The Inspirational World Of Modern Cannabis And Creativity

[Joolz]

Few artists have described their first time getting stoned better than jazz pioneer Mezz Mezzrow. In his revolutionary autobiography, Really The Blues, Mezzrow and his writing partner Bernard Wolfe describe his first weed experience this way:

 

“The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head,” he wrote. “Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip, and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker. I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phases—I was really coming on.”

 

After describing more of his experience, Mezzrow concludes his tale with an epic stoner epiphany. “With my loaded horn I could take all the fist-swinging, evil things in the world and bring them together in perfect harmony, spreading peace and joy and relaxation to all the keyed-up, punchy people everywhere. I began to preach my millenniums on my horn, leading all the sinners to glory.”

 

In the last 80 years since Really The Blues hit the scene, more artists than can be named have put out reefer-inspired work. Musicians led much of the way as chronicled in the documentary film, Grass is Greener, directed by Fab 5 Freddy.

 

The film artfully weaves the history of mass incarceration of Black people by the war on weed and the resistance to that war by musicians.

 

The years of prohibition produced all genres of stoner music from the 1960s through the 2000s. A lot of that music was rebellious, raising hell against the war on cannabis. Plenty of poster art, crafts, t-shirts, stickers, buttons, paintings, and films celebrated cannabis all through those years.

 

From the film Up In Smoke by Cheech and Chong to the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer and everything in between. Stoner artists struck back hard at prohibition and provided the soundtrack activists needed to get weed legal. I remember playing Peter Tosh, Grateful Dead, Cypress Hill, and many others during my underground and activist days in the 1990s. All that music fueled the community and brought people together.

 

Today the war has largely been won by legalization (in multiple countries and a majority of U.S. states) and the era of cannabis commerce is in full swing. More artists are working with weed than ever before. Has the relationship between weed and art and the intersection between the two changed with victory?

 

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdeangelo/2024/03/30/the-inspirational-world-of-modern-cannabis-and-creativity/