MC Improvement Article #04

   Drugs and Hip Hop: Creating Hip Hop High

Recently The State uploaded lyrics to the Cam’ron song “D Rugs”. The song is a wonderfully written inner-city tale that uses personification perfectly throughout, leading to a really mind-blowing twist at the end (for those that didn’t pick up on it earlier). If you liked this song style, you should check out some of the other famous hip hop songs that have used personification such as:

Common Sense – I Used To Love H.E.R.
Sticky Fingaz – My Dogs iz My Guns
2pac – Me And My Girlfriend
Nas – I Gave You Power

But the theme of this article is not personification. We will, however, talk about another topic in the song, and that is…(I’m sorry to give it away if you haven’t heard the song yet)…drugs.

We’re going to focus on two of the most common “recreational” drugs as they pertain to the hip-hop culture, and those are alcohol and marijuana.

Hmmm…where to begin? Well. It’s no secret that a lot of the music creation and recording that gets done in hip-hop gets done under the influence of alcohol and/or marijuana. Drugs affect the creative process –its that simple.

And it’s not only in hip hop, Louis Armstrong had an affinity for marijuana that lasted a lifetime. And its not only in music. Some of the greatest painters, writers, poets, and social critics in history have admittedly used alcohol, marijuana, absinthe, etc in the creation process…Picasso, Miles Davis, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, too many to mention

This is not to say that great music cannot be made in a sober mind state…of course it can. But since the relationship between drug use and artistic expression has been so prevalent throughout history and into today…it is a topic worth exploring deeper.

We’ll break down alcohol and marijuana into “potential artist benefits” and “artist cons”. By truly understanding these you’ll be able to harness some of the benefits these drugs provide…naturally, without having to even use them. But I’ll get more into that as I wrap up the improvement article.

Alcohol and Hip-Hop

Effects:

It is well-known that alcohol makes a person lose their inhibitions, the result…more “honest” feelings are said to be expressed. Well I’m no psychologist despite the few courses I’ve taken, but here’s my take on it through the Communications perspective (an area I am much more familiar with).

Where Normally you would have a number of factors (Communications Majors call these factors “schemas”) that come in between your initial thought or intention and your final words spoken. When you drink this changes. Your mind slows down (alcohol is a depressant)…and to get your thoughts across, you take a faster path, and sort of just cut to the chase…essentially avoiding or skimming through the “schemas”.

So what are these “schemas”?

-Social: knowledge of societal norms
-Cultural: knowledge of cultural norms
-Historical: knowledge of history relevant to the situation
-Psychological: state of mind, sad, happy, etc…
-Physical: understanding of physical environment
-Self-Image: understanding of oneself
-Others Image: understanding of the receivers self
-etc…

So—in between your initial intention or idea and your final communicated message your mind considers all these schemas…its so natural, though, that it’s instantaneous, almost subconscious.

Potential Artist Benefits:

Like we mentioned above, alcohol changes this process by slowing down or shutting off certain parts of the brain, allowing original messages to come out more “pure”…

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, people who are drunk are constantly telling you how much they love you….either that or fighting (of course this is when they are REALLY drunk).

This makes perfect sense, though. Instead of thinking of saying, “I love you”…but then in a split second considering to yourself “wait, in your culture that might mean something else, and maybe its not socially acceptable to say that to my co-worker, and I did this once in the past and it didn’t work out…etc,” and then finally saying something TOTALLY different from “I love you” or saying nothing at all….when you’re drunk you might just think “fuck it” and say what you feel…”I love you”.

Who knows, the end result could be that your co-worker is flattered by your honesty. So you can see how this is beneficial in music. Honesty is a wonderful quality to express in art. Sincerity is as close as you can get to truth. And like my man John Keats said, “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,’ that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

And I’m sure we can all agree that truth and beauty are good.

Another added bonus is that alcohol can simplify things a lot while still keeping a powerful meaning in a concise message…eliminating filler.

Artist Cons:

Using the same example as above. Your co-worker could just as easily have been disgusted by your complete disregard for the job’s sexual harassment policy.

So basically disregard and being inconsiderate (because you’re being less thoughtful in a sense) is a consequence to communicating while drunk.

Also alcohol tends to slur speech when consumed in high quantities. Needless to say this is not good when recording.

Marijuana and Hip-Hop

Effects:

Marijuana is a damn fascinating drug. The effects are not so easy to explain but I’ll give it a go. I’ll avoid all medical jargon here and just focus on the effects to make it easier for everyone to read.

In its users marijuana affects the mind at a MUCH larger scale than does alcohol. Where as alcohol disinhibits someone in social situations…and affects the body (stumbling, slurred speech). Marijuana disinhibits the imagination and has very little immediate effect on the body (besides red eyes and dry mouth maybe).

Other effects include putting the user into a trance-like state where the mind is easily able to drift into thought. Marijuana can also raise musical appreciation.

Since marijuana is also a depressant it does produce an effect of “slowness” in the user, but it is very different than with alcohol. Though THE MIND and THINKING seems to stay the same (somewhat) everything else (including music) passes by at a slower rate.

The end result…the user notices more details in everything, combine that with a disinhibition of the imagination and you end up with a state of very deep thought.

Lastly marijuana can also be an improvisation booster. Personally, when I am high I can freestyle till the CD runs out, whether it makes sense or not. There’s no pressure to rhyme, and so you do it easier.

You seriously do get into a zone…a state of mind that is indeed trance like, the correlation between music notes, the drum beat, the melody and the rhythm of your own voice makes perfect sense. The combination of situations creates a point of creative release.

Potential Artist Benefits:

I think the benefits are pretty evident in the effects. But to recap, what marijuana tends to do is just generally get thoughts flowing, get connections between various aspects of your surroundings (music, ideas, concepts, patterns, etc.) to make sense on a larger scale. To use an overused phrase, it gets you in tune with your surroundings…and just facilitates the creation process for some people.

Picture the Matrix. To the people who know they're in the matrix time seems slower. They can take their time, dodge bullets and kick 4 people, and all the while to the people who are not in the matrix, that all just happened in 3 seconds. It's the same with rhyming or freestyling. In your mind it feels like you have an enormous amount of time (because you're relaxed and throughts are flowing and making connections at a constant steady pace) but to those listening to you freestyle it may appear that you just effortlessly pulled a solid 16 bar freestyle out of thin air.

Artist Cons:

Cons are a loss of short-term memory. Of course, along with smoking anything, certain health risks may come with long term use. Also, you should also really write down any music that you might make while high because you will likely forget it the next day. Other than that, and as far as music creation is concerned, there are not many cons to the use of marijuana.

Conclusion

So to summarize…some benefits you might see manifested in the music recorded by artists under the influence of either alcohol and marijuana are relaxation and increased attention to detail as well as more direct and concise (pure?) communication of ideas, perhaps even resulting in more emotional lyrics.

Apparently these qualities seem to make for a nice sound. Tupac Shakur said that he recorded every single one of his songs (except for his first one) either high or drunk in the studio…EVERY SINGLE ONE! His work is unarguably very deep, insightful, and emotional as well as musically appealing.

Whether it’s the personality that comes off as more genuine, passionate or deep to the listener, the perfectly synchronized flow to the beat, or WHATEVER!…The point is, THOSE QUALITIES are ones you need to replicate in your raps…and of course drugs are NOT the only way to do that.

If you are interested in a guide designed specifically for aspiring emcees trying to make in the rap game you should definitely consider The Blueprint To Hip Hop

Note: The State of Hip Hop does not promote the use of any drugs as a means of creating music. What we are trying to achieve through this Improvement Article is to provide a better understanding for our visitors of the effects of some of the most commonly used drugs during the creation of music, throughout history.