In the forest we don't care

On Gang of Four and the language of punk

In one of his cheerfully lunatic appearances on the Jack Paar show in the early ‘60s, Jonathan Winters looks much like he always did—a chubby man in a dull charcoal business suit that’s working less hard to contain his bulk than it is to make this madman appear—even temporarily—like a normal person. The suit isn’t up to the job. Especially now. Atop Winters’ head sits a little wig of curls topped by a set of satyr’s horns. When his intro music dies down, Winters expertly seizes on a gap in the audience’s shrieking laughter to make this happy, fruity declaration: “I’m the voice of Spring!” and instantly the pandemonium is back, louder than before. Seated across from him, Paar, urbane and having some experience in dealing with his particular guest’s brand of craziness, does his best to spar with Winters, even scoring some laughs. But it’s a conversation between a reasonable man and one who’s creating his own reason from moment to moment. Winters is so far inside this bit that you may wonder whether he really believes, as he tells Paar, that beneath his suit and oxford shoes are the hooves and the legs of a goat. Winters flirts with sissy humor but more often he shows the delight of a kid who knows he’s being bad and enjoying every second of it. The greatest moment comes when, in a fit of jubilation, Winters plucks Paar’s pocket square from his suit and twirls it around saying “WHEEEEE!!!!!!!” In mock annoyance, Paar says, “it took me forty-five minutes to get that right,” and Winters quickly answers, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” and then, his naughty little eyes roving back and forth, he tells his host, “In the forest we don’t care.”

As I get older, I realize that, since 1977, the year punk rock first made itself felt to much of America, I have done my best to live by those six words. I don’t much care about how things are done outside the forest.

I wasn’t an immediate convert to punk, and never a complete one. It scared me. But like many things that are scary at first—art that isn’t kidding around, sex, choosing to live in a city--punk became a way of seeing and living in the world, an organizing principle for what you believed and for what you believed was false or soul sucking or just plain garbage. Greil Marcus once described viewing the world through a punk sensibility as apprehending the coalescence of signs that were simultaneously opaque and revelatory. Where most artistic and philosophical movements worked to separate themselves from the world around them, punk’s great strength has always come from a root contradiction that straddled the line between acceptance and exclusion. Based in negation, punk was and is a minority movement that chose as its chief weapon a music that aimed to get the largest number of people possible to listen and say YES. You can’t be said to be turning your back on the world if at the heart of your ethos is the most and insistently populist form of music. Within the context of punk, you could score a #1 single, as the Sex Pistols did with “God Save the Queen,” whose final refrain “NO FUTURE FOR YOU!” invited audiences to sing along with the joy that always greets a big hit. And if the hopelessness and nihilism of those final words, both a curse and a prediction, isn’t dispelled, the energy and glee and fury with which they are proclaimed propels the listener forward, ready to meet that nonfuture waiting for them.

For all the ways in which it said no, punk was less about rejecting the world than seeing through it. I don’t just mean having a nose for bullshit but living every moment as if you saw that the Great and Powerful Oz was just that man behind the curtain and, when you were told to pay the disparity no mind, replied FUCK NO. Punk was, as Guy Debord said in The Society of the Spectacle, about being able to see “the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience,” and being able to distinguish the two. It meant being able to understand the difference between, say, work and labor; between real desire and consumer-generated want; to see rock ‘n’ roll as produced by millionaire pop stars as not the rebellion it claimed to be, but a masquerade of rebellion used to reinforce the status quo; to recognize what--not just in art but in politics, in your relations with other people--made you feel alive and what merely reiterated and reinforced numbing routine; to be able to speak plain truths in moments when the impulse is to say anything but the truth. Live a life in which you are making those distinctions long enough and you can even distinguish between the cosmetic trappings of punk--listening only to music labelled as punk, or wearing a mohawk or putting a safety pin through your cheek, or choosing a life of squalor because it seems the punk thing to do—and between punk as an attitude and a way of thought. Live that way long enough and it becomes harder to settle for the ersatz, the processed, life as a spectacle rather than as actual experience. It means to live in such a way that the false keeps revealing itself: an employer who tells you he thinks of his business as a family, or the cowardice of the New York Times printing a headline about Elon Musk “campaigning” in Michigan when he was actually buying votes to rig the election of a right-wing judge to the state supreme court or, a few weeks after the presidential election, running this headline: “Trump’s long fascination with genes and bloodlines gets new scrutiny.” Imagine a Klan leader or Nazi described as having “a fascination with genes and bloodlines.”