Bad Religion: Sleep’s Hazy, Biblical Magnum Opus
The underground metal band’s 2003 album Dopesmoker is about weed. It’s also about church and the concept of religious pilgrimage.
Bad Religion explores the relationship between music and spirituality, from Christianity and Islam to the paranormal and the occult.
Written by Felix Kalvesmaki
Photo courtesy of the Observer
California stoner metal band Sleep was riding a high coming into the release of Dopesmoker. Its previous 1993 record, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, received good press from heavy metal journalists of the day. In response to this success, London Records supposedly offered the group six figures in a recording contract, which would finance the album that became Sleep's magnum opus.
Some background: Dopesmoker is an album consisting of one hour-long song. It took the band years to write, and even longer to get a proper release; that aforementioned six-figure deal with London Records went up in smoke when the label realized the kind of material they were working with. With the record company unwilling to release what was essentially a 60-minute single devoted to marijuana, and the band unwilling to make a lick of change to the record itself, Sleep broke up after burning through its advance. Several recordings of the LP called Jerusalem circulated for a few years starting in 1999, until the album came out officially in 2003. In the decades following, these guys have become the Metallica of stoner and doom metal. Heavy music label Southern Lord released a remastered version of Dopesmoker in 2012, complete with a bonus track called “Holy Mountain.” This edition is the one on Spotify, for reference, and a pressing of it is currently selling for $200 on Discogs. Sleep is practically a household name for those exploring classics of the genre, partially because of the mythos behind (and quality of) Dopesmoker.
In some ways, the subject matter of Dopesmoker is very self-explanatory. After eight minutes of scene-setting with groaning, fuzzy, distorted guitars and drumming like hail on a roof, the opening lyrics state: “Drop out of life with bong in hand / Follow the smoke toward the riff-filled land.” It’s a hazy introduction to the desert sands of this record, which is quite frankly mostly about weed. That’s what one could expect from a band categorized as “stoner metal,” after all. But in a genre that brims with smoke and riffs, there’s plenty that makes this record distinct.
Don’t be fooled, though.This isn’t a record that rides on clout. Sleep perform with dominance across the entire hour. The drums set a marathon pace, walking the song along as the kit clashes and clatters. The bass may shake your room, long and droning. The guitar can at times feel like a monolith, a giant, earthy, immovable stone, until the rest of the band comes in just as loud. When vocalist Al Cisneros growls and bellows with sand in his throat, the whole desert hears. It’s a rousing, filthy ceremony.
But the album is also notable for its religious themes, which permeate the entire lyricism of “Dopesmoker.” The lyrics “Proceeds the weedian / Nazareth” narrate the journey of the characters on the album’s official cover — cloaked men journeying through sands, presumably to the Israeli city that the phrase “Jesus of” usually precedes. Christians sometimes make a pilgrimage to Nazareth, as it seems our Dopesmoker protagonists are, too. Throughout the record, the band uses marijuana as a stand-in for spirituality. The lyrics “Assembled creedsmen rises prayer-filled smoke / Raise up seer’s holy prophecy” narrate what sound like religious ceremonies furnished with bongs. Narcotics and God are not so separate; there’s a documented phenomenon of people finding religion after tripping on acid. Similarly, the members of the Rastafarian religion smoke weed, or ganja, with a spiritual intention. Since marijuana can be classified as a psychedelic, using it to achieve spiritual enlightenment isn’t a stretch. (Hell, just look at this VICE News segment called “Meet the Christians Who Smoke Weed to Find God.”)
Image courtesy of Southern Lord Recordings
Take it from Sleep guitarist Matt Pike: “I'd definitely say where we were at, the way we played at the time and what we did was very spiritual," he said in an interview with Pitchfork. "It had a lot to do with our hearts and minds just as much as it had to do with the technical aspect, if not even more.”
The members of Sleep aren’t a bunch of burnouts noodling around on guitars and singing about ganja, just in case we’re not clear on that yet (but it’d still be fine if they were). These are earnest and talented musicians, who went as far as ordering custom amps so loud that nobody could be in the same room as them to make the noises they wanted. In this sort of experimentation, they captured a sound that bands have been trying to imitate since. Explaining the album’s sonics, Pike said in the same interview that the band aimed for “something pretty epic that would stand the test of time and stuff that people would talk about for the next however many years. We wanted to do a symphony of complete stoner riffs.”
And symphony it is. Dopesmoker at times feels like a new religious epic. Crunchy, gritty, and chugging as it may be, there is a hymn-like quality to the vocal melodies, especially of lines like “Weed-priests creedsman chant the right / Judgement soon come to Mankind / Green herbsmen serve rightful king.” The guitar on this album is thick as smoke and suffocates like ash, but the untamed riffage could fit in church walls if played on a pipe organ. The vocals are metal’s own version of melodic and truly feel ominous and foreboding. Together, they create an unholy atmosphere which tells an ironically holy story.
It’s funny, sure, to sing of pot with religious devotion. But it’s not unlike ancient Pagans who crooned praises to the sun or moon — a faithfulness to a natural resource that can benefit its users. This metaphor extends, going further into lyrics like, “Grow-room is church temple of the new stoner breed / Chants loud-robed priest down on to the freedom seed.” Within the rooms where buds spring to life comes spiritual connection for our protagonists; they go to church where their ganja grows. To stretch the metaphor further: it’s normal in Catholic tradition to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ. The creators behind Dopesmoker assert that packing a bowl is a religious experience in its own right, and who can blame them? The record ends as it begins, asking the listener to drop out of life, bong in hand. This time, however, it gazes forward: “Follow the smoke / Jerusalem.” This could be referring to what’s called the Jesus Trail, which supposedly tracks the walk Christ took from Nazareth to Jerusalem.
In mirroring religious history and terminology with references to dank kush, Sleep’s Dopesmoker is, simply put, a fun listen. The lore both within and behind the recording has solidified its place within the genres it’s helped to build up, and if you’ve got 60 minutes to spare, its religiosity, dramatics, and bombast are worth the time investment this 4/20.