Remember When Rappers Hated Weed?
Don't get high and drive a car / You will not get very far
*To celebrate the paperback release of Fentanyl, Inc., I’m doing a live online event with Subterranean Books on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7 pm central. Hope to see you there!
*This is a Drugs + Hip-Hop free post. Subscribe here. The Hip-Hop 25 continues soon with Run-DMC.
For decades rappers have espoused their love for marijuana — aka (in roughly chronological order) mary jane, cheeba, sess, bubonic chronic, ganja, dro, bud, indo, kush, and gas.
But it wasn’t always that way. When hip-hop began, marijuana barely registered. In the genre’s first decade only crack and cocaine were mentioned very often – and almost always negatively, like in Melle Mel’s 1983 cautionary song “White Lines (Don’t Do It).”
Nothing to gain except killing your brain.
By the mid-‘80s pot was receiving scattered shout-outs, including on the first gangsta rap track, from 1985, Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?”
Clinton Road one Saturday night
Towin’ on a cheeba I was feeling alright
Yet not everyone felt so comfortable. In 1989’s “Cheeba Cheeba,” Tone Loc feels it necessary to go “behind the curtains” at a concert to smoke his.
Weed references from this era were mainly negative. Rob Base, in his enduring 1988 hit “It Takes Two” with DJ E-Z Rock, notes the he doesn’t “smoke buddha, can’t stand sess.”
Even stronger language was used by Dr. Dre, of all people, on N.W.A’s track from that same year, “Express Yourself”:
I don’t smoke weed or sess
‘Cause it’s known to give a brother brain damage.*
*Not sure what scientific study Dre was consulting, but N.W.A were a bunch of teetotalers. None of them really drank or smoked.
Meanwhile Biz Markie rapped disparagingly in his 1989 song “Things Get a Little Easier” about a girl named Suzy who would “make blunts disappear better than a magician.”
There there was American hero Devastatin’ Dave.
His “Zip Zap Rap” from 1986 summed up the entire anti-drug argument. Most devastatingly:
Don't get high and drive a car
You will not get very far*
*I think his disjointed delivery must have inspired the Blizzard Man, but that’s just a theory.
Weird, square outliers, these? Hardly. Run-DMC, the most popular hip-hop act of the mid-’80s, rapped about avoiding drugs.
Seemingly everyone had anti-drug songs, from Ice-T to Public Enemy. Nowadays not too many MCs besides Christian rappers and high school students are preachy about intoxicants, but the reverse was once true.
What happened?
Pot, acid, and other recreational chemicals had long been portrayed positively in rock songs, beginning when rock came of age in the '1960s, as drug culture went mainstream.
White mainstream, that is. Drug use continued to be less tolerated by African-American communities, whose leaders tended to support the War on Drugs.
Weed gained acceptance in rap culture largely owing to a Latino-fronted group – Cypress Hill.
Cypress Hill advocated for ganja at a time when doing so could actually hurt your career.
“You could not get a song about weed on the air. You could get all kinds of violent shit on the radio back then, but nothing that condoned any drug use,” said frontman B-Real.
Tracks like “Light Another” on their 1991 debut Cypress Hill laid the groundwork, and their 1993 follow-up Black Sunday kicked off with their classic stoner anthem “I Wanna Get High.”
This sounded fairly shocking at the time, and I also remember thinking Black Sunday track “Legalize It” was preposterous, pie-in-the-sky stuff. Yet medical marijuana was legalized in California by voter proposition only three years later.
In 1992 Dr. Dre had a bud-driven about-face, a THC-induced flip-flop that turned into one of rap’s most seminal albums, The Chronic. With a cover design pilfered from Zig-Zag and a CD bearing an image of a marijuana plant, it sold three million copies.
What’s curious listening to The Chronic now is just how few weed-smoking mentions it contains. I’d bet any 2020 rap album picked at random has more.
Dre said his protege Snoop Dogg introduced him to the drug, but I doubt Dre ever smoked much. He seemed more interested in the image.*
*Remember that back before he was a gangsta rapper he was rapping against gangs.
The Chronic’s influence was seismic, and by the mid-‘90s weed was the most rapped-about drug in hip-hop.
Pot obsessives like Three-6-Mafia, Devin the Dude, and Method Man & Redman began making their debuts. Marijuana was portrayed as an edgy recreational pastime.
Public Enemy, Wyclef Jean, and Cypress Hill performed on the 1998 Smokin’ Grooves tour, the latter hitting from a giant bong onstage that was taller than they were. Not to be outdone, Snoop, Dre, and Eminem joined forces for a 2000 tour called Up In Smoke.
Gangsta rap’s success changed hip-hop. It was no longer about an MC’s party-starting abilities or skills on the mic – now it was about who was the biggest outlaw.
And so touting your love of weed helped boost one’s credibility. 50 Cent put out “High All the Time,” though he privately denied using pot at all in real life. Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y, meanwhile, forged entire careers on their love of the herb.
Then rap’s drugs got harder.
No one has ever overdosed and died from weed, but I don’t support rapping about lean, because so many people — and so many rappers — have died from it. Pimp C is the most famous example.
Now an entire generation of artists are being killed off by opioids and benzodiazepines.
When it comes to glorifying these drugs, Future is among the worst, if you ask me. I love many of his songs, but he raps constantly about lean, Percocets, and other pills.
If you don’t think these songs affect real people’s lives, you’re delusional. Juice Wrld said Future inspired him to sip syrup; he died last year from oxycodone and codeine.
You’ll almost never hear a rapper admit to shooting heroin or taking fentanyl. Yet lean is also an opioid, and Percocets and Xanies are often cut with fentanyl, so it’s tantamount to the same thing.
Let’s just stick with weed.
To celebrate the paperback release of Fentanyl, Inc., I’m doing a live online event with Subterranean Books on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7 pm central. Hope to see you there!
Ever thought of doing an online class teaching investigative journalism?