I heard Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the radio yesterday morning and it hit me. This is a blatant drug song, I thought. It blatantly tells, no, ENCOURAGES the kids to take drugs. What's more, this song (and many others of the time period with similar sentiments) is played at every oldies station on the continent. The same suits who fondly remember the 60's as a time of peace and love and experimentation balk wildly at the music of Marilyn Manson, Eminem, DMX because they claim that it promotes suicide, violence, misogyny and just about every other bad thing that a person could do. They claim that today's music is warping their kids' minds but are completely accepting of the glamourization of the late 1960's by oldies radio, passing it off as "fond remembrances" or some other confusing rhetoric.

At least the suspects I mentioned above bring an element of satire into their music. Marilyn Manson is eloquent and well aware of the absurdities of pop culture, most recently expressed in the single "Disposable Teens". Yes, the song is utter trite, but kudos to him for taking well-needed shots at such an easy target. Eminem's music is full of witticisms and caricatured celebrity satire. On the other hand, don't try and pretend that the Jefferson Airplane had ANYTHING deeper to say than "feed your head". And it doesn't stop there, because the 60's were full of songs containing this message and nothing more. Let's not get all fuzzy inside and pass these songs off as the good old days of pure and meaningful music when they are nothing more than drug glamourization relics written by hippies who were wasted most of the time which is why they couldn't think of anything more intelligent to write about.