Fear of Music

Release has always had a close relationship with drugs and music. When the organization began, in the heady days of the 1960s (a “more generous decade”, as Leonard Cohen has observed, when it seemed that the world really could be changed by the youth), Release was funded by the counter culture. In practice, that meant largely by rock stars; there were lots of high profile donations, and venues would even put a “tax” on the door so that the bands and audiences who were using the drugs were the ones that paid for Release services: help with bad trips, health and welfare problems and, especially, drug busts. With finances thus secure, Release could even turn down offers of funding by the Home Office, which, to its credit, recognized that the service was worthwhile and deserved government money. My, how the times have changed.

Enough of this wistful sighing. Release aside, the wider point is that there has been a long relationship between drugs and popular music: indeed, it goes far back beyond the 60s. And, of course, it still features big in the media today. As the Mail Online put it yesterday:

“Singer Joss Stone has been condemned for glamorising drugs after an astonishing diatribe in which she claimed cannabis is less harmful than alcohol.”

Hmmm, sounds familiar. Doesn’t this put Joss Stone into the honoured company of Professor David Nutt, with whom we launched ourselves into the Blogosphere last week? Or perhaps the other way around? Either way, the Mail is filled once more with a righteous wrath, commenting that the 22 year-old singer has “enraged anti-drug campaigners” and added that her remarks may be seen in the context of her desire to stump up publicity for her new album. She went on, we are told, to dismiss the dangers of cannabis, in spite of the fact that ministers upgraded the drug’s legal classification from C to B last year. Whatever her motivation, she too seems to have been sending out the wrong message. In another echo of the Nutt affair, David Raynes of the National Drugs Prevention Alliance remarked, “People like Joss Stone should keep their mouths shut about things like this.” Right then.

Since jazz music first appeared in the dance clubs of Soho in the early twentieth century, provoking fears of sexual primitivism and the madness of dancing women, racial interbreeding and the swamping of national identity (yes, all the old favourites), drugs and music have been entwined in the passion of the cultural imagination. Jazz and blues singers smoked marijuana and took cocaine; as the century progressed they became associated with heroin use—and it’s true, a lot of the bebop jazzers believed the drug helped them play. Maybe it did. In the 1950s, the large scale immigration of West Indians into the UK led to new fears, especially when white girls appeared to be drawn to their shadowy all-night clubs, their rhythms and their reefers, their reportedly outsized anatomical adaptations. Cannabis was the symbol of all this. For the authorities it was a fearful thing, to be repressed. For the youth, a marker of new experiences and a promise of exciting social freedoms.

Drugs, it would seem, are made of symbolism as much as they are made of chemicals. It is this symbolic struggle which is still being played out in contemporary culture. And while drugs are associated with music, itself an element of a libertarian popular culture that celebrates drug experience, no amount of “education” is going to stop people using them.

Release blog will return to the relationship of drugs and music in the near future.