White Rabbit-- Jefferson Airplane

One of the more recent an popular culture oriented references to Lewis Carroll's Alice texts can be found in the song "White Rabbit" by the 60's psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane. The song portrays much of the song in the context as the journey being produced by hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and Mushrooms.


Lyrics to song "White Rabbit"--Jefferson Airplane


One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Recall Alice
When she was just small

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving slow
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said;
"FEED YOUR HEAD



This notion of drug-induced hallucination as a type of fanciful, childlike state runs through the literature of Auldous Huxley as well. In his novel "Island" he uses mushrooms as his comparison for what the Palanese people call "Moshka medicine." The children in this novel are taking the drug to symbolize their inclusion into adulthood. The use of the drug evokes Blakeian imagery with the assertion that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite". The connection between drug use, Alice in Wonderland, Jefferson Airplane, and William Blake seems to be an astoundingly imagistic one based on the perceptions of what appears to be "reality" and the perceptions of what appears to be the "fanciful".







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_(song)