Ritual De Lo Habitual
Jane's Addiction
Warner
Bros., 1990
Reviewed by Justin Hall
In Spanish, Ritual De Lo Habitual means the ritual of the habitual -
taking our daily lives and making them sacred, or taking our addictions and making ritual
of them. It's a high-minded mission, and one that's worth celebrating. Most albums are
content to share a good time (or a sad one) between the artists and the listeners, but
some work to make the ordinary and the sordid to appear to us as truth and transcendence.
And so we have Jane's Addiction - picking through trash and shooting up heroin, while
taking on rights of personal freedom and making literal art of living. There are plenty of
bands doing drugs and talking about it, but there' s very few who convincingly ascribe a
spiritual value to their indulgence. In this way Jane's Addiction is ultimately elegant,
like a houseguest who dances on your tables, overflows the toilet, has read all of your
best books and would probably do a good job playing with your young nephew.
Jane's Addiction ripped up the L.A. music scene towards the tail end of the Guns N' Roses
era - the late '80s and into the early '90s. Drummer Stephen Perkins, guitarist Dave
Navarro and bassist Eric Avery were each six or eight years younger than Perry Farrell,
the band's lead singer. Together they mixed hard rock, funk, drugs, religion, hippy style,
surfing and Hispanic influences into a delicious stew that resembled L.A. in its diversity
and seeming incongruity. Farrell, as the songwriter and outspoken frontman, set an
artistic tone for the band with his controversial cover art and off-beat charisma.
Some background, for the uninitiated. The band's self-titled first album consisted of a
few live songs and a few covers (including the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones),
and was released on Triple X in 1987. The album cover was a painting of Farrell tied up
and cut up in sweet repose. There was so much rage and grace combined in that first album,
and Jane's would establish its skill at playing both fast and hard. This release made
Jane's a hot prospect, sought after by the major record labels. Eventually, the band
signed with Warner Brothers and released Nothing's Shocking in 1988. Like the
first album, the cover art was conceived by Farrell: a pair of life-sized naked ladies
joined at the hip and shoulder, seated in a rocking loveseat, each with their head on
fire.
And again, like the first album, Jane's laid down both hard and soft tracks;
"Mountain Song" is severely hard rock, while "Summertime Rolls" is
about the most delicious paean to the summer season heard since Porgy & Bess. The
songs are longer and more expansive: "Ted, Just Admit It..." is a seven-minute
meditation on violence in the media, and "Summertime Rolls" rolls in at six
minutes. With these longer songs in the middle of the album, and a few new songs penned by
the band, reccuring themes emerged: loss, love, drug use, exuberance and frustration with
ignorant society.
Jane's first two albums were preparation for what was to come - extremely passionate
pieces. When you compare the first two albums to the third, Ritual De Lo Habitual
stands as a more mature release. The songs just melt together better, forming an
experiential whole. Along the way, Jane's works through fierce, frenetic rhythms of
ritual, tribal music, soaring electric guitar, chanting and much cultural defiance.
The
band hoists up a proudly freakish lifestyle as the best kind of everyday experience. The
cover is a photograph of a life-sized sculpture by Farrell of autobiographical art: three
paper maché bodies, mostly naked and intermingling, surrounded by the fixins of Santeria,
a Caribbean religion involving possession by saints. Candles, fruit, a bare metal
boxspring, paper halos - it's a scene at once tawdry and saintly. The scene was enough to
provoke a ban; another version of the album was released with only the text of the First
Amendment on the cover.
Ritual De Lo Habitual is a heady mix of sex, drugs and spirituality, and doesn't
respond well to restraint. The music is pointedly resistant to analysis, as the entire
spirit of the songs is celebratory and participatory. You don't read or debate, you feel
and you move.
Press play, or drop the needle - a sultry woman greets you. In Spanish, she tells you that
"We have more influence over your children than you do, but we love them." And
she introduces the band. "Stop" propels you into the album. There isn't any time
for messing around; STOP and pay attention to what's going on here: the world's going to
end, stop complaining, get away from machines and liars!
"No
One's Leaving" is as funky as the first song, just a little less fast. It's an
argument for human racial equality based on greeting and common humanity. Farrell's
storytelling "sister and her boyfriend slept in a park, had to leave home because he
was dark" makes it resonant. It's got a point to make, but it's so damn exuberant
that it never feels pedagogical.
"Ain't
No Right" starts with rolling, randy beats; it's Jane's Addiction at their most
visceral. To sing along with this screed for self-reliance is to spew spit and have your
throat sore from overuse: "Ain't no wrong now / Ain't no right / There's only
pleasure and pain." The band establishes its own personal anarchy here in no
uncertain terms, and boy does independence party.
"Obvious" slows things down a bit, and injects some audible piano. It's a
diatribe against snooping moralists, and it's a welcome change of pace after three songs
of pure exhilaration. "Been Caught Stealing" picks things back up; felonies
never seemed so fun. With dog barking and jaunting, rolling rhythms, "Been Caught
Stealing" is about the best time you can have with a stereo - Farrell singing
"it's mine" so defiantly, and the sort of "nyeh-nyeh" chorus - it's
hard not to sing along to this, even if you're not down with shoplifting.
But "Three Days" is the emotional center of the album. Beginning with words of
modern ritual: "At this moment, you should be with us / Feeling like we do, like you
loved to, but never will again / We miss you my dear Xiola... / I prepared the room
tonight, with Christmas Lights. / A city of candles ..." The song builds up the other
instruments over this - as the words fade down, a questing bassline comes up, and then a
soft, lilting guitar riff. It is the start of a ten-minute song - an epic, by rock
standards.
Musically and lyrically, "Three Days" ventures into primal territory. For the
first movement, the story starts in a bedroom, introducing a "proud man" in the
midst of three days of three-way lovemaking. A hopping tribal rhythm starts up, initiating
a still graceful but more energetic pace. We are now discussing broader social dynamics -
the dynamics of a tribe. The celebratory spirit of this movement is marked with the cry
"all now with wings!" and we enter the bridge, where the bass, guitar and drums
begin a slow crescendo, soaring higher until finally the drums begin a metallic slamming
that urges you into the third, and most intense movement.
One
guitar note repeats over the drums, and we are up with the band in the realm of heaven,
all with wings, all charged erotic energy. There's a lull, of whispering and cooing, and
then we are back into the fierce energy swirl at the center of Ritual De Lo Habitual
- a massive crescendo of lovemaking, drugs, religion, tribe, ecstacy, vulnerability and
transcendance. "Three Days" is the height of the band's sharing of spiritual
indulgence.
"Then She Did" is another lengthy number, but only eight minutes this time. A
slower song, the lyrics take up both the drug overdose of Perry's lover Xiola and the
suicide of his mother. The track has an expansive sound, and a pained core.
Defying
all accepted record industry wisdom, the band stacks the three longest songs of their
career back-to-back-to-back, rounding out the set of enormous numbers with "Of
Course." With electric violin and acoustic fiddle, chanting and clapping, this song
comes as a sort of sobering wind-down from the frenzy and dense emotion of the previous
two songs. "Of Course" argues for the kind of fatalism that lies at the logical
heart of the band's politics: "One must eat the other who runs free before him"
- all this seizing of pleasure makes for a definite food chain.
"Classic Girl" languidly celebrates the beautiful, thoughtful women that inspire
the band. We've been through politics of property, equality, self determination; we've
revelled in lovemaking and death, and now Farrell sings, "For us, these are the
days." Time to turn your radio off and make love to your woman! It's a male fantasy
in that way, worshipping the woman - the album is filled with a charged reverence and use
of the female.
There's a dense sculpture of politics and passion here; Ritual De Lo Habitual
showed that you can make something majestic that's also human. You can comandeer violins
and Warner Brothers Records and the First Amendment to put on an Art Party to say Fuck
Bullshit. Perhaps fittingly, big and beautiful was a tenuous position; very soon after Ritual,
during Farrell's Lollapalooza touring concert festival series, Jane's Addiction publicly
decomposed and its members went their separate ways.
