Whether your a Beatles, Hendrix or MGMT fan it's hard to deny the influence the acid trip or any other mind expanding drug. It seems to be a recurring element in the great scheme of music, drugs and intoxication has a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the creative elite. It wouldn't be that wrong to say some the best music is written whilst trippin balls, what makes a Dali so much more impressive than a Manet and what makes a Smells Like Teen Spirit so much more powerful than a Baby.
If I could go into a rant for a moment, I think it's got to people the unlocking of an inner more primal state of awareness. A combination of both sensory and psychological sensations that trigger some sort of surreal response, the sense that things don't make sense and that's fine. Creativity and aestheticism usually go hand in hand, the great artists Van Gogh, Warhol and Dali created movements, new direction for art. Same with the musicians that would experiment, the poppy overtones of the Beatles's Please Please Me to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band marked a decided shift from the familiar and stale pop sounds to psychedelic, trippy, new and unexplored. Of course, different doesn't always mean better, but different does mean going against convention and most the time going against convention is doing things as naturally as possible. There wasn't the need to clean up the image or try to refine the songs to go with a specific crowd or audience. The sheer rawness of the resulting creation and the artistic accomplishment was enough to buoy any work that had a charisma behind it. Making good art requires a lot of work and talent, but making great art requires creativity and a willingness to go outside of convention. You don't learn anything new by doing the same thing over and over, you simply better at it, you learn through experimenting and making mistakes. Not all the creations of drug induced or plain surreal projects that the creatives have done have been successes, you just don't hear about the failures. But the history of human aesthetics has told us if nothing, that creativity must pave the way and not just the continual refinement of a movement or genre. Whilst 'pop' may never decline or the continually autotuned RnB/Hip Hop genre continues its selling out, it is marking a new culture in music and with every culture comes a counter culture and that counter culture will produce some of wackiest/weirdest and perhaps most innovative sounds and looks we have yet to experience.
No one really learns from succeeding, its only when you fail and try again that you discover something.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein
