that protest can be a good time, which at least would be some sort of call to arms. But being on the wrong side of 1981, I had to ask—the placards appear to have more to do with simply channeling nostalgia for the 2000s.
This understated—and for me disappointing—approach to politics included the musicians. Rarely did one of the electronic dance music giants, including Rezz, Malaa, Jeremy Olander, Jauz, Chris Lake, and Blackgummy, choose to speak out from behind the turntable decks on anything topical—other than cheering marijuana and drugs. And the style of EDM, typically a wall of discordant noise underpinned by a relentless baseline, could be said to be commentary enough on these turbulent, jarring times we live in. I did hear Childish Gambino’s controversial 2018 rap song “This is America,” which highlights and critiques the cruelty and oppression visited on African Americans by white society.
Meg Ryan. Courtesy Electric Forest.
Millennials are certainly not afraid of standing out, however. Sartorial choices ranged from medieval-style hoods and cloaks to sci-fi style—I often felt I was in a scene from the TV series Game of Thrones or from the film Blade Runner—to frightening mankinis. I felt distinctly staid and unimaginative.
But such was the all embracing and welcoming vibe emanating from the collected masses that I didn’t feel judged. I was free to be as ordinary looking as I wanted, while vicariously empowered by the audacity of others. With their Pew-designated “confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change” attitudes, millennials often make for very good company, I’ve noticed. One example of how millennials are standing up to the Man might be their embracing of the gig economy. “My generation values time more, so we aren’t willing to sacrifice that just for a guaranteed paycheck,” I was told by 28-year-old Matt, an army veteran in the tent next to mine, who had just quit his IT job to freelance. A recent 2017 study reports that overall self-employment in the U.S. is likely to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, with millennials leading the way and predicted to constitute 42 percent of these self-employed strivers.
Whether it’s the pursuit of freedom or because it just isn’t an option, they are hopping between jobs and embracing lower pay in return for being able to refashion an existence less codified by the rules of 9-5.
“What an amazing place this is—everyone is so friendly, helping each other out, sharing food and camping stuff,” reflected one reveller. “It makes you wonder why people can’t be like this all the time in society.”
The good vibes managed to even percolate through to the stern state troopers: I saw two return fist bumps offered by smiling dancing merry makers. The Establishment is, after all, still human.
For all the individuality and free spiritism on display, it all occurred under the umbrella of a very professional, well-run business operation generating a lot of money from the 40,000 attending. My basic general admission ticket cost $350. There were much pricier admission options.
For all the individuality and free spiritism on display, it all occurred under the umbrella of a very professional, well-run business operation generating a lot of money.
And though we were embracing a rustic simple camping life, the technological combination of sound, lighting, and visuals at each of the seven main stages was astonishing. As one danced with the masses, all of us facing the same way, equally enthralled, it was hard to differentiate between whether one was participating in a moment of wonderful solidarity and humanity or succumbing to a brainwashed cult.
I like to think it was more the former, but it’s hard not to confront one of the reasons today’s counterculture, especially its manifestation in the rise of the so-called hipster, comes in for much mockery. Hipster “unconventionality” is often accompanied by a well-paid technology job, a wonderful apartment, and keeping family and friends proud and adoring while maintaining your avant-garde rebellious pretensions. It certainly all this feels a long way from the type of hipster Norman Mailer praised in 1957. In “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” he defined his hero as “a philosophical psychopath,” whose role was to test the fear-soaked conformity of the time by rejecting “that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness.”
But every generation must push back within the context pertinent to its moment, which often means having to partly go along with the ordeal. At least you can earn a living—admittedly only just—without turning into a wage slave. And some millennials are using that flexibility to head to Standing Rock or to join nationwide anti-gun demonstrations (those historic Women's Marches were coordinated by a group of millennial women). Some go even further: DeRay McKesson quit his well-paying job to join the Black Lives Matter protests after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer.
By the end of the festival I felt like, as the saying goes: “The kids are all right.” Millennials are typically empathetic, more tolerant of racial and sexual differences, civic minded and collaborative—hence the moniker “generation nice.” Our tough and often brutalizing world can always do with more of those sorts of virtuous attributes.
“I know that as hard as I work — and I work very hard — I very well may fail. And it’s liberating to know that,” says one millenial interviewed by the New York Times. It’s a wise attitude straight out of the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers playbook. Maybe we can all learn something from their brand of countercultural compromise.
“Be careful, you’re about to discover everything they told you is a lie,” one festival reveler told me about a tiny piece of paper I’d just placed under my tongue—a first, done for the sake of journalistic investigation, clearly, but also a rebellious act, to decide for myself about whether to trust those going against the grain, even when they are younger.