Canabis in a 2700-year-old tomb. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, who posts the link HERE
Showing posts with label drugs/intoxication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drugs/intoxication. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Discovered
Stash for the afterlife: A photograph of a stash of cannabis found in the 2,700-year-old grave of a man in the Gobi Desert. Scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it's evident that the man was buried with a lot of it. David Potter / Oxford University PressDiscovery/MCNBC
World's oldest marijuana stash totally busted
Two pounds of still-green weed found in a 2,700-year-old Gobi Desert grave
By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery Channel
updated 10:19 a.m. PT, Wed., Dec. 3, 2008
Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.
A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.
They apparently were getting high too.
Lead author Ethan Russo told Discovery News that the marijuana "is quite similar" to what's grown today.
"We know from both the chemical analysis and genetics that it could produce THC (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid synthase, the main psychoactive chemical in the plant)," he explained, adding that no one could feel its effects today, due to decomposition over the millennia.
Russo served as a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany while conducting the study. He and his international team analyzed the cannabis, which was excavated at the Yanghai Tombs near Turpan, China. It was found lightly pounded in a wooden bowl in a leather basket near the head of a blue-eyed Caucasian man who died when he was about 45.
"This individual was buried with an unusual number of high value, rare items," Russo said, mentioning that the objects included a make-up bag, bridles, pots, archery equipment and a kongou harp. The researchers believe the individual was a shaman from the Gushi people, who spoke a now-extinct language called Tocharian that was similar to Celtic.
Scientists originally thought the plant material in the grave was coriander, but microscopic botanical analysis of the bowl contents, along with genetic testing, revealed that it was cannabis.
The size of seeds mixed in with the leaves, along with their color and other characteristics, indicate the marijuana came from a cultivated strain. Before the burial, someone had carefully picked out all of the male plant parts, which are less psychoactive, so Russo and his team believe there is little doubt as to why the cannabis was grown.
What is in question, however, is how the marijuana was administered, since no pipes or other objects associated with smoking were found in the grave.
"Perhaps it was ingested orally," Russo said. "It might also have been fumigated, as the Scythian tribes to the north did subsequently."
Although other cultures in the area used hemp to make various goods as early as 7,000 years ago, additional tomb finds indicate the Gushi fabricated their clothing from wool and made their rope out of reed fibers. The scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it's evident that the blue-eyed man was buried with a lot of it.
"As with other grave goods, it was traditional to place items needed for the afterlife in the tomb with the departed," Russo said.
The ancient marijuana stash is now housed at Turpan Museum in China. In the future, Russo hopes to conduct further research at the Yanghai site, which has 2,000 other tombs.
© 2008 Discovery Channel
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28034925/
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
2007 interview of Sound Engineer/Drug Pioneer Owsley Stanley
SF Chronicle
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Thursday, July 12, 2007
The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear -- has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.
"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."
By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.
Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
Says the Dead's Bob Weir: "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything."
Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator, grew up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.
Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.
Then he discovered acid.
He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid.
The Berkeley police raided his first lab in 1966 and confiscated a substance that they claimed was methedrine. When it turned out to be something else -- probably a component of LSD -- Bear not only walked free but successfully sued the cops for the return of his lab equipment.
By the time he made a special batch called Monterey Purple for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival -- Owsley Purple was the secret smile on Jimi Hendrix's face that night -- "Owsley" was an underground legend.
In December 1967, agents arrested him at his secret lab in Orinda. The "LSD Millionaire" headline in The Chronicle prompted the Dead to write the song "Alice D. Millionaire." In 1970, after a pot bust in Oakland, a judge revoked Bear's bail, and he served two years at Terminal Island near the Los Angeles Harbor.
"If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."
Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved with the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager. He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a laboratory for audio research.
"We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."
Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's tapes have been turned into albums.
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."
His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.
As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.
"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."
Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a natural disaster was imminent. He predicted at the time that global warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region to survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home the moment he set foot on the new continent.
"I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be wrong."
Old friends express shock that Bear would ever even admit to that possibility, but, if not exactly mellowed in his old age, he has found room to accommodate other points of view.
"He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in Australia this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be actually sweet."
His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his oldest son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various diatribes and essays.
He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says.
Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."
At the hilltop San Anselmo home where Bear had been house-sitting, pretty much all available space was taken over with his belongings. He squatted over the piles, trying to figure out what to ship and what to take with him. Two days before his flight, it looks like he'll need every minute.
This time, he was extending his stay to catch his old friends Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of Hot Tuna play at the Fillmore. But when he left for the airport the next day, he got as far as Sausalito before he discovered that he had left the briefcase with the tickets back in San Anselmo, and the trip home was postponed for another week.
"I even said, 'I wonder what I'm leaving behind this time?' before I left," he says, somewhat sadly.
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Thursday, July 12, 2007
The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear -- has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
As a planned two-week visit to the Bay Area stretched to three, four and then five weeks, Bear agreed to give The Chronicle an interview because a friend asked him. He has rarely consented to speak to the press about his life, his work or his unconventional thinking on matters such as the coming ice age or his all-meat diet.
Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.
"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."
By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.
Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.
Says the Dead's Bob Weir: "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything."
Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator, grew up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.
Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.
Then he discovered acid.
He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library. Soon after, Bear began to cook acid.
The Berkeley police raided his first lab in 1966 and confiscated a substance that they claimed was methedrine. When it turned out to be something else -- probably a component of LSD -- Bear not only walked free but successfully sued the cops for the return of his lab equipment.
By the time he made a special batch called Monterey Purple for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival -- Owsley Purple was the secret smile on Jimi Hendrix's face that night -- "Owsley" was an underground legend.
In December 1967, agents arrested him at his secret lab in Orinda. The "LSD Millionaire" headline in The Chronicle prompted the Dead to write the song "Alice D. Millionaire." In 1970, after a pot bust in Oakland, a judge revoked Bear's bail, and he served two years at Terminal Island near the Los Angeles Harbor.
"If you make some, you've got to move some to get some money to make it," he says now. "But then you had to give a lot away to keep the street price down. So anyway, I'm sort of embedded in this thing that I'm tangled up in. ... Just as soon as it became illegal, I wanted out. Then, of course, I felt an obligation."
Bear, chemist to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was involved with the Dead almost from the band's beginnings at Kesey's notorious Acid Tests. Bear was the Dead's first patron and, briefly, their manager. He bought the band sound equipment and began to use the Dead as a laboratory for audio research.
"We'd never thought about high-quality PAs," says the Dead's Weir. "There was no such thing until Bear started making one."
Bear made the first public address system specifically dedicated to music in 1966. If he was the first concert sound engineer in rock music to take his job seriously, his habit of making tape recordings of the shows he mixed also gave the Dead an unprecedented archive of live recordings dating back to the band's first days. Many of Bear's tapes have been turned into albums.
Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. "He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level," says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. "I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's."
His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several months in 1966 in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.
As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.
"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."
Bear left Northern California in the early '80s, convinced that a natural disaster was imminent. He predicted at the time that global warming would lead to a six-week-long ultra-cyclone that could cover the Northern Hemisphere with a new ice age. Determining that the tropical northern side of Australia would be the most likely region to survive, Bear made a beeline for Queensland and says he felt at home the moment he set foot on the new continent.
"I might be right about the ice age thing," he allows. "I might be wrong."
Old friends express shock that Bear would ever even admit to that possibility, but, if not exactly mellowed in his old age, he has found room to accommodate other points of view.
"He's come a long way," says Wavy Gravy, who visited Bear in Australia this year. "He used to be real snappy and grumpy. Now he can be actually sweet."
His four children are grown. He has five grandchildren, and his oldest son, Pete, in Florida, just became a grandfather, making Bear a great-grandfather for the first time. His other son, Starfinder, a veterinarian, hosted a party for him last month at his Oakland home attended by the old Dead crowd, a tortoise and a caged iguana. He has two daughters, Nina and Redbird, and maintains his own Web site (www.thebear.org) where he sells his sculpture and posts various diatribes and essays.
He keeps up with the music scene -- he singles out Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys as new bands he likes. "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD," he says.
Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."
At the hilltop San Anselmo home where Bear had been house-sitting, pretty much all available space was taken over with his belongings. He squatted over the piles, trying to figure out what to ship and what to take with him. Two days before his flight, it looks like he'll need every minute.
This time, he was extending his stay to catch his old friends Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of Hot Tuna play at the Fillmore. But when he left for the airport the next day, he got as far as Sausalito before he discovered that he had left the briefcase with the tickets back in San Anselmo, and the trip home was postponed for another week.
"I even said, 'I wonder what I'm leaving behind this time?' before I left," he says, somewhat sadly.
E-mail Joel Selvin at jselvin@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HS1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Study: Loud music makes customers drink faster
Reuters
Loud music makes customers drink faster
Fri Jul 18, 8:30 PM ET
Customers of bars that play loud music drink more quickly and in fewer gulps, French researchers said on Friday.
Their study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, found that turning up the music spurred drinkers to down a glass of beer about three minutes more quickly.
To gauge the effect of sound levels on drinking, the team spent three Saturday nights visiting two bars, where they observed 40 men aged between 18 and 25 drinking beer.
"We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking," Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioural sciences researcher at the University of Southern Brittany in France, who led the study, said in a statement.
With help from the bars' owners, the team turned the music up and down and then recorded how much and how fast people drank. The men did not know they were being observed.
Louder music spurred more consumption, with the average number of drinks ordered by patrons rising to 3.4 drinks from 2.6 drinks, Gueguen found. The time taken to drink a beer fell to an average 11.45 minutes from 14.51 minutes.
The researchers acknowledged some limitations to their study, for example that the experiment was on a small scale and could not be applied to every bar.
They said it was not clear why louder music appeared to increase alcohol consumption but said it might make conversation more difficult, forcing people to drink more and talk less.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Catherine Evans).
Loud music makes customers drink faster
Fri Jul 18, 8:30 PM ET
Customers of bars that play loud music drink more quickly and in fewer gulps, French researchers said on Friday.
Their study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, found that turning up the music spurred drinkers to down a glass of beer about three minutes more quickly.
To gauge the effect of sound levels on drinking, the team spent three Saturday nights visiting two bars, where they observed 40 men aged between 18 and 25 drinking beer.
"We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking," Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioural sciences researcher at the University of Southern Brittany in France, who led the study, said in a statement.
With help from the bars' owners, the team turned the music up and down and then recorded how much and how fast people drank. The men did not know they were being observed.
Louder music spurred more consumption, with the average number of drinks ordered by patrons rising to 3.4 drinks from 2.6 drinks, Gueguen found. The time taken to drink a beer fell to an average 11.45 minutes from 14.51 minutes.
The researchers acknowledged some limitations to their study, for example that the experiment was on a small scale and could not be applied to every bar.
They said it was not clear why louder music appeared to increase alcohol consumption but said it might make conversation more difficult, forcing people to drink more and talk less.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Catherine Evans).
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Study: Rap music Glamorizes Drug Use
Reuters
Rap music glamorizes drug use: study
1 hour, 31 minutes ago
Rap music has increasingly glamorized the use of illegal drugs, portraying marijuana, crack and cocaine as symbols of wealth and status, according to a new study by the journal Addiction Research & Theory.
The report found that rap artists had moved away from the lyrics of the early days of the genre when they often warned against the dangers of substance abuse.
"This study showed that in fact much early rap music either did not talk about drugs at all, or when it did had anti-drug messages," said Denise Herd, of the University of California at Berkeley, who headed the research team.
"So intrinsically rap music is not necessarily associated with these themes," she added.
After sampling 341 lyrics from rap music's most popular hits between 1979 and 1997, the researchers found references to drugs had increased six-fold over that period.
Of the 38 most popular songs between 1979 and 1984, only four contained drug references. But by the late 1980s the incidence had increased to 19 percent, and after 1993 nearly 70 percent of rap songs mentioned drug use.
Lyrics describing drug use have not only became more frequent but the context changed from concern about the devastation of drugs to a more positive portrayal.
For example, Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines," recorded in 1983, warns cocaine does nothing except "killin' your brain," but more recent tunes by popular rappers such as 50 Cent's "As the World Turns" refers to cocaine and heroin as positive things.
"This is an alarming trend, as rap artists are role models for the nation's youth, especially in urban areas," Herd said.
She added that much of what is discussed in rap is in code.
"The kids understand but parents don't," Herd explained in an interview.
The word "flinging," for example, means selling drugs. Some slang words for marijuana include "broccoli," "trees" and "chronic." "Fat sacks" and "strapped horns" refer to cocaine smoking pipes, according to the study.
Studies have shown rap music is one of the fastest-growing genres in American pop culture today and plays a prominent role in youth culture.
"I think society has some responsibility to give kids some alternatives to the glamorized view of drugs they see in this music," Herd said. "There are solutions that go beyond the family and home, and a lot rests with us as an American society in general."
Rap music glamorizes drug use: study
1 hour, 31 minutes ago
Rap music has increasingly glamorized the use of illegal drugs, portraying marijuana, crack and cocaine as symbols of wealth and status, according to a new study by the journal Addiction Research & Theory.
The report found that rap artists had moved away from the lyrics of the early days of the genre when they often warned against the dangers of substance abuse.
"This study showed that in fact much early rap music either did not talk about drugs at all, or when it did had anti-drug messages," said Denise Herd, of the University of California at Berkeley, who headed the research team.
"So intrinsically rap music is not necessarily associated with these themes," she added.
After sampling 341 lyrics from rap music's most popular hits between 1979 and 1997, the researchers found references to drugs had increased six-fold over that period.
Of the 38 most popular songs between 1979 and 1984, only four contained drug references. But by the late 1980s the incidence had increased to 19 percent, and after 1993 nearly 70 percent of rap songs mentioned drug use.
Lyrics describing drug use have not only became more frequent but the context changed from concern about the devastation of drugs to a more positive portrayal.
For example, Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines," recorded in 1983, warns cocaine does nothing except "killin' your brain," but more recent tunes by popular rappers such as 50 Cent's "As the World Turns" refers to cocaine and heroin as positive things.
"This is an alarming trend, as rap artists are role models for the nation's youth, especially in urban areas," Herd said.
She added that much of what is discussed in rap is in code.
"The kids understand but parents don't," Herd explained in an interview.
The word "flinging," for example, means selling drugs. Some slang words for marijuana include "broccoli," "trees" and "chronic." "Fat sacks" and "strapped horns" refer to cocaine smoking pipes, according to the study.
Studies have shown rap music is one of the fastest-growing genres in American pop culture today and plays a prominent role in youth culture.
"I think society has some responsibility to give kids some alternatives to the glamorized view of drugs they see in this music," Herd said. "There are solutions that go beyond the family and home, and a lot rests with us as an American society in general."
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Colorado debates the "high" in John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High"
NYT
March 14, 2007
Colorado Has Song in Its Heart, and Not Drugs on Its Mind
By KIRK JOHNSON
DENVER, March 13 — The Colorado General Assembly wants to be quite clear on this point: When the singer-songwriter John Denver praised the joys of Colorado and sang about “friends around the campfire, and everybody’s high,” in 1972, he was not referring to illicit drugs. Definitely not. Don’t even think it. The high in question, lawmakers say, is really about nature and the great outdoors — the tingly feeling you get after a nice hike, perhaps.
“A high is medically the releasing of endorphins in the brain — yes, drugs cause it, but so do lots of other things,” said State Senator Bob Hagedorn, a Democrat from the suburbs of Denver who successfully led the drive on Monday to make Mr. Denver’s anthem “Rocky Mountain High” Colorado’s second state song. The tune will have joint status with “Where the Columbines Grow,” which pretty much everyone agrees is about flowers.
“We could be talking about guys who’ve been fishing all day, or kids pigging out on s’mores, with the chocolate,” Senator Hagedorn said, referring to other endorphin-producing activities. “If I thought there was anything in that song about the use of drugs or encouraging the use of drugs, I would never have run the resolution.”
What the designation of Mr. Denver’s song as “official” might actually mean — for the song or the state — remains unclear. The history of official state objects around the country is quite mixed.
Maryland lawmakers, for example, voted in 2003 to make walking the official “state exercise,” but the measure walked only as far as the governor’s desk, where it was vetoed. And many people probably sing “Yankee Doodle” without getting a sudden urge to visit Connecticut, even though it’s the official state song there. But politicians still keep trying. The governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, signed a measure into law just this week making the bolo, or string tie, the state’s official neckware.
In any case, John Denver lovers and state tourism promoters say that “Rocky Mountain High” is different. The song has Colorado prominently in the chorus and it sold millions of copies. And there seems little doubt that Mr. Denver genuinely loved Colorado, too.
Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, N.M., the singer originally considered calling himself John Sommerville, according to his official Web site, Johndenver.com, before settling on Colorado’s capital city for his stage name and Aspen in the central Rockies as his home.
Mr. Denver died in October 1997 at age 53 in a plane crash, and Senator Hagedorn said the approaching 10th anniversary of the accident was part of the impetus for his resolution — to create a kind of memorial to an adopted favorite son — and also why he thinks it passed by large majorities in the House and Senate. The resolution takes effect without going to the desk of Gov. Bill Ritter.
“A lot of people probably think it’s already the state song,” said Richard Grant, a spokesman for the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. The bureau is already planning how to use “Rocky Mountain High” in promotional materials, Mr. Grant said, adding that he also hears no drug references in the lyrics.
“It’s certainly going to appeal to a lot of young people,” Mr. Grant said. “It’s just a cool thing to take a rock song and make it the official song.”
March 14, 2007
Colorado Has Song in Its Heart, and Not Drugs on Its Mind
By KIRK JOHNSON
DENVER, March 13 — The Colorado General Assembly wants to be quite clear on this point: When the singer-songwriter John Denver praised the joys of Colorado and sang about “friends around the campfire, and everybody’s high,” in 1972, he was not referring to illicit drugs. Definitely not. Don’t even think it. The high in question, lawmakers say, is really about nature and the great outdoors — the tingly feeling you get after a nice hike, perhaps.
“A high is medically the releasing of endorphins in the brain — yes, drugs cause it, but so do lots of other things,” said State Senator Bob Hagedorn, a Democrat from the suburbs of Denver who successfully led the drive on Monday to make Mr. Denver’s anthem “Rocky Mountain High” Colorado’s second state song. The tune will have joint status with “Where the Columbines Grow,” which pretty much everyone agrees is about flowers.
“We could be talking about guys who’ve been fishing all day, or kids pigging out on s’mores, with the chocolate,” Senator Hagedorn said, referring to other endorphin-producing activities. “If I thought there was anything in that song about the use of drugs or encouraging the use of drugs, I would never have run the resolution.”
What the designation of Mr. Denver’s song as “official” might actually mean — for the song or the state — remains unclear. The history of official state objects around the country is quite mixed.
Maryland lawmakers, for example, voted in 2003 to make walking the official “state exercise,” but the measure walked only as far as the governor’s desk, where it was vetoed. And many people probably sing “Yankee Doodle” without getting a sudden urge to visit Connecticut, even though it’s the official state song there. But politicians still keep trying. The governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, signed a measure into law just this week making the bolo, or string tie, the state’s official neckware.
In any case, John Denver lovers and state tourism promoters say that “Rocky Mountain High” is different. The song has Colorado prominently in the chorus and it sold millions of copies. And there seems little doubt that Mr. Denver genuinely loved Colorado, too.
Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, N.M., the singer originally considered calling himself John Sommerville, according to his official Web site, Johndenver.com, before settling on Colorado’s capital city for his stage name and Aspen in the central Rockies as his home.
Mr. Denver died in October 1997 at age 53 in a plane crash, and Senator Hagedorn said the approaching 10th anniversary of the accident was part of the impetus for his resolution — to create a kind of memorial to an adopted favorite son — and also why he thinks it passed by large majorities in the House and Senate. The resolution takes effect without going to the desk of Gov. Bill Ritter.
“A lot of people probably think it’s already the state song,” said Richard Grant, a spokesman for the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. The bureau is already planning how to use “Rocky Mountain High” in promotional materials, Mr. Grant said, adding that he also hears no drug references in the lyrics.
“It’s certainly going to appeal to a lot of young people,” Mr. Grant said. “It’s just a cool thing to take a rock song and make it the official song.”
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Cocaine and Rap Music
The New Yorker
Pop Music
Coke Is It
Rap’s drug obsession.
by Sasha Frere-Jones December 25, 2006
In September, the magazine W announced that cocaine is again a fashionable vice. In pop music, cocaine never went away. Even if some people cluck disapprovingly, most accept the tendency of pop stars to use drugs—to fuel creativity, calm nerves, and liquidate record-company advances. When Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree in Fiji last April and injured his head, the incident was greeted by jokes about whether there was much left inside his skull to harm. TV shows like VH1’s “Behind the Music” thrive on stories of musicians on drug binges, snorting lines off recording-studio consoles. This fall, Eric Clapton, who has been sober for years, decided to reinstate “Cocaine,” the louche hit song from his 1977 album “Slowhand,” in his live set.
What is a life-style choice in pop is a livelihood in hip-hop. Almost every m.c. raps about selling cocaine, whether he’s a veteran like Jay-Z, who likes to invoke his stint as a teen-age dealer, or a newcomer like Rick Ross, who built his 2006 début album, “Port of Miami,” around the conceit of being the biggest coke dealer in town. Two hip-hop acts, Clipse and Young Jeezy, rap about dealing more than about anything else, and their music has prompted critics to christen a new subgenre: cocaine rap. Clipse is Gene (Malice) and Terrence (Pusha T) Thornton, a pair of brothers from Virginia, whose brilliantly terse and abrasive second album, “Hell Hath No Fury,” came out last month; Young Jeezy is a twenty-eight-year-old from Atlanta, whose woozy and uneven second album, “The Inspiration,” was released last week. These m.c.s boast of their skill as salesmen, not of their lives as partygoers.
In the early nineties, rappers tried to placate moralists by trotting out set pieces about pitiable crackheads, a gesture about as effective as hanging a “No Smoking” sign outside an office building. Clipse and Young Jeezy don’t bother with cautionary tales, though the Thornton brothers do apologize for their lawlessness on a skipping track called “Momma, I’m So Sorry.” The song is punctuated by whimsical puffs of a chord organ and a reference to the drug-busting detectives from “Miami Vice”: “Momma, I’m so sorry I’m so obnoxious. I don’t fear Tubbs and Crockett.”
Drug dealing is a cryptic presence in cocaine rap, alluded to by dozens of synonyms and euphemisms but rarely by name. Many listeners will grasp the meaning of “snow.” (Young Jeezy’s nickname is the Snowman. When his logo, three stacked spheres, began appearing on high schoolers’ T-shirts last year, anti-drug groups complained and school districts banned the shirts.) But what about “keys” (kilos of cocaine); “trap house” (a place where cocaine is cooked into crack); “fishscale” (uncut cocaine); “triple beam” (a scale used to weigh the drug); “work,” “weight,” and “birds” (terms for parcels of cocaine)? In these songs, bricks, squares, pies, stones, and yams are coke, and the cooking, mixing, and weighing required to prepare the drug for clients becomes the inspiration for often inscrutable wordplay. As the Thorntons rap on a track called “Wamp Wamp,” “Mildewish, I heat it, it turns gluish. It cools to a tight wad; the Pyrex is Jewish. I get paper, it seems I get foolish. Take it to Jacob and play, ‘Which hue’s the bluest?’ ”
Hip-hop has always been driven by an imperative to employ the most vibrant words possible; cocaine rap takes this command to an inventive extreme. Young Jeezy and Clipse want to boast about flouting the law and at the same time protect themselves from potential prosecution. (“Take it out the wrap; then I put it on the scale, but keep that on the low, ’cause I ain’t tryin’ to go to jail,” Young Jeezy raps on the track “Keep It Gangsta.”) The result is complex poetry: songs that simultaneously broadcast and hide their meaning.
Young Jeezy became popular in 2005, eventually selling 1.7 million copies of his major-label début album, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” according to Nielsen SoundScan. “Go Crazy,” a song with verses about “cooking them o’s”—ounces—was the album’s first single. If you were teaching a high-school English class and looking for examples of metaphor and simile, “Go Crazy” would do nicely. The act of processing uncut cocaine inspires a riff on O-shaped objects: “Like Krispy Kremes, I was cookin’ them o’s. Like horseshoes, I was tossin’ them o’s.” In the chorus, Jeezy sings about making the “dope boys go crazy”; he could be boasting about his music’s effect on his fans, describing competitiveness among drug venders, or resurrecting the eighties meaning of “dope” as slang for “good.”
On “The Inspiration,” Jeezy raps over thick, simple music generated by synthesizers. It’s heavy on strings, and much of it suggests the score of a melodramatic shoot-’em-up in the style of Michael Mann. The songs quote music from the eighties—the title track samples Diana Ross’s “Muscles” (swapping out a consonant to become “hustles,” naturally)—and the album generally reproduces the decade’s aesthetic of grandeur on the cheap.
Establishing criminal bona fides is virtually a required move for a rapper, but the relentlessness of Young Jeezy’s boasts is wearying, and ultimately makes him sound insecure. “I’m the motherfucking realest; they liars, they phonies, they fakes; these niggas ain’t ever touched the weight,” he chants in “The Realest.” His hoarse voice is his most appealing asset. He sings with a charismatic swagger but conveys the impression of being slightly lost and worn out. He stretches words out across several beats, turning light interjections, like “yeah” and “that’s right,” into ominous announcements. The more Jeezy croaks, the more it sounds as though nothing will ever be right in his world.
The Thornton brothers concentrate more on writing arresting couplets than on finding new ways of delivering them. (Pusha T recently told allhiphop.com, a rap Web site, “This rap [today] is very cheap. It’s all about charisma more so than lyricism.”) The brothers’ first hit single, “Grindin’ ” (2002), established them as grave and exacting artists. Technically, the music—which is provided by the Neptunes, an influential pair of pop-music producers—isn’t always music. The harsh drumbeat is punctuated by the sound of what might be a car trunk being slammed, and the only hint of melody is a pinging noise that could be somebody playing a very fast game of Pong. The Thornton brothers rap in forceful monotones, delivering careful, clever lines.
On “Hell Hath No Fury,” there is barely a gratuitous word or noise. The album is only forty-nine minutes long—many rap CDs are seventy minutes—and, like a slap of rubbing alcohol, it is invigorating and impossible to ignore. “Ride Around Shining,” one of the album’s most bracing songs, features a small drum pattern that could have been lifted from an early-eighties rap record, and what sounds like an object being dragged across the exposed strings of a grand piano—as if John Cage had wandered into the studio. “While I’m shoveling the snow, man, call me Frosty,” Pusha T raps.
“Dirty Money” is as close to a summation of cocaine rap as we have. The lyrics, apparently about a drug dealer whose girlfriend is giving him a hard time about his occupation, defends his ill-gotten gain: “Long as I’m nice with the flame and the flask, I don’t mind keeping you up on the must-haves. Peep-toe pumps, Gucci slouch bag—now tell me, is that dirty money really that bad?” It’s not much of a defense, but the lyrics are so playful and unexpected that it hardly matters. The drug dealer in the song is trying not just to reassure his girlfriend but to cook crack and count money, too: “3-D faces on them crisp new billies got Benjy looking all googly-eyed and silly.” We may never know what the Thorntons really think about cocaine’s effect on the world, but we can hear what it does to their words. ♦
Pop Music
Coke Is It
Rap’s drug obsession.
by Sasha Frere-Jones December 25, 2006
In September, the magazine W announced that cocaine is again a fashionable vice. In pop music, cocaine never went away. Even if some people cluck disapprovingly, most accept the tendency of pop stars to use drugs—to fuel creativity, calm nerves, and liquidate record-company advances. When Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree in Fiji last April and injured his head, the incident was greeted by jokes about whether there was much left inside his skull to harm. TV shows like VH1’s “Behind the Music” thrive on stories of musicians on drug binges, snorting lines off recording-studio consoles. This fall, Eric Clapton, who has been sober for years, decided to reinstate “Cocaine,” the louche hit song from his 1977 album “Slowhand,” in his live set.
What is a life-style choice in pop is a livelihood in hip-hop. Almost every m.c. raps about selling cocaine, whether he’s a veteran like Jay-Z, who likes to invoke his stint as a teen-age dealer, or a newcomer like Rick Ross, who built his 2006 début album, “Port of Miami,” around the conceit of being the biggest coke dealer in town. Two hip-hop acts, Clipse and Young Jeezy, rap about dealing more than about anything else, and their music has prompted critics to christen a new subgenre: cocaine rap. Clipse is Gene (Malice) and Terrence (Pusha T) Thornton, a pair of brothers from Virginia, whose brilliantly terse and abrasive second album, “Hell Hath No Fury,” came out last month; Young Jeezy is a twenty-eight-year-old from Atlanta, whose woozy and uneven second album, “The Inspiration,” was released last week. These m.c.s boast of their skill as salesmen, not of their lives as partygoers.
In the early nineties, rappers tried to placate moralists by trotting out set pieces about pitiable crackheads, a gesture about as effective as hanging a “No Smoking” sign outside an office building. Clipse and Young Jeezy don’t bother with cautionary tales, though the Thornton brothers do apologize for their lawlessness on a skipping track called “Momma, I’m So Sorry.” The song is punctuated by whimsical puffs of a chord organ and a reference to the drug-busting detectives from “Miami Vice”: “Momma, I’m so sorry I’m so obnoxious. I don’t fear Tubbs and Crockett.”
Drug dealing is a cryptic presence in cocaine rap, alluded to by dozens of synonyms and euphemisms but rarely by name. Many listeners will grasp the meaning of “snow.” (Young Jeezy’s nickname is the Snowman. When his logo, three stacked spheres, began appearing on high schoolers’ T-shirts last year, anti-drug groups complained and school districts banned the shirts.) But what about “keys” (kilos of cocaine); “trap house” (a place where cocaine is cooked into crack); “fishscale” (uncut cocaine); “triple beam” (a scale used to weigh the drug); “work,” “weight,” and “birds” (terms for parcels of cocaine)? In these songs, bricks, squares, pies, stones, and yams are coke, and the cooking, mixing, and weighing required to prepare the drug for clients becomes the inspiration for often inscrutable wordplay. As the Thorntons rap on a track called “Wamp Wamp,” “Mildewish, I heat it, it turns gluish. It cools to a tight wad; the Pyrex is Jewish. I get paper, it seems I get foolish. Take it to Jacob and play, ‘Which hue’s the bluest?’ ”
Hip-hop has always been driven by an imperative to employ the most vibrant words possible; cocaine rap takes this command to an inventive extreme. Young Jeezy and Clipse want to boast about flouting the law and at the same time protect themselves from potential prosecution. (“Take it out the wrap; then I put it on the scale, but keep that on the low, ’cause I ain’t tryin’ to go to jail,” Young Jeezy raps on the track “Keep It Gangsta.”) The result is complex poetry: songs that simultaneously broadcast and hide their meaning.
Young Jeezy became popular in 2005, eventually selling 1.7 million copies of his major-label début album, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” according to Nielsen SoundScan. “Go Crazy,” a song with verses about “cooking them o’s”—ounces—was the album’s first single. If you were teaching a high-school English class and looking for examples of metaphor and simile, “Go Crazy” would do nicely. The act of processing uncut cocaine inspires a riff on O-shaped objects: “Like Krispy Kremes, I was cookin’ them o’s. Like horseshoes, I was tossin’ them o’s.” In the chorus, Jeezy sings about making the “dope boys go crazy”; he could be boasting about his music’s effect on his fans, describing competitiveness among drug venders, or resurrecting the eighties meaning of “dope” as slang for “good.”
On “The Inspiration,” Jeezy raps over thick, simple music generated by synthesizers. It’s heavy on strings, and much of it suggests the score of a melodramatic shoot-’em-up in the style of Michael Mann. The songs quote music from the eighties—the title track samples Diana Ross’s “Muscles” (swapping out a consonant to become “hustles,” naturally)—and the album generally reproduces the decade’s aesthetic of grandeur on the cheap.
Establishing criminal bona fides is virtually a required move for a rapper, but the relentlessness of Young Jeezy’s boasts is wearying, and ultimately makes him sound insecure. “I’m the motherfucking realest; they liars, they phonies, they fakes; these niggas ain’t ever touched the weight,” he chants in “The Realest.” His hoarse voice is his most appealing asset. He sings with a charismatic swagger but conveys the impression of being slightly lost and worn out. He stretches words out across several beats, turning light interjections, like “yeah” and “that’s right,” into ominous announcements. The more Jeezy croaks, the more it sounds as though nothing will ever be right in his world.
The Thornton brothers concentrate more on writing arresting couplets than on finding new ways of delivering them. (Pusha T recently told allhiphop.com, a rap Web site, “This rap [today] is very cheap. It’s all about charisma more so than lyricism.”) The brothers’ first hit single, “Grindin’ ” (2002), established them as grave and exacting artists. Technically, the music—which is provided by the Neptunes, an influential pair of pop-music producers—isn’t always music. The harsh drumbeat is punctuated by the sound of what might be a car trunk being slammed, and the only hint of melody is a pinging noise that could be somebody playing a very fast game of Pong. The Thornton brothers rap in forceful monotones, delivering careful, clever lines.
On “Hell Hath No Fury,” there is barely a gratuitous word or noise. The album is only forty-nine minutes long—many rap CDs are seventy minutes—and, like a slap of rubbing alcohol, it is invigorating and impossible to ignore. “Ride Around Shining,” one of the album’s most bracing songs, features a small drum pattern that could have been lifted from an early-eighties rap record, and what sounds like an object being dragged across the exposed strings of a grand piano—as if John Cage had wandered into the studio. “While I’m shoveling the snow, man, call me Frosty,” Pusha T raps.
“Dirty Money” is as close to a summation of cocaine rap as we have. The lyrics, apparently about a drug dealer whose girlfriend is giving him a hard time about his occupation, defends his ill-gotten gain: “Long as I’m nice with the flame and the flask, I don’t mind keeping you up on the must-haves. Peep-toe pumps, Gucci slouch bag—now tell me, is that dirty money really that bad?” It’s not much of a defense, but the lyrics are so playful and unexpected that it hardly matters. The drug dealer in the song is trying not just to reassure his girlfriend but to cook crack and count money, too: “3-D faces on them crisp new billies got Benjy looking all googly-eyed and silly.” We may never know what the Thorntons really think about cocaine’s effect on the world, but we can hear what it does to their words. ♦
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