Please Mr. Pharmacist: The New Brand of Drug Song

The general thread through most of these songs is that the prescription drug in question is not being used literally; it’s often meant to stand in as a signifier for depression, or as a symbol for the perceived overmedication of modern society. However, 2007 has already dealt out a series of songs that address prescription drug use more directly, connecting the dots between the actual mechanisms of these drugs and the neurochemical basis for moods and emotions. It’s a trend that reflects the growing awareness of neuroscientific basics among non-scientists in general, and opens new philosophical avenues for the cultural discussion of musical mainstays like depression and love.

It’s understandable that most songs don’t attempt to tackle the actual neurobiological mechanisms of illegal and legal drugs, given that it’s pretty hard to find a word that rhymes with serotonin. Due credit then to exceptions like the Talking Heads’ “Drugs (Electricity)”, which (probably unintentionally) discusses an unnamed substance’s effects in terms of the electricity that underlies neural communication, or Murs & Aesop Rock’s “Happy Pills”, which actually successfully name-drops Klonopin and serotonin reuptake inhibition – though that’s the wrong mechanism for Klonopin, which is an anti-anxiety medication. But as it becomes common knowledge that chemical neurotransmitters play a role in regulating mood and emotion, enough so that these mental states can be manipulated with a simple pill, it follows that songs would be written about the reassuring and/or disturbing reactions to this information.

No recent song encapsulates this phenomenon quite like Of Montreal’s mouthful-named single “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Amidst an album where songwriter Kevin Barnes evocatively narrates his fluctuations between depression (the agoraphobia and lethargy of “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger”) to hypersexual mania (“Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider”), “Heimdelsgate” is a reflection on bipolarity set to discordantly peppy keyboards. “I’m in a crisis/ I need help/ C’mon mood shift/ Shift back to good again,” Barnes pleads, but it’s not directed at the usual abstract depression boogeyman, but rather a concrete source of his emotional instability: his own neurotransmitters.

Chemicals, don’t strangle my head
Chemicals, don’t make me sick again
I’m always so dubious of your intent
Like I can’t afford to replace what you’ve spent

Chemicals, don’t flatten my mind
Chemicals, don’t mess me up this time
Though you bait me way more than you should
And it’s just like you to hurt me when I’m feeling good

In an interview with Pitchfork contributor Stephen Deusner for the Memphis Flyer, Barnes described his mindset during the making of Hissing Fauna: “I’d gone through a pretty heavy period when I was writing it and recording it. Kind of my first real experience with chemical depression and serious anxiety and paranoia and what might be qualified as mental illness.” “Heimdelsgate”, Barnes told Magnet magazine was about how “you can’t really control the chemicals in your brain, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do to keep it together.” While no songs on the record directly address prescription medication, the singer does credit antidepressants with the making of the album: “The real issue was a chemical thing, so when I finally got on medication, that balanced it out. So that helped me have a better perspective on things and helped my relationship with my wife and helped me through [the album].”

On the other hand, in an interview with the San Diego City Beat, Barnes also blamed antidepressants for the somewhat ill-received sale of “Wraith Pinned to the Mist” as an Outback Steakhouse commercial: “When Outback approached me, I was in this really weird state of mind where I was so indifferent I didn't really care,” Barnes says. “I was pretty heavily medicated with antidepressants that were pushing me in this weird direction. I was very indifferent, very detached. It was helping me with all this anxiety and paranoia and this crazy depression stuff, but it made me make a bad decision.”

“Take Pills”, from Panda Bear’s Person Pitch record, is a sample and loop-based swirl that fits squarely within the psychedelic-pop sound that his primary group, Animal Collective, is known for. Thick with reverb, dreamy harmonies, and unusual found-sound stimuli, it’s a track with all the markings of a “drug song.” So why does the mantra of the final section begin with “I don’t want for us to take pills anymore?” In a recent interview with Dusted Magazine’s Rob Hatch-Miller, Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) clarified:

“That song is pretty explicitly about anti-depressant drugs, not more recreational kinds of drugs. I was on anti-depressants for a while and my mom continues to be on them. Melancholy and depression is kind of a theme in my family. The song is about appreciating what they did for me at the time but wanting to get off of them, and to try not to rely on them if I could. And that’s not to say that I think nobody should be on them, like I said they really helped me out for a while. But for me personally I just wanted to try to get on with it, and it’s kind of me talking to my mom about trying to get her off of them too. I used to see a psychiatrist and he was like, “You’re going to have to be on these drugs for the rest of your life, it’s just the chemistry of your brain.” That kind of bummed me out, so I really wanted to prove him wrong. He was a nice guy, but he was wrong.

The song, then, acknowledges the utility of prescription medication as a temporary fix, but reflects discomfort with it being a permanent solution, a common obstacle facing people who are recommended to go on antidepressants. As a replacement for pills, Lennox instead recommends a sort of holistic type of advice, to “take one day at a time” and “only one thing at a time,” the popular idea that a temporary amount of time on medication is enough to get one’s brain chemistry sorted out, and that healthy living can stand in for pharmaceutical treatments.

A similar point of view is espoused by Cloud Cult’s Craig Minowa, whose latest album The Meaning of 8 contains a number of tracks that use the terminology of neurochemicals and brain function in discussing emotion and depression. Minowa is more skeptical of his own experiences with antidepressants, which occurred after a personal tragedy:

“Shortly after my two-year-old son left the planet the doctors put me on some anti-depressants, because they were afraid I was going to try and follow my son to wherever it is he went to. The doctors thought they could fix my grieving by adjusting my brain chemistry with pharmaceuticals. I think there are instances where a person would be well suited for the need to ingest certain elements to balance their neurochemicals, but that was not one of them, so I got off those drugs after a few short weeks.”

“I think many doctors freely prescribe these types of medications to deal with the negative effects of a mental problem, while they tend to completely ignore the causes. In my instance, my kid had just died. I needed to just cry for a long while and grieve, but the doctors thought it would be best to cover up those feelings with drugs. Our physicians need to get better at determining what is a mood problem brought on by a chemical imbalance, and a mood that is brought on by psychological trauma. Each of these should be treated in very different ways.”

Thus, a song like “Take Your Medicine” off of The Meaning of 8 with its command:

You can take it in stride
Or you can take it right between the eyes
Suck up, suck up
And take your medicine
It's a good day, it's a good day
To face the hard things

is not about antidepressants, but about the more general experience of facing the sources of one’s depression and adjusting brain chemistry without medication: “Take Your Medicine" is literally about conjuring up the strength to face the ugly things in yourself that most of us prefer to deny exist. In the case of this song, taking one's medicine is not about popping a pharmaceutical but is more accurately about having the guts to do some not-so-fun inner psychological work. Scientific studies have shown you can alter your brain chemistry simply by choosing to practice thinking in a different way. In that sense, ‘taking your medicine’ means having the discipline to break some bad mental habits and thereby changing your brain chemistry. Letting go of the inner monsters referenced in that song has helped me feel much better. But it wasn't an easy psychological process getting through that.”

Minowa’s interest in brain function doesn’t stop with informed opinions about overprescription of antidepressants; with a background in biology, he’s also read up on other influences upon neurochemical control of mood and emotion. “I've done some research into investigating the neurochemical reactions in the brain due to spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer. It's interesting to see that certain areas of activity in the brain of those on LSD coincide with the same activity one sees in a person in a deep state of meditation. The lesson you can take from that is either that you can take drugs like LSD, because they will trick you into thinking you're enlightened. Or you can take the lesson that you can change your own brain chemistry and activity simply by having the self-discipline to exercise your brain in certain ways on a regular basis. I prefer the latter.” So a song like “Chemicals Collide”:

I was out paying close attention
Or was I lost inside my thoughts
These days it's hard to tell what's outside from what's in my mind
And oh god, it's beautiful
Insatiable
The way our chemicals collide

appears to be, in part, using “chemicals” in the same way as Of Montreal’s “Heimdelsgate”: as an entity to take the blame and/or credit for the emotionally-charged way we perceive and exist in the world. But Minowa explains that’s only one small aspect of the song’s meaning:

“’Chemicals Collide’ is really about all of the different chemicals that collide around to make the universe what it is. The brain is just one example of how these incredible elements mix together to make complex reactions. It's really no different than the rest of the universe. Mix different types of chemicals together and you'll get different colors or an explosion or a tasty recipe or a new energy source or even life. It's the same in the brain. I think the brain is just something we perceive reality through. The brain is not the essence of what we are. Some scientists want to claim they have it all figured out, and that the brain is the center of it all. But there's a whole lot more going on than they're comfortable accepting. In that sense, I'm not afraid of the fact that the brain is a mortal organ and that it can be persuaded to function differently when exposed to different chemicals. My brain is not me. It's just another one of my physical senses through which the real me sees.”

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This trio of artists appears to be heralding the next step in songs about prescription drugs and the mental illnesses they’re designed to treat, both reflecting the complex societal viewpoints about these pharmaceutical advances and using medication as a gateway to dealing with emotion and mood in biological terms. The knowledge that we’re to some extent the puppets of our brain chemistry is simultaneously disturbing and liberating to many people; nobody wants to hear feelings of love and spirituality reduced to the cold mechanics of neurotransmitters and receptors, but our modern ability to directly treat some of the underlying imbalances that cause debilitating mental illness is a clinical miracle, improving thousands upon thousands of lives worldwide.

While science may always remain a foreign language to songwriters and musicians, its influence upon music’s native thematic territory of conveying and describing emotion is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. “Drug songs” of the past sought to translate the sensory experience of psychedelics or stimulants or opiates into musical form, to report on the powerful methods mankind has discovered or created to alter the way our brains work and play with the organ’s interpretation of our surrounding reality. As we exist in an age where those tools of brain manipulation shift from mind-expansion to mind-maintenance and treatment, and the corner pusher is transformed into the corner pharmacist, it’s only natural that our music follows suit, hymns to getting high changing into reflections on getting well.

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