The Year Pop Culture Was In Love With The Coco: On Cocaine's Comeback

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Complex Original

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In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta buys some heroin and his dealer goes, "Coke is fucking dead as dead. Heroin—it's coming back in a big fucking way." That was the height of heroin chic. You know, when Calvin Klein deliberately styled emaciated models to look like they'd been on a opiate binge. It's an infamous era in which a new generation glamorized the drug's charms all over again, choosing to ignore the immense havoc it'd been responsible for in the past. But that was 20 years ago. In 2014, cocaine is far from "fucking dead," and, in many ways, is experiencing the same type of romantic resurgence that smack did in the mid-90s.

Now, it's a bit naive to act like cocaine hasn't been in high-demand since its conception. The shit was in Coca-Cola for fuck's sake. But drugs do go through phases in terms of their popularity. When people my age were in grade school, the "Just Say No" mantra and D.A.R.E. program propaganda was still in full swing. There was perhaps some vague notion that the War on Drugs could be won, but we saw that dream dissipate in front of our eyes.

Millennials never had a Len Bias tragedy to warn us about the pitfalls of cocaine on such a massive scale. We had Clipse and Dipset and Young Jeezy, who worshipped blow. We saw Kate Moss chopping up rails on a CD case on the cover of tabloids and suffering practically no consequences for it. Those events have manifested themselves in a culture where Pusha T designs blatantly cocaine-inspired sneakers for Adidas and no one bats an eyelash.

I noticed the shift really start to take hold when Miley Cyrus sang about "trying to get a line in the bathroom" on a huge pop hit last summer. By Christmas 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street was in theaters and though its filmmakers have argued that the movie was supposed to serve as a cautionary tale, everyone I know who's seen it only talks about cool how it makes drug abuse look. I mean, the movie begins with Leonardo DiCaprio blowing cocaine into a hooker's asshole and Martin Scorsese does a great job of making it appear elegant.

For enough people, there's no stigma or shame. Kids have less inhibitions about pulling out a bag at a party because it's likely that everyone else in the room has some too.

That sentiment carried over into this year, where the glamorization of cocaine is evidently on the rise. Snootie Wild had a hit with "Yayo." O.T. Genasis has a hit with "CoCo." Riff Raff uses it on camera with no reservations. Stitches, who went viral with "Brick In Yo Face," does it onstage and passes out baggies to the audience. Lana Del Rey's "Florida Kilos" compliments her lover for snorting it "like a champ." Bobby Shmurda's "Hot Nigga" made "I been selling crack since like the fifth grade" the catchiest pop lyric of the past 12 months.

When Makonnen starts "Swerve" by rapping, "My friends like sniffing cocaine," it's more relatable than alarming. Johnny Manziel getting caught rolling up a dollar bill in a Las Vegas bathroom made him look like more of a rock star than a loser. To some extent, it's normalized. For enough people, there's no stigma or shame. Kids have less inhibitions about pulling out a bag at a party because it's likely that everyone else in the room has some too. They don't feel like they have to run off somewhere with a locked door to take a bump and, if they do, it's primarily to prevent others from mooching off their stash.

You can't pin all of this on pop culture. Migos doesn't rap about blow any more than Raekwon did, but when terms like "the plug" get co-opted by memes and social media, it exacerbates the drug's acceptance and visibility. Maybe there's been such a coke renaissance because six second loops interject a humor into the trade that helps remove it from its former status as a seedy, underworld activity.

Cocaine is back to being perceived as relatively innocuous, and there aren't any signs of a comedown on the horizon. We'll see how long that lasts.

Ernest Baker is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter here.

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