Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

As Raoul says, “a week in Vegas is like stumbling into a Time Warp, a regression to the late fifties… people like Sinatra and Dean Martin are still considered ‘far out’ in Vegas” (156). Las Vegas likes to bill itself as the entertainment capital of the world. In reality, though, in terms of music, what it serves up is both dated and anodyne. Thus, “Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week” (155) there and it is associated with acts like Barbara Streisand. In short, music in Vegas is something non-threatening and designed for easy consumption. In contrast, music for Raoul and Gonzo is jarring, timely, and provocative. Music serves as means of emphasizing and elevating extreme experiences. For example, as Raoul says when driving to Las Vegas, “‘Sympathy for the Devil’…was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio” (4-5).

Music accompanies the psychedelic experience and drowns out ordinary culture. This is seen most emphatically when Gonzo is in the bath, listening to “White Rabbit” having taken a huge amount of LSD. As he says to Raoul, “Let it roll!... Just as high as the f***er can go! And when it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that f***in radio into the tub with me” (60).