Feeling Supersonic: Give Me Gin and Tonic They make a beautiful gin and tonic at La Vara, a restaurant in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Graced with a serpentine spiral of lemon peel, it comes in a curvy glass that you almost want to pick up with two hands. As we explore in this week's Dining section, La Vara draws its cocktail inspiration from Spain, where bartenders have breathed new life into an old cocktail form. But Alex Raij, one of the owners of La Vara, also wanted to dodge an unfortunate strand of memory. "I have all these bad associations," she told me. Years ago, in Minneapolis, Ms. Raij would go to hear bands like the Replacements and the Pixies, and the G&Ts churned out at ratty nightclubs were so atrocious (with harsh, dried-up nubs of lime and overly sweet tonic shot out of a soda gun) that recalling the taste of them can still make her cringe. Her memories got me thinking about the pervasive popularity of gin as an ingredient in pop-music lyrics. The first example that leapt to my mind came from "Supersonic," by Oasis, in which the singer Liam Gallagher lays down one of his typically swaggering demands: "I'm feeling supersonic / Give me gin and tonic." Were the blokes in Oasis ever really gin aficionados? And, for that matter, was Snoop Dogg, the man who gave "Gin and Juice" its moment of cultural prominence in the early 1990s? If you seek an earlier example, how about the clown-costumed, "Cold Gin"-touting warriors from Kiss? And while we're on the topic, what, in the end, qualifies as the most convincing pop song about gin? For my money it's "Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin," from the Magnetic Fields, in which Stephin Merritt name-checks the Bowery and Elaine's and offers up mordant observations like this: It has no color in itself but it can make you see rainbows.