“We Don’t Give a Fuck and We Won’t Ever Give a Fuck”:
What My Generation Really Meant at Woodstock '99
I told my mom I was going to a Christian concert.
She believed me. I was 19, and already pretty good at lying to survive the hell of living with her. What I actually did was pile into a van with my half-brother—ten years older than me, a dropout stoner-hippie who had once been valedictorian and on track to become an astrophysicist before LSD and shrooms rewrote his life trajectory—and his girlfriend and a couple of their friends, and drive to upstate New York for Woodstock ’99.
It felt like freedom. It felt rebellious. I was excited to see some of my favorites—Korn, Rage Against the Machine, DMX, Metallica. The soundtrack of a misfit kid who’d been bullied all through adolescence. Music that told me I wasn’t alone in my pain. Music that was loud, raw, angry, and mine.
But what I found when I got there wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t catharsis. It wasn’t even fun.
It was Hell.
Not just because of the triple-digit heat radiating off a tarmac that had no shade. Not just because of the overflowing porta-potties, the overpriced water, or the stench of sweat, piss, and rage. It was Hell because the moment I stepped into that crowd, I knew I wasn’t safe.
I was groped in the pit. Hands grabbing at me without consent. Strangers pressing against me, leering. I had come hoping to lose myself in the music I loved—music that had given me a lifeline when I felt like a freak, a loser, too weird for this world. But the bands that once made me feel powerful were now being screamed along to by the same types of dudes who called me slurs.
Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rage—they were supposed to be ours. They were supposed to be the music of the broken, the weird, the outcast. But at Woodstock '99, they belonged to the shirtless frat boys lighting shit on fire, filming girls without consent, screaming lyrics like “Break Stuff” like it was a manifesto. The anger wasn’t about injustice anymore. It was about dominance.
They weren’t singing for the misfits.
They were singing over us.
And they were winning.
It became clear almost immediately that this wasn’t the counterculture I had believed in. This wasn’t the tribe of weirdos and outcasts I’d dreamed of finding. This was a testosterone-fueled carnival of cruelty. It was rage with no target except whoever looked vulnerable. And I did. I still looked like a girl—AFAB, 19 years old, rail-thin, and visibly nervous in crowds. I hadn’t come out yet, not even to myself. I didn’t have the words trans man in my vocabulary yet. I just knew I hated the way people looked at me. I hated my body and the expectations that came with it.
And at Woodstock '99, that body was a target.
It wasn’t just the groping—it was the way it felt normalized. Like no one was surprised. Like that was just what happened to “girls” in the pit. There were men with cameras filming women showering in the open. Women being lifted above the crowd against their will, stripped of clothing and dignity. When DMX yelled “My N****s!” into the mic, twenty thousand white guys screamed it back like they owned it. When Limp Bizkit screamed “Break Stuff,” the crowd surged like a riot waiting for permission. When fires broke out on the last night, it felt inevitable.
The violence wasn’t a side effect. It was the culture.
And it hurt in a way I didn’t have language for yet. Because I had believed in this scene. I had clung to those songs like scripture. I was the kid who cried alone in their room, headphones blasting Korn’s “Faget”, not because I wanted to be violent—but because I already wasn’t what people wanted me to be. That song didn’t make me angry. It helped me survive.
But at Woodstock '99, I realized the music wasn’t ours anymore. Maybe it never was.
She believed me. I was 19, and already pretty good at lying to survive the hell of living with her. What I actually did was pile into a van with my half-brother—ten years older than me, a dropout stoner-hippie who had once been valedictorian and on track to become an astrophysicist before LSD and shrooms rewrote his life trajectory—and his girlfriend and a couple of their friends, and drive to upstate New York for Woodstock ’99.
It felt like freedom. It felt rebellious. I was excited to see some of my favorites—Korn, Rage Against the Machine, DMX, Metallica. The soundtrack of a misfit kid who’d been bullied all through adolescence. Music that told me I wasn’t alone in my pain. Music that was loud, raw, angry, and mine.
But what I found when I got there wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t catharsis. It wasn’t even fun.
It was Hell.
Not just because of the triple-digit heat radiating off a tarmac that had no shade. Not just because of the overflowing porta-potties, the overpriced water, or the stench of sweat, piss, and rage. It was Hell because the moment I stepped into that crowd, I knew I wasn’t safe.
I was groped in the pit. Hands grabbing at me without consent. Strangers pressing against me, leering. I had come hoping to lose myself in the music I loved—music that had given me a lifeline when I felt like a freak, a loser, too weird for this world. But the bands that once made me feel powerful were now being screamed along to by the same types of dudes who called me slurs.
Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rage—they were supposed to be ours. They were supposed to be the music of the broken, the weird, the outcast. But at Woodstock '99, they belonged to the shirtless frat boys lighting shit on fire, filming girls without consent, screaming lyrics like “Break Stuff” like it was a manifesto. The anger wasn’t about injustice anymore. It was about dominance.
They weren’t singing for the misfits.
They were singing over us.
And they were winning.
It became clear almost immediately that this wasn’t the counterculture I had believed in. This wasn’t the tribe of weirdos and outcasts I’d dreamed of finding. This was a testosterone-fueled carnival of cruelty. It was rage with no target except whoever looked vulnerable. And I did. I still looked like a girl—AFAB, 19 years old, rail-thin, and visibly nervous in crowds. I hadn’t come out yet, not even to myself. I didn’t have the words trans man in my vocabulary yet. I just knew I hated the way people looked at me. I hated my body and the expectations that came with it.
And at Woodstock '99, that body was a target.
It wasn’t just the groping—it was the way it felt normalized. Like no one was surprised. Like that was just what happened to “girls” in the pit. There were men with cameras filming women showering in the open. Women being lifted above the crowd against their will, stripped of clothing and dignity. When DMX yelled “My N****s!” into the mic, twenty thousand white guys screamed it back like they owned it. When Limp Bizkit screamed “Break Stuff,” the crowd surged like a riot waiting for permission. When fires broke out on the last night, it felt inevitable.
The violence wasn’t a side effect. It was the culture.
And it hurt in a way I didn’t have language for yet. Because I had believed in this scene. I had clung to those songs like scripture. I was the kid who cried alone in their room, headphones blasting Korn’s “Faget”, not because I wanted to be violent—but because I already wasn’t what people wanted me to be. That song didn’t make me angry. It helped me survive.
But at Woodstock '99, I realized the music wasn’t ours anymore. Maybe it never was.
I’ve read studies in recent years that say Gen X is more conservative than Boomers. That surprised a lot of people. It didn’t surprise me.
Because I remember those dudes at Woodstock '99. We were Gen X. We were supposed to be the generation that didn’t sell out. The generation that gave us riot grrrl, Nirvana, and zines. But by 1999, a whole chunk of us had traded in subversion for supremacy. “Fuck the system” became “I am the system.”
Eventually, the burnouts became landlords. The mosh pit bros became cops. The ones who yelled “fuck the man” became the man—just in camo shorts and backwards baseball caps.
You could draw a straight line from the Woodstock '99 crowd to the MAGA crowd today. That same faux-rebellion, that same white male grievance politics dressed up as "freedom." That same “we don’t give a fuck and we won’t ever give a fuck” energy—once a howl of misfit pain, now a shield for cruelty. When I saw the rise of MAGA in the 2010s, I wasn’t shocked. I was horrified, yes—but not surprised. Because I had seen the prototype, years earlier, on that cracked tarmac in Rome, New York. The shirtless bros with American flags as capes, drunk on their own self-righteousness, smashing water towers and screaming slurs and calling it rebellion.
They weren’t angry because they were oppressed. They were angry because the world didn’t kneel for them.
I think a lot about the boy I was back then—not yet out, not yet whole. Just a scared, sensitive kid who wanted somewhere to belong. Who wanted to be seen for who he was. Who thought music could be a sanctuary. And who ended up feeling erased in the very place he had hoped to be found.
I remember my brother and his friends trying to enjoy themselves, and me trying to blend in, trying not to cry. I remember forcing myself to stay in the crowd, even when my skin screamed run, because I had waited so long to see these bands live. I had dreamed about it. And now I was here, and it was a nightmare.
I remember Limp Bizkit on stage, the crowd foaming like a rabid dog, screaming along to “My Generation.” And I remember thinking:
This isn’t mine.
That’s the heartbreak. Not just the trauma. Not just the groping or the fear or the heat. The heartbreak was realizing that the things I’d built my identity around—rage, rebellion, music—had been co-opted by the same people who made me want to disappear in the first place.
And I didn’t have the language then to say: I’m trans. I’m autistic. I’m queer. I’m a survivor. I just knew I didn’t belong there.
I still don’t.
The dudebros at Woodstock '99 weren’t conservatives back then—not in the way people use the word now. They were “anti-establishment,” but only in the most self-serving way. They didn’t want to dismantle systems of oppression—they wanted those systems to serve them. They didn’t care about justice. They cared about power. The moment they realized the right-wing would hand it to them on a silver platter, they stopped pretending otherwise.
Woodstock '99 was the moment where the fake anti-establishment merged with real violence. Where rebellion became cosplay. Where the boys who hated authority decided they wanted to be it.
Gen X—so often romanticized as cynical but clear-eyed, too cool to be conned—sold out. Not all of us. But enough.
Enough to make a difference in elections. Enough to flood social media with anti-trans rhetoric and QAnon-lite conspiracy garbage. Enough to “both sides” their way into complicity while people like me were being legislated out of existence.
The kids who were supposed to smash the system became men who screamed “Make America Great Again” and voted for cruelty. Who confused rebellion with abuse. Who turned their backs on the weird, the vulnerable, the ones they used to headbang beside.
Fred Durst wore a red baseball cap on backwards. Flash forward to MAGA: red hats everywhere.
And all these years later, when I see someone like J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley railing against “elites” while trying to roll back human rights, I hear echoes of that crowd. I see the same smirk. The same smug cruelty. The same hunger to dominate.
When I saw the footage of J6, I immediately had PTSD flashbacks of Woodstock '99.
That’s the legacy of my generation.
We don’t give a fuck, and we won’t ever give a fuck?
I do give a fuck.
