WHO'S AFRAID OF THE NEO-WOOK?
At Osmosis festival deep in Oregon weed country, a new strain of psychedelic raver emerges
Consider the wook: a much-reviled dance music archetype that first emerged, in a snarl of matted dreadlocks, in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows. Dressed in drop-cotch harem pants, wire-wrapped crystal necklaces, and hooded hemp ponchos, wooks wander barefoot, trying to trade shroom chocolates for free concert tickets. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, many wooks migrated to the dubstep scene, replacing their devotion to jangly guitars with a love for the wub. Festivals like Lightning in a Bottle, Desert Hearts, and Shambalah are now festering grounds for the contemporary wookie, and where you’re most likely to catch them six tabs deep, spinning poi to “sacred bass.”
In the 2000s, wook culture became the hairy butts of endless memes in the dance music scene. Our distaste for their feral, drug-addled lifestyles might stem from a deeper wound: wooks force us to confront the long shadow of psychedelia—its anti-capitalist spirit boiled down to opportunistic mooching, psychonaut experimentalism devolved into brain-fried stupidity, countercultural resistance cross-faded into pseudo-spirituality. These grimy drug goblins particularly plague festivals on the North American West Coast, where the underground often cannot escape the twin blades of New Age cheese and Burning Man cringe.
I was skeptical when I first heard whispers in the rave network that something interesting was happening in Oregon. The granola-ass state is the perfect petri dish for wooks to self-replicate, and has a hard time shaking off its reputation for whitewashed woo-woo. Then friends told me about Osmosis, a psychedelic music festival connected to Portland’s electronic music scene. I was curious about the West Coast network that Osmosis is both drawing from and actively building; many of their DJs come from Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area—cities with vibrant but chronically under-documented rave undergrounds.
It was at Osmosis, surrounded by horses and pot farms as cybernetic basslines shook the pines, where I first heard the term: neo-wook. The phrase was circulating around the festival like an inside joke, because it so perfectly captured the subcultural flavors converging there into something familiar, yet new. “Neo-wook” forced me to contemplate questions that had never before crossed my narrow, wook-hating mind: What if the wook psyche holds a secret to resisting the logic of late-capitalism? Can wooks mutate from goofy caricature to an updated psychedelic archetype that fits this era of global club culture, post-ironic memes, and cybersigil spiritualism? Wait—am I a neo-wook too?
Osmosis happens deep in Oregon’s weed country, in an artist colony called Takilma nestled on the edge of the Sisiyou Mountains. Locals consider this region the northern tip of the Emerald Triangle, where the nation’s best cannabis has been cultivated for generations. Takilma’s original pot farmers are earthy, back-to-the-landers who fled cities like San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, in search of an Eden far from the surveillance state. These hippies were the spiritual predecessors of the wooks—staunchly anti-authoritarian, and a little rough around the edges—and the bassbin ravers of Osmosis are the latest pilgrims seeking escape from technofeudal hell.
