It’s hard for me to fully appreciate Woodstock. The event may have been in New York, but the place that encapsulated the times and context in which Woodstock took place, San Francisco, is the city I call home. Yet I don’t feel, being just shy of 30, that I can ever really understand what it meant at the time, any more than I could understand Monterey Pop or the Newport Folk Festival.

No matter how many books I read about those times, no matter how many people I hear bear witness, I can never really understand them. Locked up in those music festivals is the spirit of those times. And while I may never understand, I think I get the musical aspect, the very glue that bound those times together.

As hard as this may be for people to swallow, I see the very same thing today in the phenomenon called “indie rock.” To some of you, this seems ridiculous, I know. To someone who witnessed the ’60s, I imagine it’s hard to see anything in my generation but petty disaffectedness and over-tech’ed self-centeredness. Generation ME is, after all, what they’re calling us.

Yet, what is easy to miss is the history of how indie rock came to us; it was not born from particularly stylish or even fashionable people. It may be the domain of hipsters in recent years, but it rose from the most awkward and rebellious of sources. Indie rock gets its roots from the art rock of the late ’70s and punk of the early ’80s. While the former may very well have resembled the hipster intellectual beat precursor to the ’60s, the latter was a shear kind of rebellion that’s as ferocious as that of the ’60s—only in the stale hypocrisy of the Reagan ’80s, it remained very much underground. Even much of its current forms are derived from its ’90s torch bearers: Gangly, un-cool, rebellious, and highly-educated college bands such as Sebadoh, Archers of Loaf, and what became Pavement.

Indie rock in its current form is far too diverse to lump into any ground of musical categories. In such it resembles a movement, one that has finally seemed to pierce the underground. After years of mediocre festival ticket sales, suddenly every town is getting its own outdoor music festival. Just a few years after Lollapalooza found itself canceled then sold, festivals are again on the rise and they are heavily stocked with indie acts.

In the 1990s, Lollapalooza found its successful model based on a collaboration between Bill Graham and Ian Asbury (of the Cult) called A Gathering of the Tribes, which had dates in both Los Angels and the San Francisco Bay Area. The success of the festival seems to have been the result of its diverse lineup and a heavy reliance on alternative and non-mainstream acts, anchored by a few big mainstream acts. Lollapalooza mimicked this model in a traveling version that ran successfully for six years until its founder, Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Ferrell, left. In his absence, too many mainstream acts began to bog down the lineup and ticket sales plummeted.

Just a few years ago, in a post-Lollapalooza world, it seemed the hippie jam-band genre was the only segment that could move large amounts of tickets. Eventually that began to coalesce into festivals that attracted the jam-band crowd, the most respected of which has been the Bonnaroo festival. A look at the lineup over the last few years shows that by the festival’s third year it began to expand and fill out with increasing numbers of indie acts.

The last couple of years have seen a staggering increase in the number of indie-laden festivals. Just a few years ago there were only a few multi-day festivals anchored in multiple venues scattered around a city, such as Noise Pop in San Francisco and CMJ in New York, a couple of small outdoor festivals, and, of course, the South by Southwest Music Conference. Coachella has now completed its ninth festival, and Chicago has been hosting the reborn Lollapalooza since 2005 in addition to gaining two new completely indie outdoor festivals: Intonation (which was curated by Vice in 2006) and its successor, Pitchfork. New York now has a number of small, outdoor, indie-heavy events; San Francisco has added two new outdoor festivals in the last two years; Portland now has its own multi-venue festival that is growing every year; and Washington state hosts the Sasquatch festival. Outside the borders of the US, Montréal has two outdoor festivals now as well as a multi-venue indie festival and Toronto has found itself one of the hosts of the Virgin festival. In the UK, where fans have never lost their love of outdoor festivals of any variety, the London area has gained the outdoor indie festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, who are now co-curating events with Pitchfork.

This resurgence of the indie-driven festivals has some notable differences from the surge of youth-oriented music festivals in the ’60s. They are not based around some common spirit of great change looming on the horizon. Much of the cynicism that divides the attitudes of my generation from that of the ’60s may come from the fact that many of us sit in cubicles working corporate jobs while having terror rained down upon us by bosses who will warmly recount the freedom and great change that seemed to be unstoppable as they pranced around at Woodstock.

The content of the culture that binds my generation together is also alternative and not pop culture; that is because pop culture was altogether different back when it was the essence of youth culture, not a manufactured, tasteless marketing tool that you were forced to look past to find anything of note, as is the case today. And perhaps that is where the two times meet on some common plane.

We may not have the innocence to believe in the kind of change that was thought possible in the ’60s; we use drugs to escape, not to find freedom. Most of us are just as opposed to a war that is all too similar to the one the ‘60s generation spoke so loudly against, but hardly as inclined to stand up and say it with the vigor they did. But perhaps music is giving independent culture a forum once again, and, through bringing us together as it did for a previous generation, maybe it will give us a voice that we have long been without. In a world where we’ve grown up being marketed to through our culture and treated like the ripest target of disposable income, maybe this is our rebellion. At the very least, we are finally giving a big, fat middle finger to that shit they play on the radio.

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