Red Hot Chili Peppers
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
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Red Hot Chili Peppers
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Warner Bros., 1991
RiYL: 311, Primus, Faith No More |
Some music that I was crazy about back in the day, I have a whole new perspective on now. I know so much more about writing and playing and performing and the biz and being an adult. But there are a few bands about whom the impression I formed back in 1992 still holds more or less intact. Take the Chili Peppers, for example. My added years have added absolutely zero appreciation or shading to Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I thought it was too long then, I think it’s too long now. I like a lot of the songs but feel weirdly guilty about it now as I did then.
I finally got around to listening to By the Way and much of Stadium Arcadium (I defy anyone to make it through that whole album in one sitting) this week and it's evident the latter-day Anthony Kiedis as lyricist and bandleader has the precise same limitations and hangups as he did in 1991. Kiedis has basically been in arrested development as a 13-year-old for the Chili Peppers’ entire career, if a 13-year-old with rather precocious tastes for heroin and groupie sex.
But compare two songs that shocked me when I was 13, Blood Sugar’s “Sir Psycho Sexy” and the Afghan Whigs’ “Be Sweet.” After my mom's Beatles records and my dad's Iron Butterfly cassettes, I sure wasn’t ready for alternative pinups singing directly about their dicks. I felt downright unclean listening to Gentlemen back in the day. But my relationship to that album has developed. It’s still disturbing, but in a way that has resonance and relevance. Greg Dulli had issues. Kiedis just had, and still has, an infantile fixation on his li’l pepper. I see the difference now. I doubt the Chili Peppers, or most of their fans, care very much either way.
Blood Sugar Sex Magik is still a pretty good rock record. “Suck My Kiss” and “Give It Away” are obviously durable standards. They could fill a dance floor in ’92 and they still can now. The more confessional moments on the old album work for the same reason they used to, which is that for what Kiedis lacks in sophistication he occasionally makes up for in pure guileless honesty. “Under the Bridge,” for all its overexposure, works, because the performances of Anthony and (especially) guitarist John Frusciante convey all of the emotions that the lyrics can’t. The other ballads, “Breaking the Girl” and “I Could Have Lied,” have the same mawkish directness. Kiedis feels genuinely bad about his drug addiction, his relationship with his father, and the unimaginable string of girlfriends he must have annoyed by 1991, but he’s simply not smart enough to make sense of these ideas in his lyrics. Back in high school, it struck me as odd that such a himbo winded up fronting as obviously gifted a group of musicians as Frusciante, Flea, and Chad Smith, but now I grasp that this sort of thing happens all the damn time.
So you can go one of three ways with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Either you ignore Kiedis, you appreciate him in a smug, detached sort of way, or (God help you) you disagree with me and you think he’s actually an acceptably competent lyricist. Maybe you think he’s an okay singer too, you poor fool. I fall mostly into the second column, which brings me around to the only song on Blood Sugar Sex Magik that has new meaning for me now. Back in the day, “My Lovely Man,” Kiedis’s hysterically mawkish and ineptly homoerotic tribute to late Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak, seemed so stupid as to border on offensive. (But sadly it doesn’t fly so far across the line of what’s acceptable that it comess back around to greatness, like AC/DC’s “Have a Drink on Me.”
The Chili Peppers, as it so happens, make for a very instructive comparison with AC/DC. While the reference points differ they’re basically both arena rock guitar riff bands with full-time massive hard-ons. But the Aussies, I would argue, are completely self-aware while RHCP are almost poignantly innocent, the only ones not in on a joke of their own telling.) Now that I’ve accepted that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are never going to be more than exactly what they are and have always been, I kind of have a soft spot for “My Lovely Man.” Come on, who else could sing a line like “come to me all warm as covers” and sell it like Anthony Kiedis?
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.