Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
As a news junkie who righteously follows current events, this week is already taking on a surrealistic feel. It’s only Wednesday, yet already information is swirling through massive shifts of multiple data streams coalescing into a tight vortex of infinite probabilities.
Which leads me to believe it’s break time for some serious acid rock music.
Soul of Acid Rock
The totally not surrealistic Wikipedia describes Acid Rock as:
Acid rock is a loosely defined type of rock music that evolved out of the mid-1960s garage punk movement and helped launch the psychedelic subculture. Named after lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the style is generally defined by heavy, distorted guitars, lyrics with drug references, and long improvised jams. Much of the style overlaps with 1960s garage punk, proto-metal, and early heavy, blues-based hard rock.
The term is sometimes used interchangeably with “psychedelic rock”, but it also specifically refers to a more musically intense subgenre or sibling of the psychedelic rock style. Compared to other psychedelic rock, acid rock features a harder, louder, heavier, or rawer sound. It developed mainly from the American West Coast, where groups did not focus on the novelty recording effects or whimsy of British psychedelia, and instead emphasized the heavier qualities associated with both the positive and negative extremes of the psychedelic experience.
Wikipedia: Acid Rock
The first band to make Acid Rock popular was none other that Jefferson Airplane. The heart of that band was my life-long favorite female singer Grace Slick. And the song that made them all famous, indelibly imprinted in the hearts and minds of anyone sentient enough to follow the music of that era, was the ultimate Acid Rock song “White Rabbit.”
Jefferson Airplane gave us this wonderful piece of music in 1967. As of last year, forty-four years after it’s release, the song was ranked number 455 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Whatever. In real-world-speak, White Rabbit is an incredible song that sweeps me away with the power of Grace’s voice and Airplane’s instrumentals. It is indeed a fitting song for when the world seems to be going out-of-control with too many news threads to follow.
The Music
So, I give you the official music video of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” This video includes gratuitous images of Grace Slick playing on an ocean beach, bonus eye candy to the music.
Since Then
Other singers have taken the White Rabbit challenge, but only one other singer, in my opinion, has ever come close to matching Grace in the power of this music. That one singer would be “Pink.” So, just because one can never get enough of Acid Rock in times like these, I present a bonus second feature of Pink performing White Rabbit, live on stage.
