Tag / Red Hot Chili Peppers

by sweensryche

The Gen X Rock Doctor Is In!

A lot of things have to go right to become a rock star. Some mixture of timing and talent and luck that’s about as likely as this post getting a million views. But to become a rock star with longevity? To stay socially relevant and creatively inspired and physically capable of touring well into middle age? That’s just a magic trick.

As I slide into my mid-40s like an obese cat dragging itself across the linoleum, I find myself interested in how my fellow Gen Xers are holding up. Several have released albums this year, which I’ve listened to with the ear of a doctor, searching for any slowed reflexes, emerging arrhythmias, or unhealthy anxieties about getting older.

The doctor is in!

Patient #1: Eddie Vedder


Of the ’90s rock poster boys, Eddie Vedder always seemed like the one who was built for the long haul. It’s easy to read too much into Pearl Jam’s decision to stop making videos and battle Ticketmaster at the height of its fame, but in retrospect, they were the actions of young men looking at the big picture. Earthling keeps that narrative intact, with the 57-year-old leapfrogging between sounds with more energy than you might expect, and a healthy amount of humility. The jangly “Long Way” is a self-aware Tom Petty rip-off, with actual Heartbreaker Benmont Tench on keys. The ballad “Mrs. Mills” is a self-aware Paul McCartney ripoff that pays homage to the British music hall pianist who hit it big in the early ’60s alongside her label-mates The Beatles. And “Try” gives Pearl Jam’s garage-punk roots a poppier, grown-up makeover, its lyrics about pure, earnest effort sexier than any pick-up line could ever be.

Diagnosis: Some slight wear and tear in your vocal cords and lyric sheets – but it really works for you Eddie. Your passion has always been evident, but in the old days it could cross over into non-sensical mutter-growling. I like this older, calmer you. By being open about your influences and not trend-chasing, you’ve ironically made the freshest-sounding Pearl Jam-related project in over a decade!

Treatment: Keep being true to yourself, and you will keep doing right by your music.

Patient #2: Red Hot Chili Peppers

“My life is a rope swing, always headin’ back to where I came,” sings Anthony Kiedis on his band’s first album in six years. It’s an apt metaphor, because with Unlimited Love, Red Hot Chili Peppers are trying to pull the same trick they did with 1999’s Californication – welcome guitarist/vocalist/aesthetic compass John Frusciante back in the fold to help draw out the beauty in their sound. And while this record lacks the sweeping hooks and fragile gravitas of its older cousin, it’s a worthy addition to their catalog. Frusciante, Flea and Chad Smith still vibe beautifully together, turning spacious ballads like “Let ‘Em Cry” into melodic showcases and putting just enough polish on their trademark funk vamps so they feel older and wiser. The X factor, as usual, is the 59-year-old Kiedis, who continues to think lines just need to rhyme and the words themselves are merely incidental: “The seventies were such a win / Singing the Led Zeppelin / Lizzy lookin’ mighty thin / The Thompsons had another twin,” he raps in the abysmal “Poster Child.” But just as you’re ready to write him off, he’ll throw himself into a line like “It’s been a long time since I made a new friend,” and you’ll be reminded about how, despite all the blood and sex, this band has never skimped on the sugar and magic.

Diagnosis: Your age is showing, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Your reflexes are duller, and your energy flags a bit over 17 tracks. But you seem happy, and in a comfortable groove, letting the spark of old chemistry propel you forward. As long as you don’t expect to top the charts or attract a bunch of new fans, you’ve got a fulfilling third act of your career ahead of you.

Treatment: Icy Hot to soothe those forced rhyme schemes. Stay out of the sun, or else you might write songs with “California” in the title again. And keep spending time together!

Patient #3: The Smile

It wasn’t always clear how Radiohead would handle aging. It’s healthy to have a sense of one’s own mortality, but these guys have always been obsessed with the pointlessness of it all. “Cracked eggs / Dead birds / Scream as they fight for life,” sang a 26-year-old Thom Yorke on the final track of the disillusioned masterpiece The Bends. 27 years later, this side project from Yorke, guitarist Jonny Greenwood and drummer Tom Skinner has an outlook that’s just as bleak, but it’s informed by something different. A Light for Attracting Attention delivers what we’d hope from a late Radiohead record – Yorke’s voice beckoning like an alien siren, post-punk grooves elevated by odd time signatures, waves of melody soothing us out of nowhere like a radio broadcast from a happier time. But there are some elements that are purely The Smile, too – most prominently Skinner’s drum solo that kicks off “The Opposite,” which sounds like the beginning of a sweaty funk workout from The Meters and absolutely made me check to see if Apple Music was on shuffle. For an album that’s not interested in being catchy, this rhythmic pulse from a live drummer is critical, a still-beating umbilical cord that helps us understand there can be comfort in nihilism. “When we realize we are broke and nothing mends / We can drop under the surface,” the 53-year-old Yorke observes on the closing “Skrting On the Surface.” It’s not an argument for suicide, but acceptance. The older we get, the thinner the ice. What’s wrong with picking out our wetsuit?

Diagnosis: Thom. Jonny. You’re in exceptional shape for your age. You made a whole album about the dehumanizing impact of technology, but you’re making me wonder if you were the robots all along. How else can you explain the fact that you’re still able to make music that goes to such beautiful, lonely places, while somehow making us feel less alone?

Treatment: If you truly are carbon-based, just stick to your current diet and exercise plan, which I assume is tea, plant-based energy bars and staring out rain-spattered windows.

Patient #4: Jack White

When you get famous for leading a band that checks many of the traditionally “cool” boxes of electric guitar-based music – loud, unpolished, defiant but also romantic, branded with signature colors – it can be tough to begin the next phase of your career. Especially if you’re as much of a tech nerd as Jack White, who is now as much of an advocate for vinyl pressing plants as he is a rock star. His fourth solo LP, Fear of the Dawn, has the same upsides and weaknesses of previous efforts – richer-sounding White Stripes-ish riffs coupled with interesting production wrinkles that all sound good, but feel a bit aimless without the steady, intangible pulse of Meg White’s drums. My favorite parts are the most experimental, like “Hi-De-Ho,” a melodramatic blues-rap freakout that pairs White’s simple riff with verses from Q-Tip and a prominent Cab Calloway sample. I also love the concept – an image-obsessed 45-year-old rocker petrified of the sunrise, another day further away from his glory days. “Eosophobia” uses the scientific term for this fear over delightfully syncopated drum-and-guitar interplay that reinvents the White Stripes formula into something weirdly wonderful. Maybe this is the transition record that White needed to make before he could finally throw open the curtains and move on.

Diagnosis: Jack, I’m proud of the self-awareness you’re showing here, translating your fear of aging into art. But you need to trust those instincts even more. You are showing signs of early-stage carpal tunnel, retreading those familiar punk-blues riffs over and over. Embrace your mid-life shift into an obscure LP/vintage instrument-hoarding weirdo and see what happens! Excited for your next check-up.

Treatment: Rest those old guitar-shredding muscles – they’re tired!

by sweensryche

Top 100 Albums of the ’90s (60-56)

220px-RHCP-BSSM60. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)

Of all the mega-selling, on-the-charts-for-years rock albums, have any been as weirdly schizophrenic as Blood Sugar Sex Magik? After scoring a minor hit in 1989 with a rather grating cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground,” Red Hot Chili Peppers used its next album to shamelessly court the mainstream. And spit in its face. And forget all about it because it had a boner. And then court it again. BSSM is on this list because it remains the band’s most fully realized work, a 17-track tapestry of immaculately crafted funk and richly realized, anthemic rock. When John Frusciante’s elegant guitar chatter intertwines with Flea’s lyrical bass lines on tracks like “If You Have To Ask,” “Mellowship Slinky” and “Apache Rose Peacock,” they prove that party music for buttheads can be as artful as anything else. But as always, the band’s X factor is singer Anthony Kiedis, whose political rants and sexual fantasies have always been as developed as your average 13-year-old (“Sir Psycho Sexy” is BSSM’s most ambitious song, and thanks to Kiedis and his vagina thesaurus, it’s also its most embarrassing). Yet, on this record, Kiedis also convincingly hates the honesty in his face, sees the world through the eyes of an addict, and gets endearingly goofy while covering Robert Johnson. This album is where the bravado of the penis-sock days met the polished, dad-friendly balladry that’s defined Red Hot Chili Peppers ever since. Why is that a good thing? If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

Blowout_Comb_Cover59. Digable Planets – Blowout Comb (1994)

To the delight of aspiring poets, kids who couldn’t get into bars, and white people with dreadlocks, coffee shops were all the rage in the 1990s. I can remember spending way too much time at a place in Buffalo called Stimulance, pretending to like cappuccino while sitting on ironically garbage-picked furniture. In retrospect, this fad had a few positive aftereffects – like the snob-worthy java you can find around every corner these days, and the all-too-brief popularity of groups like Digable Planets. Fusing the cadence of live poetry with the jazzy sensibilities of Native Tongues hip-hop, this Brooklyn trio scored a hit with 1993’s “Rebirth of Slick,” and used all of its resultant goodwill to make this sprawling, career-murdering, aggressively chilled-out masterwork. Eschewing samples in favor of live musicians, Blowout Comb makes the jazz-rap experiments of its peers sound like novelty tracks. Saxophones trill; vibraphones echo; live drums burrow deep in the pocket, and emcees Butterfly, Ladybug and Doodlebug deliver verses with soft, rhythmic power. Their voices are such a part of the aesthetic that you barely remember what you just heard, drifting happily from track to track. To listen to Blowout Comb is to experience new vistas of dreamy funk, which lull you into closing your eyes, as the summer sun glows behind them.

Basement_Jaxx_-_Remedy_-_CD_album_cover58. Basement Jaxx – Remedy (1999)

I was a loyal subscriber to Rolling Stone and Spin for most of the ’90s, and have a vague recollection of being told in no uncertain terms that electronica was going to be the next grunge. I certainly bought into that hype – spending $17 on Tricky’s Maxinquaye and trying very hard to like it, for example (I still don’t get it) – but it wasn’t until I was in college and heard Basement Jaxx that I thought those writers might not have been totally full of shit. Electronica never took off, I know, but maybe if something as funky, melodic, and unabashedly hook-filled as Remedy had hit five years earlier, we’d be left with more than mental images of that Prodigy guy’s seizure-dancing. Or maybe I’m just not a big electronic music guy (Daft Punk’s never really done it for me either), and Remedy is one of those records that only requires a pulse to enjoy. Either way, the thing is as fun to crank as ever, a dance record that uses digital elements as efficiently as a great punk band uses chords.

Ben_Folds_Five_-_Ben_Folds_Five57. Ben Folds Five – Ben Folds Five (1995)

Nerdy dudes can be like fine wine – once they reach a certain age, they turn to vinegar. Take Ben Folds, who was the driving creative force behind this album, an electrifying slab of sensitive guy rock and roll that purposely excluded guitar solos on one outcast anthem after another. “You can laugh all you want to/But I’ve got my philosophy,” he crooned, with a reactive confidence that sounded earned. With “Underground,” he delivered a spot-on, sardonic takedown of music scene snobbery that was simultaneously one of the most infectious pop songs of its time. And “Boxing,” a gorgeous waltz in the form of a tear-stained, existentialist letter from Muhammad Ali to Howard Cosell, remains a stunningly imaginative piece of songwriting. Ben Folds Five followed this with greater commercial success, including some lovely work here and there. But the formula was eroding even then – the band’s biggest hit was about how abortion is tough on men, and that was followed up by a single with the chorus, “Give me my money back, you bitch.” Folds’ talent is undeniable, but only on Ben Folds Five was it bottled correctly.

Soundgarden_-_Badmotorfinger56. Soundgarden – Badmotorfinger (1991)

Just like Metallica’s first crossover metal album was And Justice For All …, Soundgarden’s courting of the mainstream began here. And just like AJFA was superior in every way to its blockbuster follow-up, Badmotorfinger has held up over the years in a way that makes 1994’s massive hit Superunknown look like a pop culture relic. Now, I like Superunknown a lot. It’s #96 on this list because it did a fine job bridging the artful brutality of its previous work with pleasant-enough grist for the MTV heavy rotation mill. But Badmotorfinger is the greater accomplishment, because while it punishes your ears more than anything this side of Slayer, its melodies and ideas are so compelling, they invite you in. Religious iconography rubs shoulders with prisoners about to burst with rage. Kim Thayil’s riffs are as dark and sludgy as pure crude; Chris Cornell’s throaty, banished angel screams are somehow both operatic and thrillingly raw. It’s serious metal music made for all of us to enjoy, and it’s galaxies away from “Black Hole Sun.”