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Onward through the haze: The love affair between artists & weed
Other | Friday 13th July 2012 | Osh
95% of musicians in the Western world today smoke weed. Okay, admittedly, that’s a statistic I just made up – but it’s probably true. The love affair between musicians and their smoking habits has been well-documented through the lyrics in their songs and the records that were inspired and born whilst getting high. For just a moment, let’s put aside the drug-related negatives and all its associations, and focus purely on what happened when weed got involved with art.
The setting is early 1900s New Orleans, when weed first arrived on the scene and jazz was breaking out of the music box in North America. Artists like Louis Armstrong found it helped them forget their exhaustion when they were jamming and scatting into the small hours, as well as providing them with a channel through which they discovered certain creative and unique paths to take their music down. Unlike alcohol, which dampened the senses, pot was the stuff that inspired dreams and got the musicians buzzing.
Nowadays, even though there are artists who are happily out and proud about their habit – Snoop, Drake, Wiz, Rihanna and co we’re looking at you – and Lady Gaga even confessing to the press that she smokes “a lot of pot when I write music”, most of them are expected to pretend they don’t roll up or take it upon themselves to pretend anyway. Under pressure to come off as good role models, it doesn’t exactly help their cause being papped doing something illegal.
But should they have to? Essentially, it’s become the acceptable taboo. No one really cares if you smoke weed, because they're probably doing it too. Unlike its hard drug counterparts heroin and cocaine, when it comes to weed we can at least say that it hasn’t managed to suck away the genius of great musicians like a powdered parasite and drag them into the gutter of greats who fell from grace. Instead, it can put them in a good place to create. This isn’t to suggest that all these successes wouldn’t have been possible without weed, or that the youth of today should dream about the day they’ll roll the first kush that will help them take those first tentative steps towards world domination. Weed hasn’t made great music; it’s just been a part of it. And more than a century on, we still seem to be doing alright.
Angie Moneke @angiejudeLDN
