You can tell from the Willie Nelson picture in the sidebar that I love music. When I was a kid, my parents bought me a brown plastic cassette player, and I carried it everywhere. I am mildly embarrassed of the cassette tapes I played over and over again (mostly Disney soundtracks and ’80s country music), but I recognize that the music I listened to had a huge impact on my childhood and the person that I have become. I grew up in the relatively isolated state of Wyoming (before the invention of the Internet and the iPhone), and tapes like Dolly Parton’s Rainbow (1987) and the Aladdin (1992) soundtrack were my window onto the world outside my hometown.
So it probably isn’t a surprise that when I think about marijuana I think about how I have heard it portrayed in music. To be honest, I can’t think of many songs that were written before the late 2000s that talk specifically about pot. Dolly smokes it in Nine to Five (1980), and Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and other people were definitely smoking it in their tour buses, but they were mostly silent about it in their music. When the subject did come up, you had to really listen for it. For example, in “Me and Paul” (1971), Willie sings that he “was almost busted in Laredo, but for reasons that [he’d] rather not disclose,” and that “if you’re staying in a motel there and leave, don’t leave nothing in your clothes.” There are lots of things you can get into trouble for leaving in a motel room, but since it’s Willie singing it seems pretty obvious that he’s talking about marijuana. Like I said, though, you have to listen for it.
In recent years the taboo on mentioning pot in popular music has disappeared. In 2009, I was shocked to hear Charlie Mars on the radio frankly inviting his friends to “come over and get high while [they] listen to The Dark Side of the Moon.” In the years since then pot has worked its way into hit songs even in that most conservative of musical genres (and one of my personal favorites)–country. In 2010, Eric Church had a hit with “Smoke a Little Smoke,” and in 2013’s “Follow Your Arrow,” Kacey Musgraves tells us that when “the straight and narrow gets a little too straight” we should go ahead and “roll up a joint.”
The more visible using marijuana has become in songs and other forms of popular media the more people have accepted it as normal behavior. I think this is mostly a good thing, but still I have to wonder if something hasn’t been lost with the total mainstreaming of pot in American culture. Back in 1971, rolling a joint meant something. Kris Kristofferson was a long-haired liberal who was friends with Janis Joplin and rejuvenated country music with a folk and hippie sensibility. For Willie Nelson, who felt stifled by the lack of artistic freedom afforded him in Nashville, making subtle references to smoking pot was an act of defiance. Now, singing glibly about taking hits from a bong is business as usual in the music industry (country included), and according to one of my favorite blogs, Saving Country Music, Willie is getting ready to open his own chain of weed-related products and stores. Where is the rebellion in that?