The Stoner Canon: 101 Trippy Movies, Albums, Books, TV Shows, and More

Marlon James’s Jamaica-spanning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of those books you can smell. Whether you’re following along with gangsters’ murder plot to assassinate a very Marley-like singer or riding shotgun in shady businessman Alex Winston’s Porsche, marijuana is always there, hovering over this sprawling, perspective-shifting novel. Given its kaleidoscopic and episodic nature, skipping around from place to place and mind to mind sets it up perfectly for an unequivocally eerie (though not especially irie) read. In case you need more convincing, James made you a mixtape.

In her memoir, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit is here to provide you with a really poetic excuse for why you are always late to things. The book is a celebration of all sorts of experiences that traditionally (when you’re not stoned) induce panic: losing the map, setting out without a destination in mind, confronting the unknown. Solnit revels in the vast gray areas of contradiction (“To calculate on the unforeseen,� she writes, “is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.�) and invites us to question whether getting “lost,� in every sense of the word, must always be such a bad thing. Burn your maps, trash your GPS, and … start practicing your apology for walking two miles in the wrong direction on the way to brunch. 

On another day, the choice here might’ve been Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, but Jaden Smith is a Melchizedek fan, so we’ll go with this one, the sacred nonfiction text of our new New Age. In it, the author reveals ancient “knowledge� cribbed from Atlantis, the hidden geometry that governs existence, and other esoterica that, if utilized correctly, might allow, among other lovely things, the Mer-Ka-Ba to become a living field of light. And wouldn’t that be nice? 

André 3000 isn’t really into weed, and he said as much on ATLiens’ title track. (“No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day,� he raps.) The irony, of course, is that this an album that seems suspended in smoke. Outkast might have gotten weirder (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below) and harder (Stankonia), but they never sounded more spacey than they did on the likes of “Wheelz of Steel� and “Elevators (Me & You).� (Besides, André’s erstwhile partner Big Boi never quit smoking, so don’t let Dre’s abstainining kill your buzz.)

Say what you will about Miley Cyrus, who over time reinvented herself as a millennial stoner icon, but she made this decade’s quintessential album about chilling out. Alongside executive producer Mike Will, Miley remade her sound into a throbbing, snapping collage of Bangerz. “FU� in particular is like dubstep meets Winehouse, and it’s fantastically overpowering.

Crumb was the key cartoonist of the high ‘60s, the man responsible for the iconic Mr. Natural. His neuroses — both sexual and social — finally found their perfect match in, of all things, the Bible. Gorgeously drawn in his inimitable style and acute in its characterizations, Crumb’s adaptation of the Book of Genesis is his heaviest effort, and makes the overt psychedelia of his earlier work seem almost psychically tame in comparison. 

Like The Truman Show and The Matrix, this 1973 novel imagines what life would be like for someone who suddenly believes they’re living in a universe where free will isn’t a given. Except rather than TV satire or cyberpunk fantasy, Vonnegut focuses on an Ohio car salesman who uses this crack in the cosmic egg as invitation to go on a delusional destructive rampage. (Though, to be fair, there’s a fair amount of sci-fi in TBOC.) Like all of Vonnegut’s works, the book makes you laugh at life while simultaneously sneaking in some solid humanist vibes. Also, there are a lot of dick jokes and funny drawings.

If you’ve ever had trouble appreciating the disjunctive, not entirely sensical work of America’s most celebrated living poet, try reading it out loud after getting high. Studies show that this method is most effective with Ashbery’s later work, so no harm starting your experiments with his excellent new collection.

At artist Chivas Clem’s walk-up West 14th Street loft, Pruitt placed a 16-foot-long mirror on the floor with a line of cocaine stretched from one end to another. A perfect gesture embodying the “Where were you while we were getting high?� do-it-yourself self-reinvention of the late ‘90s. Participants partook, or didn’t, and went back into the world altered whether they’d imbibed or not.

For reasons that are often condescending and almost always corny, stoners have long had an affinity for Native American culture; something about the solidarity with countercultural underdogs, the dignity of a close connection to the natural world. Mari Sandoz’s biography of the Oglala Sioux military warrior is the rare book that feels empathetic, rather than merely sympathetic, to the plight of native people in the 19th century. It’s also full of absolutely gorgeous figurative language — traitors who sold their tongues to the white man; settlers who dig themselves into stony hills as turtles dig into sand. Crazy Horse is as purely evocative a piece of history as you’re ever likely to read; a book to wander around in.

Become one with the quintessential bitterly orphaned underdog Narthos (and his prolific creator, Lovecraft pal and writer Clark Ashton Smith) as he transforms into mighty sorcerer of sorcerers Namirrha (a commander of devildom “direr than … pestilence�) and attempts to overthrow the dark powers that be in this classic of 1930s weird short fiction. Revisit the forgotten sorcery of sunken worlds while you formulate theories on the relationship between psychedelic experience and inventive entities beginning with the final letters of the alphabet: Xeethra (an ancient evil lord), Zothique (the only remaining dimly lit continent on Earth), Zylac (a city on this continent), Ummaos (the main town within this city), and Zotulla (Emperor of Zylac), for starters. In case Smith hasn’t already cast his spell, he also throws in an ornate giant skeleton, an invisible stallion, and legions of ruby-eyed rats and alarmingly welcoming mummies in the fight against Zotulla.

Featuring the world’s biggest, longest, slowest, heaviest mutating riff (or “visual landscape,� as fan Jim Jarmusch puts it) may be good for introspection or entering mythic realms — this album’s hour-long song involves a procession of weed priests “unearthing the creed of Hasheeshian,� and implores us to “drop out of life� and “follow the smoke to the riff-filled land.� (It’s an all-in, not-remotely-moderately-consuming experience, so we’re almost there already.) But chances are likely that head-banging or air-drumming or maximum zoning-out will take over from any mythmaking portents once you’re absorbed in once-defunct, again-crushing-it San Jose trio Sleep’s ultimate version of their doom-metal classic Dopesmoker, which is largely about hitting the bong as hard as possible to reach cannabis Zion.

We’re currently in a golden age for comic fans who are also into pulpy sci-fi. In their latest collaboration, Brandon and Klein take the tired Western trope of the highly skilled lone cowboy far from home and shoot it off to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Abram Pollux is the drifter in question, a man who crash-lands on an alien world that resembles an endless Sergio Leone movie set and gets pulled into an ongoing conflict while trying to figure out why he’s here and when, exactly, “now� is. It’s all topped off by Klein’s beautiful digitally created artwork, which calls to mind the more cosmically minded European comic masters of the ’70s and ’80s.

So many of the trippy albums from the psychedelic era sound today like a sort of twee playacting — as if frilling up a song with sound effects and singing about gnomes constituted true trippiness. The genius of Electric Ladyland, though, and the thing that lifts it above all other ’60s psych albums, is in how fully it captures, and then conveys, a stoned worldview. The sonic effects — all the stereo panning, the way the drums shimmer, that omnipresent wah-wah guitar — are placed with wizardly detail. The lyrics — even on the epic aquatic love story “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)� — have an earthiness, a solidity, to them, free from any of that Professor Picadilly’s tangerine-tart whimsy that sank so many of the era’s songwriters. And Jimi’s vocals have a mystical, lagging quality, as if the words were coming to him in the half-instant before he sang them. All this adds up. Electric Ladyland isn’t the work of someone dillydallying with psychedelic signifiers, drooling while he futzes around with the crossfaders. It’s is an album made by a genius who spent years high, heard special music in his head, and then painstakingly translated it, or as much of it as he could, onto this eternal album.

In novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and a small library of others, megaprolific sci-fi guru Philip K. Dick presented some of literature’s thorniest and most reality-melting conceits. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is one of them — with the added bonus of being real. In 1974, while recovering from the removal of some wisdom teeth, Dick — an avid speed user — began receiving mystical revelations from an entity he dubbed the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (that’s VALIS to you) and, graphomaniac he was, he got it all down on paper. “We’re not talking about a different way of being-in-the-world,� Dick wrote. “Or ever a better way; we’re talking about the lifting for the first time in human history of a massive perceptual/conceptual occlusion having to do with the ontological structuring factor we call causality …� Dude, I know! I KNOW!

Pot and pseudo-profundity go together like pot and finger food, and there’s no more pseudo-profound album from the pseudo-profound, echt-awesome world of prog-rock than Fragile. Part of the pleasure is in the virtuosic playing — all those oddball time signatures and herky-jerky riffs, country-ish guitar licks splattered here, a lurching bass giddy-up there (RIP, Chris Squire), squiggly keyboards everywhere: It’s all maximum bombast, all the time. Then there’s lead singer Jon Anderson’s elfin voice, often featured in churchly harmony (and once in a while backwards) singing stuff like this: “Sharp! / Distance! / How can the wind with so many around me / Lost in the city.� It’s all so unabashed in its ridiculousness that it turns into something grandly moving, in the way that you might get stuck staring at a skyscraper and think things like, People made that!

In the same way that maximum musical density and detail can be absolutely absorbing when your neurons are cloudy, intense, stripped-down purity can also grab the stoned mind and not let it go. On 2013’s From the Ages, Earthless, an instrumental and largely improvisational hard-rock band from San Diego, take the power-trio template of Age of Aquarius icons like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Blue Cheer and rid it of anything that might get in the way of true heaviosity — pop structures, time constrictions (the best performance here is the longest, the 30-minute title track), vocals, and lyrics. From the Ages is just a drummer, bassist, and guitarist ripping, and it’s incredible.

Long before this legendary West Coast singer passed away in 2011, he’d been chopping it up with weed aficionado Snoop Dogg since his 213 days. And it seems like the latter rubbed off on Nate Dogg. Case in point: “Bag O’ Weed� — no, not the song from Family Guy, the one from Nate Dogg’s debut album. It’s more or less the original “Trap Queen,� a guide to wining and dining your woman with — what else? — weed. (But, like Nate says, she’ll have to bring the actual bottle of wine.) The pot-infused sounds of ‘90s G-Funk don’t get any smoother or more sinuous than this.

“You wanna be high for this,� Abel Tesfaye assures in the first moments of House of Balloons — an opening-track mission statement if there ever was one. Though there are references to all sorts of pills and powders scattered throughout the Weeknd’s notoriously narcotic debut mixtape (representative song titles: “The Comedown,� “Glass Table Girls�), they’re really red herrings for Balloon’s true spirit-drug — just listen to those sunbursting synthesizers and slow-motion psych-rock riffs.

So many of Miles’s distinct eras lend themselves to contemplation: the sparse modal playing of Kind of Blue, the throbbing mystery of mid-’70s fusion efforts like Agharta, even the tone poems of Sketches of Spain. In a Silent Way, though, is the Miles album that feels most apt for laying around, just listening, as the man’s ghostly trumpet snakes its way through quietly bubbling electronic soundscapes. This is jazz as spooky ambient drift.

Think of Pynchon’s hero, the beach-bum P.I. Doc Sportello, as Philip Marlowe with potent joints substituted for the neat whiskeys. As Doc drifts through 1970s L.A. tracking the operations of the Golden Fang, which might be a Chinese shipping concern, a cartel of evil dentists, a heroin ring, or all three and more, it turns out paranoia is a detective’s best friend. (As Paul Thomas Anderson’s faithful 2014 adaptation showed, an unimpaired ability to follow Inherent Vice’s plot isn’t required to enjoy it.)

Clams Casino (born Mike Volpe) is a producer who helped create a mini-movement of thick, celestial music for rappers like Soulja Boy, Lil B, and A$AP Rocky back in 2011. But Volpe’s purple beats are far more affecting on their own, collected in a psychedelic little package where dreamy melodies pierce through thick fog. Grab your noise-blocking headphones and a bunch of pillows.

The late ’60s and early ’70s were a golden age for jazz that traveled the spaceways, and then-contemporary albums by Sun Ra, Mahavishnu Orchestra, or Herbie Hancock’s brilliant Mwandishi band could’ve easily nabbed a spot on this list, but we’ll go with Lawrence of Newark as a stand-in for a style of music: hard electric jazz that ebbs and flows according to its own primordial logic. Especially on the monolithic “Khalid of Space, Pt. 2: Welcome,� Young, an endlessly inventive organist, throws down mighty slabs of sound that might make whoever was responsible for the Big Bang nod and say, “Dude, intense.�

The creative method employed by Adam Gordon, a young American poet living in Madrid in this funny and flaneur-y first novel, requires a cup of coffee and a dose of strong hashish first thing every morning. No surprise, then, that the book keeps looping back to the question of whether Adam, as a poet, as a lover, as a mostly high American abroad, is something of a fraud.

Once you’re blerg’d and bleary, get “Stoned and Starving� with the second album by these wordy and catchy Brooklyn-based Texan punks. On opener “Master of My Craft,� they remember that even “Socrates died in a fucking gutter,� and on “No Ideas,� a shrink tells them they know zilch — so, they figure, why not light up some Acapulco Gold and ramble on? Elsewhere, singer Andrew Savage teaches us rad ways of dealing with being a young aimless-jobless in the land of the oppressed — like declaiming just about everything one can about the experience of eating a tasty doughnut while avoiding a gnarly tumble into its ever-widening hole. Every tight riff leads to the next long before wearing out its welcome, and your confused inner voice will find good company here.

Along with the better-known Milton Nascimento, among others, Lo Borges came out of the thriving, exploratory early ‘60s–’70s Clube da Esquina music scene of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Unlike their countrymen in the contemporary tropicalia movement (Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes), the Minas Gerais musicians favored languid drift and golden melody over genre-busting and discordance, and Lo Borges is as good an album as the moment produced. A deeply mellow breeze of liquid guitar, lullaby melodies, gently funky rhythm, and tropical languor, this is perfect swaying-on-a-hammock music.

The Australian rockers’ breakthrough second album is all about texture. From the panting opening of “Be Above It� to the appropriately warm close of “Sun’s Coming Up,� every second of the record is enveloped in fuzz, cracks, and reverberating synths. Front man Kevin Parker’s wispy vocals act as an anchor amid the spiraling, sun-bleached soundscapes that even the most alert listener can’t help but get lost in. Lonerism is one of the few psych-rock albums of recent years that you could play for sober friends without embarrassment.

The third album by George Clinton’s original Funkadelic lineup begins by explicitly encouraging our participation in the birth of dormant Earth magic: We’ve knocked her up again, so let’s raise the child right. Thankfully, you’ll feel safe poking your heads above ground (like the album’s cover star, Barbara Cheeseborough) once Eddie Hazel’s beautifully warped soloing over lullaby fingerpicking kicks in on the ten-minute title track, delayed and decayed and intensely emotional. The rest is heavy but also comfy, with tons of joy and life affirmation and yuks, a synergized funk rich with surprises: flatulence, robo-bass, cuckoo clocks, the lowing of cows, tilt-a-whirl organ, and Latin percussion leading to furious guitar shredding on “Super Stupid,� high-energy proto-metal about losing the fight to fear, and just one of this record’s many perfect incongruities for the scrambled brain.

In this case, you can 100 percent judge an album by its cover: Indie-rock art weirdos Animal Collective’s eighth album is adorned with what looks like a freaking Magic Eye. The music is fittingly wobbly and full of seeming aural illusions, as wave upon wave of dub and dance-music recording techniques are somehow stuffed into harmony-rich songs that, at their core, wouldn’t be too weird on Pet Sounds.

Former art-school students Milligan and McCarthy produced some of the most bizarre (and punk-rock) comics to ever come out of the U.K., pushing their imaginations and those of their readers are far as they could without snapping. From existentially adrift superheroes focused on making the tabloids to a Philip K. Dick–inspired drag race through Indian mythology, there wasn’t a concept or archetype that Milligan could resist gleefully deconstructing. On the art side, McCarthy (who helped write and did design work on Mad Max: Fury Road) kept going further and further down a surreal rabbit hole until each and every page felt like its very own universe.

In the arcane tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, this slim nonfiction book by a Belgian polymath diaries one man’s narcotic self-experiments. Here, the active agent is mescaline. The result is a fantastically surreal volume of alternately hyperdetailed and jibber-jabber drug recollections, along with drawings of his hallucinations and marginalia that signifies who knows what. It’s a report back from a journey into the mind’s deepest recesses — and it actually ends up being pretty funny. “Another pause … could it be finished?�

Slow, sensuous, and oozing with Earth-Mother wisdom, Fat Belly Bella’s latest album is a blissed-out masterpiece. This is Badu at her most comfortable, serving a rare blend of confessional and confident, deeply personal and omniscient across meandering neo-soul song structures. Then there’s the cover art, which pictures a nude Badu crawling out of the futurist garden-brain of a robot version of herself.

Ever think about what colors mean? Postmodern literary macher William Gass sure did. This gorgeous little volume is 96 pages of genius wordplay and genius-er thinking about “blue� in all its various and enigmatic meanings. Here’s how it starts: “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten gum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have …�

Around the age of 35, Walter Benjamin began experimenting with hashish, opium and mescaline. Of his first time on hashish, he wrote, at 3:30 a.m. on December 18, 1927: “Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful ‘character’ unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.� The fun continued for seven years.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Dillard’s best-known nature writing shows her mastery of what amounts to supernaturally close observation, the kind of looking that changes both the seer and the seen. Whether it’s moths, preying mantises, meadows, or her own cat — a born killer, like all cats — Dillard’s prose conveys the transcendent power of really, like really, looking.

Over the course of 32 issues, college student Sophie Bangs — the latest person to take on the mantle of the superherolike harbinger of the apocalypse Promethea — guides readers through an exploration of comics god Alan Moore’s personal thoughts on philosophy, spirituality, mysticism, and the occult. The writing is always wild but it’s the book’s art that really earns its place here. Artist J.H. Williams’s work is experimental from the start, but by the end, he’s doing outlandish things with page design and color that no comics artist before him had even thought of, culminating in a final chapter that can be read as a standard comic or reassembled into a gigantic poster-size document.

The basics of the criminally underappreciated Hoban’s whatever’s-worse-than-criminally underappreciated postapocalyptic novel are bonkers enough on their own: 2,000 years after a nuclear war, society has entered another Dark Ages, and a teenage boy becomes entangled in a race to re-create firearms. The sentences, though — written in a kind of pidgin English — are what makes Riddley Walker so unique, and they’re more rewarding the longer you spend in their company: “Seams like I ben all ways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don’t know what it is. What a way to live.�

Are Grey’s paintings good art? Probably not. Are they near-perfect representations of stoned perception? Hot-diggity they are! If Grey’s work looks familiar, that’s because it’s become iconic for other altered-states-friendly musicians. (Tool, Nirvana, and the Beastie Boys, among others, have used Grey’s paintings for their album art.) And it’s easy to grok why. Faux x-ray, saturated colors, body-obsessed, lots of radiating lines — Grey’s “visionary art� is a straightforward translation of psychedelic sight — which, in the appropriate state, makes it perfect to look at for hours and hours and hours and hours.

The summery Salad Days is the perfect soundtrack for a day, week, month, or life of lounging. Each of the record’s 11 hummable songs haphazardly meanders along, never attempting to be anything bolder than its own deceptively simple self. The result, chock-full of lolling bass lines, twinkling guitars, and sunburnt synths, is effortlessly charming, and the introspective lyrics are surprisingly poignant. These are the kinds of songs you’ll still be quietly singing to yourself long after you’ve come back to sober.

Released as a triple LP in 1980, the Clash’s fourth album found them abandoning the rock power of London Calling and indulging in a number of different genres: traditional reggae, folk, soul, dance, jazz, gospel, you name it. (Smoke it if you got it, the saying goes, and this band had it all.) The last dozen tracks, beginning with “Lose This Skin,� are where the album really goes boners, with forays into dub and a rendition of their earlier scorcher “Career Opportunities� sung this time by a couple kids. If you have the vinyl version, look at the runoff groove in the center: You’ll find etched-in words that, over the six sides of the records, add up to “In space, no one can hear you Clash.�

Bolaño’s elliptical novel centers around a group of intellectuals called the Visceral Realists and the community they inspire  — broken up into three parts, it’s probably easiest to think about The Savage Detectives as three books. The second passage, which magically floats from perspective to perspective depicts the group’s freewheeling and essentially inconsequential philosophies; the third portion climaxes (satisfyingly!) with a completely inscrutable line drawing.

“Anywhere and Everywhere — Hang On!� promises the tagline on the Silver Surfer’s solo title, and that’s exactly what recent writer-artist team Dan Slott and Mike Allred have delivered. Yes, their freewheeling take on the character doesn’t veer that far from Jack Kirby’s original — a solitary hero travels space on his surfboard in search of ways to make up for the damage he helped wreak as, of course, the herald of Galactus — but the duo lets their stoic lead finally crack a smile and enjoy himself. When you can see all the awe-inducing planets and creatures the galaxy can offer, with your love interest (and reader stand-in) Dawn Greenwood at your side, why not hang a cosmic ten?

The artist James Turrell’s life work is an installation at Roden Crater, a volcanic cone in Arizona where Turrell is carving his masterpiece. Billed as a “naked eye observatory,� Roden Crater represents the culmination of a lifetime blending color, space, and optical illusion in some of the most demanded installations on the planet. But most of all … the light! SO MUCH LIGHT, MAKING ALL SORTS OF WILD-ASS SHAPES! Though his art can be overwhelming, there’s something magically human about it, too. And since Roden is basically impossible to get to, you might wanna start with Turrell’s far more accessible Skyspaces. Photo: Kenneth Johansson/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

Mastermind Gustav Ejstes and his Scandinavian bros throw a bunch of entrancing elements in the air — fuzzy guitar, glistening strings, jazzy drumming, cascading melody — and let them land where they may. One song is decidedly Hendrixian, the next is melted Grateful Dead, then there are stately ballads and discordant sax jams — and because it’s all sung in Swedish, it’s sure easy to imagine the album’s Pagan rustic atmosphere as being the product of gnomes or elves or something. (This is a compliment, fair Swedes.)

Whereas Zep’s first two albums hinted at their medieval nerdery, the quartet really indulged themselves on this LP, an album that redeems the old getting-it-together-in-the-country cliché. Written mostly at a remote Welsh cottage called Bron-Yr-Aur, the journey begins with Robert Plant’s Viking wails on “Immigrant Song� and veers into the bombastic minor-key plaints (“Since I’ve Been Loving You�), folk tales (“Gallows Pole�), bucolic Americana (“That’s the Way�), and ghostly blues (“Hats Off to (Roy) Harper�). Thanks largely to guitarist-producer Jimmy Page’s sonic ingenuity, it’s a cohesive record, drawing power from its alternating feelings of tension and tranquility. And if you can dig up a vinyl copy (clean the seeds off the spine), there’s plenty of delight to be found in the surreal album art, which was designed by a friend of Page’s named Zacron.

The genius of L.A. session cat turned solo artist Dam-Funk is the way he finds the sonic and spiritual connections between ’70s pop-studio wizards like Todd Rundgren and funky ’80s R&B maestros like Zapp’s Roger Troutman. Over two discs and two hours of shining, intricate funk-pop, Dam marries obsessive attention to detail — every nook and cranny of this album is stuffed with smoker’s delights — to an implacable sense of groove. It’s ground and sky, melody and rhythm, hot and cool all at once. He’s worth seeing live, too, simply for the extended keytar solos.

Remember the endless sagas you would create with all your toys as a kid? Scioli and Barber’s Hasbro-approved story is the comic-book equivalent of that. The colorfully illustrated, whimsical war games between the eponymous toy lines may be a little lacking when it comes to logic or reason, but it’s unlikely that you’ll care. While the book could have ended up as just another craven corporate cross-over, its got a hyperactive spirit rarely present in mainstream American comics noawadays. Scioli’s art stands out, beautifully mixing meticulously detailed battle scenes ripped from an algebra notebook with the chunky psychedelia of Jack Kirby’s peak output.

None of that weak shit for Lana Del Rey: “I’ve got feathers in my hair,� she brags on the gloriously languid Ultraviolence, “I get high on hydroponic weed.� And given the record’s overall vibe, her story checks out — the whole thing feels like one gorgeously sustained exhale. Melodies billow out and float away, the tempo never exceeds “sleepwalking,� and a song rumored to be about Axl Rose literally just goes, “He loved guns and roses / Guns and roses / He loved guns and roses / He loved guns / And roses / Roses, roses.� We’ll have what she’s smoking.

The sight of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people laying on their backs, taking in Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular Weather Project, a gigantic red sunlike projection in the giant Tate Turbine Hall, was the apex of everything that Relational Aesthetics said it wanted to be: art, institutions, audiences, initiated and not, participating equally in a work of art. This simple E=mc⊃2; work was a blissfully confirming experience. Photo: Mike Kemp/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

Paranoia? Cotton mouth? Awkwardness? Pass. Weekend at Burnie’s, the serene 2011 album from rap’s most prolific stoner, paints a different picture of what it’s like to smoke weed. For Curren$y, being high —  and he’s always high — means being relaxed, sharp, confident, quick on the uptake, and surrounded by equally chilled-out friends and women preparing his next joint — stoned heaven.