186. Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Blood Sugar Sex Magik"

 


The Red Hot Chili Peppers can be a divisive band to write about because I'm sure there are a lot of people who love them but they're pretty terrible and that makes it hard.  You know that famous Nick Cave quote, right?  “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

NEVERTHELESS, I must say that if you have to listen to an RHCP album this is probably the one, as I guess it shows some thought and range beyond their usual Flea slap-bass/Anthony Kiedis rap-singing/funk-punk thing.  Hell, I've been trying to figure out what's going on in "Give It Away" for almost 30 years:

What I got, you got to give it to your mama
What I got, you've got to give it to your papa
What I got, you got to give it to your daughter
You do a little dance and then you drink a little water
What I got, you gotta get it put it in you
What I got, you gotta get it put it in you
What I got, you gotta get it put it in you

What is it that the listener would not only have to give to their mama, their papa, and their daughter, and then put inside them?  A delicious apple pie, perhaps?  It gets more perplexing:

I realize I don't wanna be a miser
Confide with sly you'll be the wiser
Young blood is the lovin' upriser
How come everybody wanna keep it like the Kaiser?

I think it's admirable that Anthony doesn't want to be a miser, but I have no idea what "Confide with sly you'll be the wiser" OR "Young blood is the lovin' upriser" could possibly mean.  And I have to confess, "How come everybody wanna keep it like the Kaiser" is maybe one of my all-time favorite lyrics in rock.  Was the Kaiser famous for keeping things?  Is the "it" the Kaiser keeping the same thing you're giving to your family members and putting inside you?  This song is a little puzzle box, if the puzzle is "what rhymes with -iser?"

The album also contains "Under the Bridge," maybe the Peppers' biggest hit, a song about the loneliness and isolation of drug addiction.  Rick Rubin, who produced this record, famously found the lyrics while flipping through one of Kiedis's notebooks and suggested that he share it with the band.  It was earnest and heartfelt, completely out of step with RHCP's usual bigger dick energy swagger, but it cemented their place as MTV darlings and launched them into the 100-million-albums-sold stratosphere where they've hung out ever since.

Look, this is a fine party album for 20-something boneheads armed with a beer bong and a hash pipe, but the dark side of this post-adolescent sex obsession showed up in various allegations and convictions for sexual harassment and assault.  There's an ugly underside to Kiedis's let's-just-fuck ethos and a lot of women have been on the receiving end of it.  Sure, this album is a document of a certain time and place - LA in the early 90's - but it's also a reminder that the vapid, sniggering male culture behind it was toxic and damaging.  

Nirvana's Nevermind came out on the same day as this record, September 24, 1991.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Begrudgingly yes, but not here.  Maybe in the 400's.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more