Marijuana and music were the main things I took away from my teenage years, and besides teenage girls, were my only interests until I got out of college. Like all weirdo high school kids with a pot habit, I especially enjoyed my two hobbies in tandem, and any music that got better when I was stoned held a special place in my oversized CD book.
This was also the time when my musical taste was arguably the worst of my life, inundated with typical pothead choices, and music that you could only appreciate when you were really high on Midwest ditch weed. In a lot of ways, I was an enhancement smoker.
I was irritating. To make matters worse, we discovered mushrooms during our junior year. If our tweaker mentality had been annoying when we smoked a lot of pot, it was flat unbearable once we started tripping every weekend. Songs like Kool Keith's Blue Flowers, and The Fire in Which You Burn was the type of shit we would listen to. Can you imagine sitting around a garage, chain smoking cigarettes, listening to Funcrusher Plus in the dead of winter, out of your mind on mushrooms, with only a lone naked lightbulb in the corner of the room? This was certainly not what El-P envisioned his listening parties looking like.
An album like that, (and any album for that matter) takes on a lot of different characteristics when you're on psychedelics. I won't get in to specifics, but it's a more enjoyable experience all around. The problem was, we didn't limit our trippy music listening sessions to when we were actually tripping. We would attempt to compensate for this by smoking enormous amounts of pot, generally when we were in cars. It actually worked, in a way. When you're in a car with the volume up all the way, and you're very high, you either go deep inside your head or you zone in to the music, much like you do when you're tripping.
To compound matters, we always seemed to be taking long car trips. As post-adolescents but still teenagers, we were constantly traveling in search of shit to do. We would drive to Wisconsin on a whim to see a friend in Milwaukee. We would dip out to remote suburbs to sell a bag or buy something we couldn't find on the Northside. On an average weekend when I went out between ages seventeen and nineteen, I might spend 24 hours in a car. And most of those 24 hours were spent listening to tweaker music at a high volume with the windows rolled up. I was way out there. I'm surprised I was able to put together sentences.
When I was about nineteen, I was living on my own and attending school at DePaul. I was the only one of my friends with an apartment, so there were usually people hanging around there. We were able to ditch the cars, and just sit around and space out. I remember in the months before I moved there, smoking weed and sitting on a couch was the most exciting concept to us. We'd never really done it. There were those houses in high school where this kind of thing was acceptable, but I was always weirded out knowing that somebody's parents were just upstairs, or in some cases, sitting across the room. This apartment was a place we could just hang out and not worry about shit.
We went through a flurry of new music at that time, but nothing really hit me on the psychedelic level that I was used to. It wasn't until a friend of mine came over one day with mushrooms, hashish, and a CD book. He'd provided the drugs, so he was going to play whatever he wanted with the understanding that we would be listening to mushroom-appropriate music. The first record he played was Kid A.
We got two songs in, and the walls started moving. The sunlight was coming in between the blinds and lighting up the smoke in the air, so everything looked all twinkly like Edward Cullen. I was absolutely losing my shit throughout that album. Remembering back, we must have had it playing at an incredible volume, because I remember not being able to hear myself talk. When that ended, we put on the first Clouddead album. shit got even weirder.
If you're unfamiliar, Clouddead (cLOUDDEAD) is a group project between Dose One, Why?, Odd Nosdam, Sole, Illogic, Mr. Dibbs, and Jel. These guys were all part of an alternative hip hop scene based around the Anticon and Mush record labels. The album features a lot of really bizarre shit. Long, soft synths that kind of undulate and collide. Psychedelic, convoluted lyrics. Bizarre, distorted samples. It was built to Fuck with your head while high.
I'm not sure my buddy had ever put this record on while he was tripping, because we got really out there. We thought we'd discovered the secrets of the universe while listening to that record. We were laughing hysterically and dancing around like idiots. At a time when I should have been abandoning my teenage ways and moving on to new stuff, this one day in my living room threw me right back into it. During this one day I'd gained a lifelong appreciation for Radiohead, Bjork, Dose One, and Jel. It was glorious.
I began to shun all things that lacked the same kind of depth. I couldn't decide whether this music was hiding really deep meanings, or was just "there," and the meaning was mine to decide for myself. I began to devote a lot of time to figuring out this problem, mostly by taking long car rides by myself. My girlfriend at the time was in school in Michigan, about four and a half hours away. I took any excuse I could to drive out there to see her, if only for the alone time. At home there were people trying to come over and hang out. The road to Michigan was just me, a shit load of weed, and OK Computer. After about six months I thought I'd made some progress. I was probably just out of brain cells.
The problem with getting into music that's so cerebral is, you're not always enjoying yourself. Where I used to throw on a Gangstarr album and just let it play, now I was loading up a bong fifteen times and studying Icelandic in hopes of gaining a better understanding of Gling-Gló. I was high all the time, in my car three hours a day, sleeping very little, and far too concerned with things that don't matter. (The universe, for example). I was having trouble with normal conversation. I didn't care about anything but everything, and I was finding that most people just didn't give a Fuck about all the metaphysics and hippy bullshit I cared about. When I look back on that time in my life, I just see a haze.
It wasn't until I actually met Dose One, and saw what Thom Yorke was really like, that I started to see things differently. Dose came off like a nice guy. Quirky, but funny, and everybody around him seemed to be having a good time. For somebody who had written lyrics about all kinds of heady nonsense, in person he seemed to just want to have fun. I wasn't really like that most of the time. Either he had things figured out, or had just stopped caring. I went with the latter.
Yorke, on the other hand, seemed like he cared too much. If you see interviews with him from the OK Computer days, he seems really depressed. He has this cynical world view, and hates almost everything about almost everything. If Thom Yorke saw a toddler drop an ice cream cone, he'd probably be sulking about it for weeks. If he'd figured out the meaning of life, I was going to steer clear, because he looked miserable.
It was a hard thing to do, but I decided I didn't want to be anything like my heroes. I couldn't imagine living another day in that weed fog, blasting bizarre tunes in my headphones while I searched for the meaning behind it all. I started to drink whiskey and got heavy in to Motown as soon as I could. The difference was palpable. I didn't immediately become the life of the party, but I spent a lot less time thinking. Regardless of what you've been told, thought is destructive, and generally a waste of time. Stop doing it.
While I don't blame Dose, or marijuana, or even Radiohead for completely ruining a decade of my life, they certainly didn't help things. Now when I listen to Kid A I can just tune it out and get back to worrying about important things like healthcare and gas prices.