#186 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik' (1991)
Previously #310
Red Hot Chili Peppers had been kicking around the Hollywood music scene since 1983. Their music was a funky type of rap-rock with rapid-fire vocals delivered by Anthony Kiedis. The first four albums didn’t set the world alight but the band was happy to continue doing their thing. Founding member and guitarist, Hilel Slovak, sadly died due to a heroin overdose in 1988. The band recruited fan, John Frusciante to the group for their fourth album, ‘Mother’s Milk.’ The album had marginal success, especially in comparison to their previous three records. It was their fifth album, ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik, however, that was the major breakthrough for the band. And not just a breakthrough, they smashed through and it launched the band to stratospheric heights. I had first heard of RHCP when they released this record, but not why you may think. I clearly remember pulling out a poster of Bart Simpson from a magazine to stick on my wall and the poster on the other side was Red Hot Chili Peppers. That poster hung on my wall for months, possibly years to come, just facing the other way.
This album saw the start of the band’s longstanding collaboration with producer, Rick Rubin. Rubin finessed their sound, reducing the heavy guitar riffs, and focussed more on the melodic playing of Frusciante. Rubin set the band up in an old mansion that Harry Houdini once lived in. Chad Smith refused to stay there as he believed the mansion was haunted. Frusciante agreed but said that the ghosts were friendly. The result was arguably the best album of the band’s career. It’s a true 5-star record for me, where every track is a winner. ‘Breaking The Girl,’ ‘Funky Monks,’ ‘Suck My Kiss,’ the beautifully majestic ‘I Could Have Lied’ (written about Kiedis’s relationship with Sinead O’Connor) and the massively funky hit single, ‘Give It Away’ all appear within the first 10 songs. You could have ended the album on the title track, the average length of an album, and it would have been an amazing album. But then you go one beyond to track 11 and what you’re presented with is like nothing you would have ever heard before from RHCP. An intricate, considered guitar progression leads into Anthony Kiedis’s earnest and beautiful vocals. We had never quite heard him sing like this before. “Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner/Sometimes I feel like my only friend/Is the city I live in, the city of angels/Lonely as I am, together we cry.” Wow. Still gives me goosebumps. ‘Under The Bridge’ is a song about the bridge under which Kiedis, wuld score his heroin. Kiedis was clean at the time of writing/recording the song, jolted into sobriety after the death of Slovak. It takes almost 3 minutes for the song to take flight with Flea and Smith jumpstarting it before the angelic choir chants “Under the bridge downtoooown.” We’ve been so exposed to this song on radio for 30 years that I think we take for granted how good it actually is. The song is so deeply personal and painful for Kiedis that there was a period that he couldn’t perform it live. The album continues further, including the ridiculous ‘Sir Psycho Sexy’ (I still know all the lyrics word for word) and a Louis Armstrong trumpet tribute by Flea on ‘Apache Rose Peacock.’ Speaking of Flea, it would be remiss of me not to mention his incredible bass playing on the record. His bass playing is incredible (there, I mentioned it). The album ends with an unexpected cover of Robert Johnson’s ‘They’re Red Hot,’ a very un-serious way to end a rollercoaster of emotions. Red Hot Chili Peppers had arrived.
#rs500albums