Standing by your ganja
Rebellious musicians cosy up to weed
“Give me weed instead of roses/Bring me whiskey ’stead of wine/Every puff, every shot you’re lookin’ better all the time.”
Ashley Monroe’s voice is sweet-like-Dolly’s as she proposes an illegal drug as marital aid, the need to get a little wild in the face of monotony.
The Nashville singersongwriter can also be heard on some country radio, dropping the most controversial line in the current anti-small-townstuffiness single from her all-girl country band, the Pistol Annies: “So I snuck out behind the red barn/ And I took myself a toke/ Since everybody here hates everybody here/Hell I might as well be the joke.”
They’re surprisingly blatant references to marijuana, a drug that that’s common and yet surreptitious — still a restricted substance in North America save for, until last fall, the states of Colorado and Washington. These mentions are also somewhat jarring to find tucked in a genre more broadly associated with corn-fed good ole boys than law-busting rebels.
But the 26-year-old and her band are far from the only ones in on the Nashville pot party. Country music has always been a haven for outlaws — that White Lightning George Jones enjoyed early in his career could have been moonshine or something else; either way, it was definitely illegal.
But just as country enjoys a slight uptick in mainstream popularity today thanks to Blake Shelton in The Voice chair and Taylor Swift feigning surprise at every turn, the pot lobby is also enjoying an upswing of support. For the first time in 40 years, the majority of Americans support the legalization of marijuana — 52 per cent — a Pew research thermometer on popular opinion reports. In a recent Slate article that asked “When did country music and weed get so cosy?” writer Rachael Maddux draws parallels between pot approval and dope references in country music through time, dating back to the 1970s.
“If my popular music geared towards a younger demographic, I’d be surprised, frankly, if it wasn’t talking about smoking weed and smoke in all of its ambiguities,” said Jocelyn Neal, associate professor of music and director for the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Popular music reflects popular experience — if people are toking, or at least open to talking about toking — it’s fair game for songwriters, says Kristine McCusker, a music scholar at Middle Tennessee State University near Nashville.
“It’s supposedly illicit behaviour that many are doing anyway and these singers are simply validating a shared audience experience.”
Take Kacey Musgraves. Touted as country’s next great hope, this 24-year-old songwriting wizard is sending up more dope smoke signals than most, with liberal nods to marijuana dropped throughout her debut album Same Trailer, Different Park, released this spring. “When the straight and narrow/Gets a little too straight/Roll up a joint, or don’t/Just follow your arrow wherever it points,” she sings in Follow Your Arrow, a twangy answer to Lady Gaga’s Born this Way. On the critically acclaimed Merry Go Round — her first single about stunted life in a small town — Musgraves sings ‘Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother’s hooked on Mary Jane/Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down.” She’s publicly paid homage to her hero, Willie Nelson — Nashville’s most prominent pothead who, somewhat surprisingly, sings very little about his drug of choice, Maddux points out. Musgraves’ current single is the aptly titled Blowin’ Smoke.
Still, these young artists are merely adding to a slow forming pile of positive pot references amassed over the decade. In 2008, The Zac Brown Band vowed to “lay in the hot sun and roll a big fat one.” In 2005, Kenny Chesney mused about “floating ’round through Gorda Sound/With a cooler and a bong.” The 2003 Toby Keith tune Weed with Willie, is, well, what the title suggests.
So when did those square-boy Okies from Muskokie start hitting the bong?
Well, they haven’t — not exactly, Neal points out. There’s still plenty of clean-cut, dirt-road, beerdrinking, four-wheel-drive songs in mainstream country (think Shelton’s new hit Boys Round Here). Some of these more rebellious songs are an answer to that, and a reminder that today’s country owes as much to outlaw rebels like Lynyrd Skynyrd as the clean-cut likes of John Denver.
“This generation of musicians in the country scene is actually drawing on a more southern rock lineage and more rebellious than the mainstream lineage or lineage that touts behaviour and parental expectations,” she said. Mega country star of the moment Miranda Lambert — and the celebrity behind the Pistol Annies — often subverts class, generational and gender expectations. She does it in her current radio charttopper Mama’s Broken Heart (which happens to be co-written by Musgraves). And it’s done again in Hush, Hush, when Monroe’s character sneaks out behind the red barn for a little herb.
While Lady Antebellum and Brad Paisley aren’t lighting spliffs on their current records, Neal says, they’re certainly dropping references to southern rock idols.
“You can find these alternative streaks within contemporary country and that’s where we’re finding what might be described as some of this edgier songwriting, pushing the norms of middle-class respectability.”
The fact that women are the ones smoking dope also challenges a long-running dilemma in country music experienced in the 1950s by the iconic Patsy Cline, Joli Jensen, a media scholar at the University of Tulsa says.
“Can a woman be ‘really’ country if she isn’t demure, ladylike and standing by her man?” she asks. “Can she be really country if she is rowdy, redneck, raising hell like a man? Or if she uses drugs and alcohol to ease her loneliness and pain, just like a man? [She can] more so now than before, but not totally.”
But while a Mary Jane reference is dead obvious to one listener, it could completely escape another — likely those in the traditional “naive” country radio demographic, Neal says. Very few have noted the possible lesbian relationship in the Dixie Chicks song Long Time Gone, she says.