What was the first ketamine song?
Music and drugs have gone hand in hand for many years – for centuries, in fact.
While alcohol may have been the tipple of choice for many classical composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Franz Liszt and Jean Sibelius, some of those from the romantic era began dabbling with harder substances, such as Hector Berlioz, who wrote his Symphonie fantastique as a semi-autobiographical tale of overdosing on opium in 1830.
Despite the cultural crossover of music and drugs having existed for much longer, we tend to only think of those from the 20th century onwards. The jazz, blues and rock musicians from the mid-century laid down the benchmark for how many substances a human can conceivably consume and function on as a performing artist.
Whether it’s cocaine, heroin or amphetamines, musicians have always had easy access to all of them, and while some were able to pick their poison and stick with it, some were regularly found huffing cocktails of many at once, which is unequivocally a bad idea, if you were wondering what this might do to a person. However, with time, new technologies have led to the discovery and synthesis of new drugs, and whether or not they were originally intended for pharmaceutical or recreational use, musicians have found ways to make them part of their intake, for better or worse.
First created in 1962, ketamine is a drug that is regularly used to induce anaesthesia in a medical environment, but its alternative use as a dissociative hallucinogen has led to it being used recreationally, with users often being sent to another realm of consciousness after using it. In recent times, it has since become something of a party drug, that is, if your idea of a good party is being zonked out on the bathroom floor.
With its rise in popularity coming around the turn of the century, more songs have begun to explicitly reference ketamine in their lyrics or titles, but when exactly did references to the drug start to seep into the mainstream?
What is the first song about ketamine?
It’s not easy to trace the direct origin of music’s relationship with ketamine, but one of the the first songs to really provide any definitive and clear reference to its use in both the lyrics and title is Placebo’s 2001 single, ‘Special K’, which for all of the more naive readers, is not a reference to the popular breakfast cereal.
Named after a nickname for the drug, ‘Special K’ uses several analogies that refer to singer Brian Molko’s experiences of taking the drug, but at the same time, he is equating the effects of taking the substance to the feelings he gets when he is around a certain romantic interest. One such line that makes reference to the effects of ketamine is found in the chorus, where Molko repeats: “gravity, no escaping”, and also utters the phrase “I’m on sinking sand”, both of which refer to the feeling of simultaneous weightlessness and inability to move that users might experience during a trip.
However, this isn’t the first instance of ketamine being referenced in a song title, as four years prior, electronic duo The Chemical Brothers released ‘Lost in the K-Hole’ as part of their album, Dig Your Own Hole. The term ‘K-hole’ here refers to a nickname given to the state of complete dissociation that someone may experience after taking an extremely high dose of ketamine, and the psychedelic vibe of the song certainly does the job of emulating the spaced-out feel of getting a high from the drug.
As we know, 1997 wasn’t the first time people had begun using ketamine, and there are plenty of musicians from prior to this date whose art was significantly inspired by their experiences on the substance. Genesis P-Orridge may not have explicitly referenced it in their work as a member of Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV, but they have regularly spoken about how they experimented with injecting liquid ketamine as a vehicle for exploring pandrogyny – a vital part of their personal and artistic identity.
On the other hand, there are plenty of records that sound like they could have been made on ketamine or to be listened to under the influence of it. While Iggy Pop was reportedly sober at the time of recording The Idiot with David Bowie in 1976, there’s no denying that songs like ‘Nightclubbing’ have a certain vibe about them which is akin to wading through marmalade with a head full of rocks. It would be unfair to question Iggy’s sobriety during the sessions, but it’s impossible not to hear the track without thinking there was a hint of influence from past ketamine use.
