Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) was a drug-fueled rock concert-cum-multimedia art event where layers of mediation mixed with immediate experience: The Velvet Underground performed their innovative music in front of films of themselves performing, Factory Superstars danced and performed poetry, various Warhol films projected on the walls, flashing lights flickered on mirrored surfaces, and a crowd of spectators – both famous and unknown – packed in to see and be seen, to dance and trip into the early hours of the morning. The experience of the EPI was a potent combination of alienation, mediation, and commercialization.
The EPI was a promotional vehicle for Warhol, Warhol's Factory crew, and the Velvet Underground, but is also a complex example of spectacle that has been under-analyzed in recent scholarship. The EPI's unabashed emphasis on marketing, packaging, consumer goods, and empty celebrity are all manifestations of fears of late capitalist excess, but beneath the veneer of vapidity was an undercurrent of counterculture political activism and social awareness. Original contributions include cultural analysis, interpretation of contemporary reviews and reports, examination of the event's lack of art historical presence, and incorporation of music scholarship into the Warhol historical canon.