White rabbit
| White rabbit | |
|---|---|
| Jefferson Airplane | |
| publication | June 24, 1967 |
| length | 2:31 |
| Genre (s) | Psychedelic rock |
| Author (s) | Grace Slick |
| album | Surrealistic pillow |
| Cover versions | |
| 1971 | George Benson |
| 1987 | Sanctuary |
| 1987 | Lizzy Borden |
| 1996 | World Bang |
| 2004 | Emilíana Torrini |
| 2013 | Mayssa Karaa |
| 2015 | Paul Kalkbrenner |
White Rabbit is a 1967 psychedelic rock song by Jefferson Airplane that first appeared on the album Surrealistic Pillow . The song was released as a single , was the band's second top ten hit, and ranked 8th on the Billboard Hot 100 . The song ranks 483 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 best songs of all time .
history
White Rabbit was written by Grace Slick when she was singing for The Great Society . In 1966 Slick moved to Jefferson Airplane and replaced the singer Signe Toly Anderson, who had left the band because of the birth of their child. Surrealistic Pillow was the first album Grace Slick recorded with Jefferson Airplane. Slick contributed the two pieces White Rabbit and Somebody to Love to their previous group, the latter was composed by Darby Slick and recorded under the title Someone to Love by The Great Society. Both songs became huge hits for Jefferson Airplane and have been associated with the band ever since.
Lyrics and composition
Grace Slick wrote the song as one of her first between late 1965 and early 1966. The lyrics refer to Lewis Carroll's children 's books Alice in Wonderland and Alice Behind the Looking Glass from 1865 and 1871 and contain allusions to the hallucinatory effects of psychedelic drugs such as hashish , LSD and mushrooms containing psilocybin .
Events from these books such as the hunt for a rabbit followed by falling into the abyss, changing body size after eating mushrooms or drinking an unknown liquid can be found as well as the fictional characters Alice, the water pipe smoking caterpillar, the "white knight" ( the white knight in the chess game ), the "red queen" (a red queen from the card game) and the dormouse in the song again. The quotations given in the song do not follow the original literally: In Carroll's books the “white knight” does not speak backwards, it is the lady of the heart who says: “Off with her head!” (Eng: 'Down with her head!') , and the dormouse doesn't say: “Feed your head!” - the mad hatter rather expressly declares that he cannot remember what she said.
With his lyrics, White Rabbit was one of the first songs with clear references to drug use that made it past censorship on the radio. In interviews, Slick reported that the novel Alice in Wonderland was read to her many times as a child and left a vivid memory into her adulthood.
The song has a crescendo similar to the famous Boléro by French composer Maurice Ravel , with a strong Spanish influence. Marty Balin , the founder of Jefferson Airplane, considers the song a masterpiece.
reception
White Rabbit was often used in pop culture to underline drug states, such as in the films Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Law of the Road - Brooklyn's Finest or Platoon . It can also be heard in a scene and in the credits of the 1997 film The Game . In the television series Supernatural , it is played at the beginning of episode 10 of the second season. The series Futurama refers in episode three of the second season (around 13:30) to the song and in its context also to the hippie movement when “Richard Nixon” sings the phrase “Remember what the dormouse said” while he is on accompanied by the electric guitar itself. US director Zack Snyder uses a cover version by Emilíana Torrini as the soundtrack for a psychedelic dream sequence in his film Sucker Punch (2011). The track "Feed your Head" by the German DJ Paul Kalkbrenner is loosely based on the song.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In: Rolling Stone . December 9, 2004, archived from the original on June 22, 2008 ; accessed on February 16, 2017 .
- ↑ Jeff Tamarkin: Got a Revolution !: The turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane . Atria Books, New York 2003, ISBN 0-671-03403-0 , pp. 113 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
