"White Horse" by Laid Back

1984 / #26

Rate Your Music score: 3.38 out of 5!

"If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse..."

I want to do more mid-'80s goodness on this blog, since that was when music-related media had perhaps the most influence.

There was a time in the late '80s and early '90s when we had something called the "radio recession." That was when many rap and metal hits did not appear on some top 40 stations. If such a tune charted, you knew you wouldn't hear it on top 40 radio unless it at least reached the top 10 - and maybe not even then.

There was something else like this going on even before then. But instead of metal and rap, the biggest target was electro-funk. Around here, electro-funk was usually relegated to very small stations. A good example is "19" by Paul Hardcastle, which is now a lost hit.

Another fine example is Laid Back's electro-funk hit "White Horse." I first heard this now-lost hit on American Top 40 when I was growing up. I rarely heard it anywhere else. Even when the song was at its chart peak, hearing it at all was a major event.

Imagine my surprise when I climbed into my parents' car to go to school one morning and heard "White Horse" crackling out of the car radio. I was surprised even though the song was peaking then.

"White Horse" has been widely interpreted as being full of drug references. The song repeatedly admonishes, "If you wanna ride...Don't ride the white horse." But the last verse suggests, "If you wanna ride...Ride the white pony." In other words, the song seems to be saying, "Don't use heroin. Use cocaine instead." However, the members of Laid Back said it was an anti-drug song, and that the "white pony" had nothing to do with cocaine.

If you want to talk about drug references, I have a story of something I saw just after "White Horse" peaked. I completely forgot about it for 40 years until recently. We went on a family trip to Chillicothe, and we were waiting outside the motel restaurant where we had breakfast. A man walked out of the restaurant wearing a red t-shirt that said, "Enjoy cocaine." It was a parody of the "Enjoy Coca-Cola" advertising signs.

Meanwhile, music media kept us occupied in a way that was free-floating like my zine did 5 to 10 years ago.