Hi, Davey Dreamnation aka Les Fauves here with another pseudo hot-take. 

“Marijuana is God’s Currency” came out as a b-side to “Dogs Are the Best People” which means it technically belongs to the Future Spa era but for me, it’s more closely related to the songs on the EPs the Fauves issued after The Young Need Discipline was released. 

In many ways, “Marijuana” is the twin of “Borg”: both are gentle, strummed acoustic songs in no hurry to reach their conclusion; they sound more like sun-kissed Sebadoh out-takes than Oz Rock sketches. They’re both quietly poetic, too. 

“Marijuana Is God’s Currency” sits nicely alongside Doctor’s “Photo Albums” and the acoustic version of “Caesar’s Surrender”. 

It also mines the same vein of melancholic whimsy that Coxy first tried out in earlier songs such as “In a Time of Plague”, “Archimedes’ Crown” and “The Raven or the Dove”, and prefigures the knowing, ironic stoner lyrics of “Understanding Kyuss”. 

Given the band issued several EPs within the space of 18 months, it’s tempting to speculate there’s an imaginary Fauves album somewhere in the aether that Polydor refused to put out. 

But I’d even take that idea further: “Marijuana Is God’s Currency” hints at an alternative history of the band: one in which they broke up after the commercial failure of The Young Need Discipline.

A not-totally-improbable timeline in which Coxy struck out on his own, issuing a solo album and going on an endless “Last Time” tour, his setlists filled with acoustic versions of older songs like “Orgamosarion”, “Arbuckle At Glenrowan” and “Ye Olde War Wound” plus newer ones he was no doubt road-testing at the time, like “Sentimental Motel Journey”. 

Maybe, in this parallel reality, Coxy got his wish, naming his solo album A Moment’s Ornament in a hat-tip to the poet William Wordsworth’s “She Was a Phantom of Delight” as much as his own undergraduate literary aspirations. Because “Marijuana is God’s Currency”, like “Borg”, and even “Understanding Kyuss”, is a literary song. 

It riffs on the link between intoxication and the divine: in this case, the idea that God is a drug dealer who’s, sure, “a little vague” but at least he’s “not running around”. In other words, Coxy’s God is stationary; everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Like all good drug dealers. And even if he’s not there, it’s comforting that this God “only meant us to be happy”. 

The place where Coxy’s God lives is not the America of U2’s “In God’s Country”; nor is it the jangly mysticism of The Church’s “Myrrh”; and when Coxy croons “Hey now, hey now”, he’s not channelling his inner Neil Finn, or marching to the tune of “Iko Iko”.

Instead, he’s in heaven. Only Coxy’s idea of heaven is a place where verdant, resin-laden shrubs tower over the heads of the true believers. Where wallets bulge improbably with buds, with “quarters and Gs”. 

“Marijuana Is God’s Currency” is a song that could only have been written by a stoner. And yet, as the liner notes to 22 Reasons inform us, Coxy doesn’t do drugs. Unlike the other three members of the band, who in this scenario would surely be the three wise men with their gold, frankincense and myrrh. 

So, while we’re duty bound to take the lyrics for “Marijuana” with an extra large grain of salt – or, yes, “frankincense”, which does sound like a code word – isn’t it worth contemplating who those three wise men might have been visiting, in Coxy’s totally not-drug-addled mind? 

Or am I overthinking it? 

Yeah, probably. 

Les Fauves, out. 

This is the text version of my cameo contribution to Episode 88 of Fauves Are the Best People, which you can listen to on Spotify (see below) or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6oriMHh9ySg0FSneFAAkYD?si=28d08d4059d14d1d