What was the original message of the song?
From here, and the story behind the song as I understood it from age 14:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-behind-the-song-white-rabbit-by-jefferson-airplane
Slick herself always maintained that White Rabbit was aimed at hypocritical parents and their habit of reading drug-laced stories to children at their most impressionable age.
“In all those children’s stories, you take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure,” she told writer Mark Paytress.
“Alice In Wonderland is blatant. Eat me! She gets literally high, too big for the room. Drink me! The caterpillar is sitting on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium!”
She also argued that the song was about the importance of education: ‘Feed your head,’ the rousing climax to White Rabbit, was intended as a call to liberate brains as much as the senses.
"Slick wrote White Rabbit at home in Marin County a year earlier, on an upright piano with missing keys, at the end of an acid trip during which she listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain for 24 hours straight. Then she presented it to her then bandmates, San Francisco raga-folk avatars the Great Society. Also in that band were Grace’s drummer husband Jerry, brother-in-law Darby Slick [lead guitar], Peter Van Gelder [bass] and rhythm guitarist David Minor. According to the latter, who began as the Great Society’s chief songwriter, White Rabbit was an answer to a call.
“When we started working, nobody had anything because I couldn’t write any more,” he recalls. “I was too busy keeping up with my various jobs. So Grace’s husband Jerry challenged them: ‘What are you gonna do? Let David write all the songs?’ Y’know, ‘Do something!’. So Darby came back with a couple of songs and Grace came back with White Rabbit.”
At six-minutes-plus, the original version of the song was much trippier, and nearly three times as long, as the Airplane’s single version; it was Eastern-flavoured, with an improvised raga intro, and Slick’s vocal was less stately. But the Spanish march and echoes of Ravel’s Bolero were already there."
Sorry, Al. It's an ad. Mute it and move on, okay?? People have money to make and there are cruises to sell.
You missed my point completely.
I have no problem with the commercial use of the song, I just think it's a woefully misguided use.
I suspect most people on a cruise aren't the type who actually want to take a psychedelic trip, and in fact as I said, they're NOT all fun and games.
But the ad agency apparently believes this is a good song to sell the fun and games of a cruise.
Worry about something a bit more upsetting..... I dunno... GLOBAL WARMING...... or is it warning...... damn!!
Who's upset?
I was just calling it a dumb-*** commercial.
:glee:
(I also agree with Frono on chopping up the tune, though)