Go Ask Alice
by Juli Scalzi
Title
Go Ask Alice
Artist
Juli Scalzi
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
"White Rabbit" is a song written by Grace Slick, and recorded by the American psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album, Surrealistic Pillow. The lyrics were inspired from both Lewis Carroll's books "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" in which Alice ingests various substances. Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs, and she saw a surfeit of drug references in Carroll's book, including the pills, the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are pretty trippy.
This was one of the defining songs of the 1967 "Summer Of Love." As young Americans protested the Vietnam War and experimented with drugs, "White Rabbit" often played in the background . . . the lyrics "one pill makes you larger" refers to the choice between protesting (making you a big person) versus joining the war (making you a small, insignificant person), and adding that your parents can do nothing to help you make the choice. "Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall" refers to not fitting in and being disruptive as Alice does when she grows large in the book.
In the book, Alice ingests a liquid labelled "Drink Me" which causes her to shrink. She then eats a cake labelled "Eat Me," that makes her grow. Grace Slick uses the reference to pills to draw a parallel here with Lewis Carroll's work and the Sixties drug culture. The lines to "And the ones that mother gives you/Don't do anything at all" would appear to be a reference not to Caroll, but instead to placebos. A placebo is any preparation which has no demonstrable effect on the human body, but has therapeutic benefit merely through the power of suggestion.
Slick claimed to Q that the song was aimed not at the young but their parents. She said: "They'd read us all these stories where you'd take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure. Alice in Wonderland is blatant; she gets literally high, too big for the room, while the caterpillar sits on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium. In the Wizard of Oz, they land in a field of opium poppies, wake up and see this Emerald City. Peter Pan? Sprinkle some white dust-cocaine-on your head and you can fly."
Uploaded
May 25th, 2016
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