286. Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication"

 


What the fuck? No.

Oh, do I need to elaborate?  There are no circumstances under which this is a Top 500 album, much, much less number 286.  There is no world in which this is a better album than Mr. Tambourine Man or Let It Be or, for the love of god, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.  This is a mid-range Red Hot Chili Peppers album, which is to say it is utterly predictable, lyrically hilarious, and occasionally memorable.  The fact that this album is on the list and Purple by Stone Temple Pilots, to take a random example, is not, is completely unfair.

Those lyrics.  The first song, "Around the World," finds Anthony Kiedis idly flipping through an atlas and finding what places he can rhyme with.  Thus:

Bonafide ride
Step aside my johnson
Yes I could
In the woods of Wisconsin

Wake up the cake
Its a lake shes kissin me
As they do when
When they do in Sicily

LOL.  The oddly titled "Emit Remmus," reportedly written about Kiedis's brief romance with Spice Girl Mel B., takes us across the pond:

Summer time to talk and swear
Later maybe we could share some air
I'll take you to the movies there
We could walk through Leicester square
What could be wetter than
An English girl American man

Ew.  And so forth.  (Oh, wait, it's "Summer Time" spelled backwards.  Oh jeez.)  

The album was a massive hit, of course, and I knew more songs on it than I realized.  You know the title track, a play on words so awful and juvenile it was used for a cable TV show as well, and you probably know "Scar Tissue."  I have a long-running mondegreen (i.e., a lyric mishearing) with this song, the chorus of which I always thought was about the "birds of shame" but is actually "With the birds I'll share this lonely viewin'/With the birds I'll share this lonely viewin,'" whatever the fuck that means.  I think exploring the "birds of shame" idea could yield much better lyrical fruit. 

It's not all terrible.  I actually think "Parallel Universe" has a good, catchy chorus, if you can get over the idea of Kiedis as a mattress ("Christ, I'm a sidewinder/I'm a California King/I swear it's everywhere, oh/It's everything").  "Porcelain" is kinda pretty.  There, I'm not a total jerk.

Even my Spotify was disapproving.  It would never save this album on my "Recently Played," no matter how many times I played it.  Spotify: taking a bullet for me, thanks.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? No.  Jesus. 

Comments

  1. GGSeptember 28, 2021 at 11:39 AM

    Wow. The Birds of Shame are looking down on Rolling Stone’s editorial staff and shaking their heads

    ReplyDelete

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