THERE'S NOTHING DOPIER THAN A BAD STONER SONG

Tunes do nothing to help the cause

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

Not the most unfortunate, I grant you.

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

The drug song is up there, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then again, maybe I've been smoking something that makes me overthink these
things.