Pop Life

“What you putting in your nose?
Is that where all your money goes (is that where your money goes)
The river of addiction flows
You think it's hot, but there won't be no water
When the fire blows”

appleseed said:

There seems to be an anti-drug song on almost every album. So many, it's hard to think of them all at once. Anyone got others than those listed below?

• Purple Music

• Something in the Water

• Sign O the Times

• Clouds

For a musician of his calibre, Prince certainly wrote a lot of songs laced with anti-drug messages eschewing and expressing an apprarent distate for chemical use as a means to find freedom from trauma. He’s unlike nearly every other musician in this vein from his contemporairies like Rick James, Coltrane to Cobain, Hendrix to George Michael, and Lennon to Whitney whose passion for making music seemed to have been tragically exlipsed by substance abuse. He’d have made far more money and likely topped more charts if he took a less hard stance against drugs in his most public artistic statements. It makes it even more strange that someone who espoused the physical and moral virtues of healthy vegetarian/vegan diets to give up the ghost the way he reportedly did.

[Edited 11/30/19 19:53pm]

Really bizarre post - but I want to single in on what you said here. John Coltrane was a saxophonist and composer by trade, not a singer-songwriter. Kurt Cobain's music is littered with references to drugs and drug use - he wrote more songs about it than Prince (Dumb is especially good). Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze is an ode to LSD. And George Michael actually scored a #1 hit with a song about drugs - Monkey, in 1989. Disco is another good GM song about drugs, incidentally.

Something in the Water has nothing to do with drugs. Prince happened to write enough songs that were anti-drug that you don't really need to stretch that far to find them.

herb4 said:

How about "Don't Play Me?"

I know there's more but my memory is failing me. Usually, any "anti drug" message he wrote was a one off line within a larger song.

"My Little Pill" is creepy to contemplate given how shit worked out.

And "Clouds" doesn't seem about drugs to me. I thought he was talking about data storage and that cloud. Everybody getting off on putting everything they do into larger data storage and things like social media. Maybe not but "clouds" is only a "drug reference" for people who vape e-cigs. Could be a weed/THC reference but I never read it that way.

It's a double meaning. getting high on something that doesnt 'require' clouds. ie, drugs/social media

Clouds = the smoke from drugs

and of course, the addiction and trap that social media is, which exists in the 'cloud'.........love this song so much.

[Edited 12/25/19 3:18am]

Old Friends For Sale, Chaos and Disorder, Days of Wild, Don't play me, Musicology, Cold Coffee & Cocaine, Cindy C, Eye No, Baby You're a trip, 2Nite, The Undertaker, Escape/

[Edited 12/25/19 14:08pm]

"Don't Play Me."

lavendardrummachine said:

LoveGalore said:

He doesn't even mention drugs in Baby You're A Trip, lol. He isn't saying she's a trip on acid. There is more than one alternate meaning for that word.

"You're like a drug and I can't get enough".

lavendardrummachine said:

LoveGalore said:

lavendardrummachine said:

"You're like a drug and I can't get enough".

That lyric constitutes an anti drug song?

Depicting drugs as addictive? Yeah, but I provided a long list anyway following up on suggestions where drugs came up. Your last post was denying he even mentioned drugs to begin with.

lavendardrummachine said:

LoveGalore said:

I guess sure he mentions drugs, strictly speaking, but he isn't talking about drugs themselves

It mentions drugs. The use of an analogy doesn't change anything. The thread is full of similar examples. You're free to hold your own criteria, but when you jump out and say there isn't even a mention of drugs, without awareness of the lyrics, that smacks of another agenda. Leave that at the door.

[Edited 1/1/20 16:29pm]

lavendardrummachine said:

LoveGalore said:

Yeah, the agenda is the premise of the thread. Anti drug songs. Not just songs that use drugs as a metaphor (and not in a particularly bad context either).

Try reading the direction the thread took instead of just dissecting my post. This is boring.

lavendardrummachine said:

“Do you get high? Does your daddy cry?”

The parallel structure suggests an underlying problem causes both behaviors.