"Don't Ride the White Horse"

YouTube - Laid Back - White Horse Here's a song from the 1980's by the Danish group "Laid Back" called "Don't Ride the White Horse" (Click the You Tube link). Me, I've never ridden a white horse. Actually I've only ridden one live horse in my life but I've ridden many carousel horses. It was the early 1980's and I was in Phoenix, Arizona attending a "National Tour Association" national convention and on one of the free afternoons a group of us went to the Marriott Camelback Mountain resort in nearby Scottsdale where they had horses available to ride along the nearby Camelback mountain. I found it amusing that they asked how much horseback riding experience each of us had as it turned out that the horseback ride was more like a mule train up the mountain. My horse was a brown colored horse named "Brandy" and there really wasn't much horsemanship required as these horses knew where they were going so it was kind of like riding a horse on "cruise control" in a car. There weren't any white horses or white ponies to ride that day so I did follow the advise of this song and didn't ride the white horse or even the white pony.

Now, in this song, believe it or not there is a term you may have heard of in English class in school called a "metaphor". A "metaphor" is a symbol for something else. For example in this song "white horse" actually represents the drug heroin and "white pony" represents "cocaine". And the song is telling you if you must take a white powder; stay off the heroin and use cocaine instead. Now I'm not saying you should use either drug myself; but this is the advise given in the song. Other "metaphorical" drug related songs include "Mr. Tambourine Man" by Bob Dylan, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the "Beatles".

One phrase in this song I have always remembered besides "don't ride the white horse"; is when the song says in a low voice, "If you want to be rich, you've got to be a ...." with the word unsaid in this video being "bitch". Rich........bitch.

So, If you want to ride, you should do what I did, ride "Brandy" or "Beer" perhaps.