Pubdate: Sat, 08 Jul 2000
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2000 The Toronto Star
Contact:  One Yonge St., Toronto ON, M5E 1E6
Fax: (416) 869-4322
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
Forum: http://www.thestar.com/editorial/disc_board/
Page: M3
Section: Entertainment
Author: Ben Rayner

THERE'S NOTHING DOPIER THAN A BAD STONER SONG

Tunes do nothing to help the cause

One of the most unfortunate by-products of drug criminalization is the drug 
song.

Not the most unfortunate, I grant you.

The dirty looks one gets from latter-day Puritans while huddling with 
friends around a pre-clubbing joint in an alleyway are a pain. The violence 
that often flares up around the underground drug trade is pretty nasty, 
too. So are prisons crammed with people who wanted nothing more than to 
escape reality for a little while using something other than 
government-sanctioned (and taxed) toxins - and, of course, with the 
black-market entrepreneurs who sought to make a few bucks by providing them 
with the means to do just that.

The drug song is up there, though.

I'm not talking about music that seeks to approximate or enhance altered 
states of consciousness, music that sounds great when you're high (or, 
rather, that I'm, er . . . told sounds great when you're high). I've got a 
record collection overflowing with cultural and generational variations on 
psychedelia: Summer of Love-era acid rock, dub reggae, sprawling prog-rock 
song cycles, cheeba-fed hip hop and downtempo, feedback-charged 
noisescapes, the numerous electronic offspring of the rave generation, 
everything My Bloody Valentine and Elevator To Hell and Spiritualized and 
Plastikman and Aphex Twin have ever put to tape. And hey, maaaaan, I love 
every last trippy second of it.

Nor am I necessarily down on every song that specifically chooses narcotics 
as its subject matter.

With bleak, amoral slice-of-junkie-life sketches like "Heroin" and "Waiting 
For The Man," the Velvet Underground during the late 1960s provided a 
William S. Burroughs-like template for an entire subgenre of rock song that 
tackled drugs from a non-judgmental, glamour-free standpoint.

That tradition - a sort of pride-free, shrugging declaration of deviance as 
mundane social reality - has since been upheld by acts as diverse as The 
Ramones ("53rd And 3rd" updated the heroin-score vignette from "Waiting For 
The Man" for the punk-rock '70s) and Spacemen 3, who through lethargic 
drones like "Feeling So Good (Head Full Of Sh--)" exuded the willfully 
blurred detachment and apathy that comes with watching the world drift by 
through a permanent narco-cocoon.

The irritating drug songs are those that rely on good-timey dope 
references, usually to pot, to achieve a kind of slovenly rebel posture. 
(Few have attempted to pen a jolly equivalent to "One Toke Over The Line" 
for heroin or ketamine, but then perhaps they just couldn't get around to it.)

This is the "I wish The Man would get off my back so I could have a toke in 
peace" breed of tunes. They appeal to the people who would canonize Dr. 
Hook, who misinterpret the "everybody must get stoned" line from Bob 
Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" as a call to light up and who sway and 
slur along to Spirit of the West's "Home For A Rest" ("I've been gone for a 
month / I've been drunk since I left") with pint glasses held proudly 
aloft. And their shambling, scruffy reinforcement of stoner stereotypes has 
likely done more to hurt the pro-legalization movement than any government 
study ever has.

The soundtrack to Grass, Ron Mann's hilarious and well-reasoned new 
documentary on marijuana's adventures in North America, is laden with such 
gems.

It might be an Everyman plea for common sense in the face of paternalistic 
laws, but the whoops that greet each verse to John Prine's live version of 
"Illegal Smile" ("I've got the key / To escape reality") speak volumes 
about the self-defeating yahoo-isms of some segments of the pro-pot lobby. 
Prine shares space, too, with a few groaners from the early days of acid 
experimentation (The Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park," Quicksilver Messenger 
Service's "Fresh Air") seeking to share the insights gleaned from 
chemically mediated conversations with God - and which bear a striking 
resemblance to embarrassing LSD poetry some of us might have jotted down in 
high school.

Hip hop's embrace of marijuana has made for some great beats, from Cypress 
Hill and Dr. Dre's blunted, bass-driven head-nodders to the fractured 
paranoia of U.K. artists like Tricky. But during Tuesday night's Toronto 
stop by the Up In Smoke tour - which featured Dre and Snoop Dogg performing 
on a stage lovingly adorned with luminescent pot leaves - one couldn't help 
wondering if maybe they, too, are sending a mixed message. Their jovial, 
gun-toting, chronic-blazing gangsta schtick might as well be a '90s update 
of the old, post-hippie wasted-rock-ranger pose.

Most rap fans, I think, get the joke. But while Toronto police Chief Julian 
Fantino might be on the decriminalization trail, you could almost see the 
tacit reaffirmation of marijuana's illegal status going on in some cops' 
heads as they strode stoically through the clouds of pot smoke eddying 
through the Molson Amphitheatre after witnessing a short film of a bloody 
gun battle.

Then again, maybe I've been smoking something that makes me overthink these 
things.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart