Richmond, Virginia's Frames, AKA Sarah Phung, reveals the audio video for "Hell," a track from her debut EP, Cursed, via Know Hope Records/The Orchard Music.
"Hell" is the heartbreaking ballad of someone who can't let go of a toxic love affair. Featuring an addictive alt-rock melody vaguely reminiscent of 4 Non Blondes, the song is simple yet powerful. A single guitar and pulsing bassline lures in listeners as Frames' soft voice sings, "You had addictions / I had convictions / Sober was never your plan / And neither was I."
The story of psychedelics is intertwined with the story of music, and tracing their relationship can feel like going in circles.
For thousands of years, artists have been using naturally-grown herbs to open their minds and enhance their creative processes. Since LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938, psychedelics have experienced a reemergence, blooming into a revolution in the 1960s, launching dozens of genres and sounds that focused on acid, shrooms, and all of the portals they opened. Around the 1960s, scientists also began studying the relationship between psychedelics and music, and even back then, researchers found that, when combined, music and psychedelics could have therapeutic effects on patients.
More modern studies have discovered that LSD, specifically, links a portion of the brain called the parahippocampal—which specializes in personal memory—to the visual cortex, which means that memories take on more autobiographical and visual dimensions. Other studies have found that LSD can make the timbres and sounds of music feel more meaningful and emotionally powerful. Today, psychedelic music still thrives, and you can hear flickers of those early trip-inspired experiences all across today's modern musical landscape.
"There is a message intrinsically carried in music, and under the effects of psychedelics, people seem to become more responsive to this," said the psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen. "Emotion can be processed more deeply. It's a beautiful narrative. It's like a snake biting itself in the tail."
All that said, psychedelics can be as dangerous as the archetypal live-fast-die-young rock and roller's average lifestyle. They can destabilize already fragile minds and can encourage further drug abuse and reckless behavior. Often, psychedelic revolutions have coincided with colonialist fetishizations, apocalyptic visions, and appropriations of Eastern culture.
However, sometimes psychedelics and musical talent can come together in a synergy so perfect that it can literally create transcendent and healing experiences. Hallucinogens affected each of these following musicians in a unique way, but their experiences with hallucinogens produced some of the greatest music of all time.
Harry Styles — She
In his revelatory Rolling Stone profile, Harry Styles spoke out about how magic mushrooms inspired his most recent album, Fine Line. Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the 25-year-old apparently spent a lot of time at Shangri-La Studios in Los Angeles tripping and listening to the old psychedelic greats.
"Ah, yes. Did a lot of mushrooms here," he said in the interview during a tour of the studio. "We'd do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney's Ram in the sunshine."
Things even got a little violent, as they often can when dealing with hallucinogens. "This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place," he reminisced affectionately.
Kacey Musgraves' dreamy song "Slow Burn" was apparently inspired by an acid trip. Listening to the lyrics, you can hear the influence of psychedelics twining with country and singer-songwriter tropes. "I was sitting on the porch, you know, having a good, easy, zen time," she said of the songwriting experience, which she said happened out on her porch one evening. "I wrote it down on my phone, and then wrote the songs the next day with a sober mind."
LSD, she said, "opens your mind in a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be scary. People in the professional worlds are using it, and it's starting to become an option for therapy. Isn't that crazy?" Her affection for the drug also appears in her song "Oh What A World," which contains the lyric, "Plants that grow and open your mind."
A$AP Rocky — L$D
While A$AP Rocky's affection for LSD isn't a surprise given his propensity for writing about the drug, apparently the rapper has an intellectual approach to his psychedelic experimentation.
"We was all in London at my spot, Skeppy came through," he told Hot New Hip Hop about his experience writing LSD. "I have this psychedelic professor, he studies in LSD. I had him come through and kinda record and monitor us to actually test the product while being tested on. We did the rhymes all tripping balls."
Apparently his first acid trip happened in 2012. "Okay, without getting anyone in trouble, I was with my homeboy and some trippy celebrity chicks and…" he said in an interview with Time Out. When asked how long it lasted, he said, "Too long, man. Twenty-three hours. I was trippin' till the next day. When I woke up, I was like, Damn! I did that shit! That shit was dope. It was so amazing. It was a-ma-zing. Nothing was like that first time."
Acid changed his entire approach to music and success. "I never really gave a f*ck, man, but this time, I really don't give a f*ck," he said. "I don't care about making no f*cking hits." Instead, he focuses on creating. "It's so hard to be progressive when you're trippin' b*lls," he said. "You make some far-out shit!"
The Beatles' later music is essentially synonymous with LSD, and the band members often spoke out about their unique experiences with the drug. According to Rolling Stone, the first time that Lennon and Harrison took it was actually a complete accident. A friend put LSD in their coffee without their knowledge, and initially Lennon was furious. But after the horror and panic faded, things changed. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours," said Harrison.
Paul McCartney had similar revelations. LSD "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God," he said in 1967. "It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience." Of LSD's effect, he also said, "It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."
Using the drug not only helped the band create some of the most legendary music of all time—it also brought them closer together. "After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship," said George Harrison. "That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, 'I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.' That is an illusion people are under. It's nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It's down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what's going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death."
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Remastered 2009)www.youtube.com
Ray Charles — My World
The soul music pioneer allegedly once described acid as his "eyes." Charles was blind, but LSD is said to have allowed him some version of sight. Though he struggled with addiction, Charles eventually got clean, though his music always bore some markers of his experiences with the subconscious mind.
Actually, blind people on LSD and hallucinogens can experience hallucinations of different kinds, though it's somewhat rare. According to a study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, this happens because during a trip, "the plasticity of the nervous system allows the recognition and translation of auditory or tactile patterns into visual experiences."
Clapton struggled with drug abuse throughout his life, and LSD certainly had an influence on him. While he was a part of Cream, he frequently played shows while tripping, and according to outontrip.com, he became "convinced that he could turn the audience into angels or devils according to the notes he played."
Before he was creating the ultimate dad rap, Chance the Rapper was an acidhead.
"None of the songs are really declarative statements; a lot of them are just things that make you wonder...a lot like LSD," said Chance the Rapper of his hallucinogen-inspired album, the aptly named Acid Rap. "[There] was a lot of acid involved in Acid Rap," he told MTV in 2013. "I mean, it wasn't too much — I'd say it was about 30 to 40 percent acid ... more so 30 percent acid."
But the album wasn't merely about acid; like much of the best psychedelic music, it was more about the imagery and symbolism associated with the drug than the actual drug itself. "It wasn't the biggest component at all. It was something that I was really interested in for a long time during the making of the tape, but it's not necessarily a huge faction at all. It was more so just a booster, a bit of fuel. It's an allegory to acid, more so than just a tape about acid," he said.
Jazz great John Coltrane was a regular LSD user who used the drug to create music and to have spiritual experiences. Though he struggled with addiction throughout his life, LSD was one drug that had a major artistic influence on him. While it's not known for sure if the album Om—which includes chanted verses of the Bhagavad Gita—was recorded while Coltrane was on LSD, many rumors theorize that it was.
"Coltrane's LSD experiences confirmed spiritual insights he had already discovered rather than radically changing his perspective," wrote Eric Nisenson in Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. "After one early acid trip he said, 'I perceived the interrelationship of all life forms,' an idea he had found repeated in many of the books on Eastern theology that he had been reading for years. For Coltrane, who for years had been trying to relate mystical systems such as numerology and astrology, theories of modern physics and mathematics, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders, and advanced musical theory, and trying somehow to pull these threads into something he could play on his horn. The LSD experience gave him visceral evidence that his quest was on the right track."
Jenny Lewis — Acid Tongue
Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis wrote the song "Acid Tongue" about her first and only experience on LSD, which happened when she was fourteen. She told Rolling Stone, "It culminated in a scene not unlike something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the scene where Hunter S. Thompson has to lock the lawyer in the bathroom. I sort of assumed the Hunter S. Thompson character and my friend – she had taken far too much – decided to pull a butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and chase me around the house… At the end of that experience, my mom was out of town on a trip of her own and she returned to find me about 5 lbs lighter and I had—I was so desperate to get back to normal I decided to drink an entire gallon of orange juice. I saw that it was in the fridge and decided that this would sort of flush the LSD out of my system, but I didn't realize that it did exactly the opposite."
The Beach Boys' mastermind Brian Wilson was famously inspired by psychedelics, which both expanded and endangered his fragile and brilliant mind. After his first acid trip in 1965, an experience that he said "expanded his mind," Wilson wrote "California Gurls." After the trip, however, Wilson began suffering from auditory hallucinations and symptoms of schizophrenia, and though he discontinued use of the drug, he continued to hear voices; doctors eventually diagnosed him with the disease. Wilson later lamented his tragic experiences with LSD, stating that he wished he'd never done the drug.
Though it led Wilson on a downward spiral, LSD inspired some of his band's greatest work—namely the iconic Pet Sounds, which launched half a century of "acid-pop copycats."
The Flaming Lips — Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is widely believed to be the product of lead singer Wayne Coyne's LSD experimentation. This theory is corroborated by the fact that the album's cover features the number 25 (and LSD is also known as LSD-25). They also frequently reference LSD in their music, which includes an album called Finally, the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid.
the flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots part 1www.youtube.com
Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Child
While there is still some general contention on whether Jimi Hendrix hallucinated frequently, nobody really doubts that he did. According to rumors, the legendary musician even used to soak his bandanas in acid before going onstage so the drug would seep through his pores.
According to one source, Hendrix did more than just play music while tripping. He was also an expert at (of all things) the game of Risk.
"Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all," said Graham Nash in an interview. "He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he's a paratrooper, and I don't know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk."
The Doors — The End
Jim Morrison was a documented LSD user, and it eventually led him out of his mind. "The psychedelic Jim I knew just a year earlier, the one who was constantly coming up with colorful answers to universal questions, was being slowly tortured by something we didn't understand. But you don't question the universe before breakfast for years and not pay a price," said John Desmore in Riders on the Storm: My Life With the Doors.
Morrison used many different drugs during his lifetime, but apparently LSD had a special place and he avoided using it while working. "LSD was a sacred sacrament that was to be taken on the beach at Venice, under the warmth of the sun, with our father the sun and our mother the ocean close by, and you realised how divine you were," said Ray Manzarek. "It wasn't a drug for entertainment. You could smoke a joint and play your music, as most musicians did at the time. But as far as taking LSD, that had to be done in a natural setting."
Morrison himself—a visionary who was also a drug-addled narcissist—was kind of the prototypical 1960s LSD-addled rock star. Alive with visions about poetry and sex but lost in his own self-destruction, he perhaps touched on something of the sublime with his art, but in the end he went down a very human path towards misery and decay.
Like many of these artists' stories, Morrison's life reveals that perhaps instead of using hallucinogens and psychedelics as shortcuts to a spiritual experience, one should exercise extreme caution when exploring the outer reaches of the psyche. When it comes to actually engaging with potent hallucinogens, that might be best left to the shamans, or forgotten with the excesses of the 1960s.
On the other hand, we might do well to learn from the lessons that people have gleaned from hallucinogens over the years—lessons that reveal just how interconnected everything is, that shows us that music and memory and nature may just all stem from the same place.
Billie Ellish performs at Sir Lucian Grainge's 2020 Artist Showcase Presented By Citi and Lenovo on in Los AngelesSir Lucian Grainge's 2020 Artist Showcase Presented By Citi and Lenovo, Los Angeles, USA
Photo by Mark Von Holden/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
The artist Billie Eilish has shared some love for another one of the most influential people on the planet, fellow teen Greta Thunberg.
Of course, both these people just happen to be teenage girls, but their influence stretches far, far beyond the realm of Gen-Z subculture. Eilish is one of the most famous musicians in the world right now, and Greta Thunberg was just named Time Magazine's Person of the Year for her climate activism.
"[Greta Thunberg] is paving the way," Eilish said in an interview with NME, which just crowned her debut album its album of the year. "She's doing her thing and I feel honoured to be compared to her." She added, "Hopefully the adults and the old people start listening to us [about climate change] so that we don't all die. Old people are gonna die and don't really care if we die, but we don't wanna die yet."
Eilish has spoken out about climate change before. At the AMAs, she wore a shirt printed with the message "NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET" and her video for "all the good girls go to hell" was clearly a climate change allegory. She also posted a message of support for a climate strike spearheaded by Thunberg. "TICK TOCK! Our time is running out. The climate crisis is very real. We need to speak up and demand that our leaders take action," her message read.
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Billie Eilish - all the good girls go to hellwww.youtube.com
Eilish also addressed some of the accusations of hypocrisy that are sure to appear in the comments for this article, and which are typically thrown at environmental activists who don't live their lives in a perfectly sustainable way yet still have the nerve to call for systemic change.
"Dude, I always see these posts that are like, 'Why is this f***ing artist saying this sh*t when they're taking planes to places?' Bro, would you rather I just shut the f**k up and say nothing and then no one will ever do anything?" Eilish said. "Yeah, maybe I'm doing something that's not as perfect as somebody else, but there are things I can't change. So because of those, I want to get the word out to other people. I want to do as much as I can and I want other people to do as much as they can."
Still, the myth that individuals are responsible for climate change persists, as does a blatant refusal to act at the scale of the problem. Perhaps it's not surprising that some of the greatest actions against climate change are coming from the youth. It's becoming clearer and clearer that many members of older generations don't care at all about the future of the planet, which admittedly they won't be around to experience—but they're more than happy to damn their children to suffering and increasing inequality. People like Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and allies like Eilish are breaking through, but it's not enough.
Thunberg, who has just arrived back home to Sweden, has expressed exhaustion at all the acclaim she's received that hasn't been accompanied by tangible action, and she's called for a shift in focus to other climate activists. "It is people especially from the global south, especially from indigenous communities, who need to tell their stories," she said at a U.N. climate meeting in Madrid. Thunberg seems well-aware that climate change is already harming vulnerable and low income communities and communities of color, who are much more affected by natural disasters, rising prices, and unclean air.
Unfortunately, as Thunberg made clear, the message was not enough to spark action at the COP25 summit in Madrid, which she described as "failed." It seems the future really is in the next generations' hands.
Saving the planet, running businesses, starting social movements... It's fair that we'd all be concerned for their well-being. Fortunately, the Internet has come through with a handful of codes and cheat sheets that you can use to decipher what your child is really getting up to online.
Astrology
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BTS
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(Timothée) Chalamet
Decolonization
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(Edgar Allan) Poe
Financial Crisis (2008)
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Guinea Pigs
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Hamlet
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Intersectional Feminism
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Julio-Claudians
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Kingdom Hearts
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Love, Simon
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Molecular Biology
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Naruto
Oklahoma
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Pop-Punk
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The Q'uran
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Radical Liberalism
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Stew
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Tide Pods
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Unions
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(Two Gentlemen of) Verona
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Writing
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X Factor Auditions
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(The New York) Yankees
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Z
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The truth is that these memes are more about Boomers and Gen X'ers than they do about kids these days. We all know that older generations spend more time than anyone leaving angry comments on Facebook pages, and they're the ones who worry relentlessly about the Internet when maybe they should have been worrying about climate change or gun violence. But hey, as long as your kid isn't texting about communism, everything's going to be just fine.
Eilish just dropped the video for her song "all the good girls go to hell." It's a creepy masterpiece in itself, but It also has an extremely important (and bone-chilling) message.
The video features Eilish as an angel who falls from the sky and plunges into a thick pool of oil. For the rest of the video, she walks slowly across an abandoned road as fire blooms in the background, and eventually catches up to her.
As to what she was trying to say, she didn't leave much room for doubt.
Eilish posted this statement alongside the video: "Right now there are millions of people all over the world, begging our leaders to pay attention. Our earth is warming up at an unprecedented rate, ice caps are melting, our oceans are rising, our wildlife is being poisoned, and our forests are burning."
She finished with a call to action. "On September 23, the UN will host the 2019 Climate Action Summit to discuss how to tackle these issues. The clock is ticking. On Friday, September 20 and Friday, September 27 you can make your voice be heard. Take it to the streets. #ClimateStrike @greenpeace."
Eilish is talking about the worldwide climate strike that will take place on Friday, September 20, which will kickstart a week of action in protest of worldwide inactivity with regards to the existential threat that is climate change. You can RSVP for the strike here.
The terrifying video is even scarier when you think about the very real threats that it symbolizes, but at least Eilish's generation seems keenly awoken to the reality of climate change. Watch it below:
Billie Eilish - all the good girls go to hellwww.youtube.com