John Lennon released the song Imagine in May of 1971.
I was born less than six months later in that same year, the third child of a couple hippies who had no business having kids. But they had truth - and so did John.
And then consider these inventors of all that we listen to, those who create the sountrack for our lives: Buddy Bolden, Robert Johnson, Professor Longhair, David Bowie, Fats Domino, Kendrick Lamar, and Van Morrison.
In an alternate universe they would be seen as Joyce, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Walter Mosley, Seamus Heaney - the beacons of truth through the dark and dimly-lit tunnel of sociological change and evolution.
IMAGINE. (Ultimate Mix, 2020) - John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band (with the Flux Fiddlers) HDwww.youtube.com
Instead, Lennon was feared by parents for being a "rock-n-roll" musician, for playing "black" music. Imagine that. Wow.
"People have always been trying to stamp out rock 'n' roll since it started, I always thought that it's because it came from black music and the words had a lot of double entendre in the early days. It was all this 'our nice white kids are gonna go crazy moving their bodies', y'now the music got to your body and The Beatles just carried it a bit further, made it a bit more white, even more than Elvis did because we were English." - John Lennon.
We miss you, John, and thank you for inspiring people to learn to love truth and for honoring the invention of our African American brothers and sisters. You stayed true. You will be missed.
WORKING CLASS HERO. (Ultimate Mix, 2020) - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (official music video HD)www.youtube.com
Below I lay some flowers at your grave - the track my brother Joey wrote - inspired in large part by your style and sound, your truth.
Joey was part of a Dublin band that charted in the UK, trying to model your mojo. He wrote this song when he got back to the States, but continues to busk in front of the Dakota with his band mate, Nigel Williams, on the date of your birth - whenever possible.
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.
The sound of Denitia's Touch of the Sky is how walking by the ocean feels.
Listening through, you get a sense of vastness, a kind of vertigo at the sight of the unending horizon, and an appreciation for a network of things much vaster than yourself. Though the waves of sound can grow ragged and powerful, there's a sense of underlying peace, a transcendence to be found in the cyclicality of the ebb and flow.
It makes sense that the album was born in the Rockaways, the New York peninsula that most city-dwellers only know as the end of the A line. Denitia moved there to escape the city's congestion; from there, something opened up and she began to reflect on the structures that underlie our visible reality.
What arose from those meditative sessions by the beach is Touch of the Sky, a masterful album that fuses glossy electronica with glitchy guitar and smooth vocal lines. It's composed of rich images and sounds—tides of psychedelic synths tangle with muted house rhythms; guitar lines dance like fractals of sunlight over a roof in the early morning. It's fractured and cohesive, awake yet relaxed, the product of an artist fully coming into her own and communing with some sublime creative force.
We spoke with Denitia about finding peace in the city, finding nostalgia for the present, and what it means to dream.
You produce all of your own work. How did you get started with producing, and how does it influence your work?
I basically played everything, wrote everything, and arranged it all, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I've known for a while that I could do it. I had this vision for my sound, and there was always something I felt was missing, and I think I needed to make my own work and start fresh. I really just needed to make this record for myself and express myself with every layer.
I got into production five years ago or something, when I moved into this artist house in Brooklyn and there were a lot of people living there at the time. We had this studio, and a lot of amazing artists lived there. That's when I really started to get into self-production and recording.
You mentioned this record felt different from your past ones, in that you were able to talk about things you haven't before. How was it a fresh start for you, either musically or in another way?
I started out playing guitar and writing songs, and then I got super into electro-pop and electronic music, and I put the guitar down for a while. It's cool because I've gone full circle and picked the guitar back up on this record. I was able to hear guitar textures in the way I'd always wanted to hear them.
Your sound is so vivid and full of imagery. I've read a bit about you doing production out on the Rockaways and I was wondering how that influenced the record, and what other places or images went into inspiring the record?
That's also one of the reasons why I've been thinking of this music as cinematic. I worked in the Rockaways in this bedroom studio, and my room was next to this huge deck and big windows, so every day I'd open my eyes and see this wide open, gorgeous sky. And I'd look around the corner at the ocean, and the ocean just represents infinite possibilities to me.
So much of our bodies are water, so much of this planet is water, and I felt this traction with infinity and the depth of that body of water, so much that it made me feel like anything is possible and it made me feel free. Visually, the ocean and the wide open sky over the ocean has everything to do with the sound of this music. It's in me now.
I moved back to Brooklyn a couple of months ago, but I can still feel how integral that experience was to unlocking who I am. Moving out there at that time in my life when I felt like things were tumultuous and crazy and jumbled helped me return to myself and my purpose, which I feel is making beautiful music that moves people and allows them to feel.
That's definitely a tension I think a lot of people—New Yorkers or anyone—can relate to: wanting to be in the rush of the city and wanting to find space to reflect. How are you finding the move back?
I love New York City. I'll always love this place. From the first time I came here when I was twelve years old, I just felt like I belonged here. I feel like I can be myself here, and I feel free. Something about the kinetic energy just feels inspiring.
But you can go to the extreme, you know, so since moving back to Brooklyn—it's important for me to take walks and have quiet time and not to over-commit like a crazy person to different things. There's a lot of stuff I say no to. I say no to chaos, I say no to nonsense. I just like to keep my life chill and focused. I just want to be connected to my purpose, spend time with my girlfriend and my purpose and, like, call my mom.
A few years ago I stopped drinking, which put me in this whole space in my mind. I get up really early in the morning now, and that's where I find my quiet, meditative time. It's really about balance and quality of life. I think that can be achieved in the city, still, if you really work on it.
So what's coming next, and what do you have on the radar?
I'm gonna dig deeper. This music is very visual to me, so I'm gonna dig deeper into making more filmic visuals to accompany the music and really put on my art director hat.
I'm never stopping making music. I'm a creative person, that's when I'm at my best, so I'm just gonna keep working on music and fleshing out the album in a visual way.
Kelly De Geer
All the songs are so unique, and I was wondering if there are any stories about any of them you'd be interested in sharing.
For the song "23," the first song on the album, I was getting up every day at like 6AM… I had an endorsement for this livestream app, and I'd get up and livestream me making tracks, and one day I grabbed some drums that I had been working with and started building this track. The words "23" came to me, and I was like "What about 23? I want to feel like we were 23, I want to be as free as we seemed."
I started thinking about being a young person fresh out of college. I was living in Nashville, I had this apartment that was on the tenth floor… As we get older, I think there's this romanticizing of the past, like oh my god what if we could just be 21 again or 23 again. So I started to unpack that illusion of nostalgia.
When I was 23, I was f*cked up. I was worried about what I was gonna do with my life; I was in crazy relationships that were non-reciprocal. I was anxious about everything. That song plays with that idea, well I want to be as free as we seemed we were. I want to feel like how we think we felt when we were younger. That's the kind of energy I want to bring to the now, the present.
I think often there is this idealization of youth or just other places or other ages, so it's cool to think how can we use that in the moment.
You released a video alongside your album. What was the inspiration for that?
I met Hugo Ferrocko, the director, when I opened for a premier of a movie he worked on. We hit it off, and when we got together, he was like, I love your music, let's make something… We had this idea to make something that was documentary, part music video—something that starts to unpack some of the themes of this record, which are love and the power of love, identity, consciousness, awakening—and surround it with the beauty of the Rockaways.
Hugo came to me with that treatment after we had that conversation, and I was just blown away. He's a visionary filmmaker. I'm really glad to have had the chance to work with him; he's gonna have an incredible future making things.
You mentioned themes of consciousness and awakening, which are kind of loaded terms, and I'm wondering how you feel like those play out on the album?
I hope this always happens to me in life, but when I pulled out of Brooklyn and went to the Rockaways and when I was writing the album, I felt like I was going through this other level of awareness. Inevitably there was a slowing down, and that led to a lot of reflection and looking around and asking, What is my place in this world, and how do I fit here, and what are we doing?
It was less of a conscious thing; I was just musing and looking around in the world.
On the track "Touch of the Sky," I was thinking about how in black neighborhoods, there are cops everywhere, and it's infuriating. I was hearing so much about black people dying wrongfully at the cops' hands, and I was thinking about how sometimes we wait until people die to lift them up and to lift up their spirits, to focus on them and give them their flowers, so to speak.
That song was written in stream-of-consciousness, when I was thinking, I want to be lifted up now. I want us to have an anthem about being lifted up now, and getting this touch of the sky now. Let's fly now, while we're still alive. Let's raise each other up now.
I'd never really written about anything like that before, and, even so, it's pretty abstract, but I feel like it's another step in my reaching this awareness in thinking about the world around me.
I think consciousness plays out in a lot of different ways in the record. I talk a lot in the record about dreams being essential. In the end of "Touch of the Sky," there's this poem that goes, half my life's been spent dreaming. That's about the power of dreams in marginalized communities and among people who are struggling. Dreams are essential for us. Of course I'm going to be dreaming. My reality is not what it should be, so the dreaming is essential to push me forward into the life that I want.
Ashe's alt-pop style and sunny, vintage vocals have earned her quite the buzz.
She recently released her new single
"Choirs" that has amassed over 870k streams on Spotify. Compounding her previous success, which saw her accumulate 200 million streams and nine Hype Machine #1s with "Girl Who Cried Wolf" and "Used to It" (as well as her Louis The Child collaborations "World on Fire" and "Right To It"), Ashe was recently announced as one of VEVO dscvr's Artists to Watch for 2018. Having played select dates this summer with Lewis Capaldi, Ashe recently wrapped up a tour with Lauv and previously traveled Northern America while performing alongside Big Gigantic, Louis The Child, Shawn Frank, Whethan, and the Chainsmokers. Now, her very own brand of psych-pop is poised to make a splash in 2018 with her debut EP The Rabbit Hole and the recently-released single "Choirs."
Popdust's Megan Oots got a chance to sit down with Ashe and chat about the inspiration behind The Rabbit Hole which deals with existentialism, escapism, the human condition, and love.
Ashe says her favorite song on The Rabbit Hole is "Real Love"
Real Love was also one of the first songs she finished and it blazed the way for the others. Real love is about loving others regardless of where they come from and encourages us to focus on the commonalities between all people. She was inspired to write "Real Love" by the social political turmoil that commenced after the 2016 presidential election.
Ashe hopes people that listen to "Real Love" unify in their joy, and develop more empathy and compassion for one another.
Kelly De Geer
