Perry Farrell Says Mind-Altering Drugs Changed History

Posted on Aug 24th 2009 4:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell is becoming more of a fixture on the dance scene with each passing month. At Lollapalooza, he hosted Perry's, a dance area that included acts like Simian Mobile Disco, Kid Cudi and MSTRKRFT, he spins at the Coachella dance tents under the name DJ Peretz and he's lent his vocal prowess to acts like Thievery Corporation, Hybrid and, most recently, Infected Mushroom. Now, he tells Spinner that he's embracing the culture even further on his upcoming solo work. "I've been working with people like Danja, who worked with Britney Spears, and people like Kaskade, who worked with Deadmau5," he says.

Never one to shy away from speaking his mind, Farrell tells Spinner that he sees the scene as the new frontier in music, in part because it shares the openness and experimentation of past movements. "If you look at Woodstock and listen to the music and look at the kids that went and the musicians, I would say it was very fueled by LSD. Then the era of Lollapalooza, it was fueled by coke and heroin," he says. "You look at the dance world and it's fueled by mushrooms and ecstasy and, in all honesty, music and mind alterations go hand in hand. If you look at the scenes that changed the course of human history they've been fueled by mind-altering drugs."

To prove his argument he goes back even further. "It's experimentation and I think you can date the experimentation and art back to the impressionists, back to the Dadaists," he says. "I think there's always a healthy scene there when you have experimentation and I think it's still very much there and alive in the dance culture."