387: BLOOD SUGAR SEX MAGIC | RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
Jeremey Gordon at Pitchfork: In 1984, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a long shot to make it to the 21st century. They were a party band back then—too funky for hair metal, too cock-obsessed for college rock. (And that name, perfectly encapsulating the band’s essence while being incredibly gauche.) They wrote songs about their dicks; they then stretched cotton socks over those same dicks and jumped around on stage without fear of gravity. They were revered as a potent live act__,__ and got some songs on the radio, but they’d yet to make a strong step forward—their own label balked at giving them resources. The decade passed with small successes—a gold record for 1989’s Mother’s Milk—and unexpected tragedies, such as the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak, with the hope of something better to come. In the music world, they were definitely not a big deal.
And then, the world changed. By now, the hagiography about Nirvana’s Nevermind* *has been well-repeated: It terraformed the radio into new, unfamiliar shapes, it sparked a 10,000% rise in flannel sales; it broke pained groaning as a pop sound, etc. But it also set the tone for a decade more permissive of what a popular rock band could sound and look like, in ways that would reverberate far away from grunge or flannel obsessives. Their success allowed a fomenting alternasphere of bands who didn’t adhere to existing mainstream norms to rise up: Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden… and suddenly, the Chili Peppers. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as Nevermind, a neat coincidence for historical records, and perfect timing for their attempt at fitting into a broader cultural milieu. In its title—a phrase as ridiculous as their name—were the irreducible elements of their previous records, distilled into a declarative statement.
Teenaged guitarist John Frusciante had been hired after the untimely death of Slovak, who passed away from a heroin overdose in 1988. Slovak rooted the band in their early sped-up punk-funk sound, a slurry molding of acts like Gang of Four, Jimi Hendrix, and Parliament-Funkadelic (George Clinton produced their second album, Freaky Styley). On those records, the Chili Peppers sounded like a live band trying to rein it in, with varying success. They’d never recorded two records with the same lineup, forcing them to continually jel on the fly. Frusciante changed all of that. His melodic instincts were languid and expressionist—a counterpunch to a rhythm section that wrote funk for moshing, allowing them to write open-hearted songs for the first time in their career. He found his footing following an up-and-down recording for Mother’s Milk, which forced him to shed his identity as a kid playing with his heroes. “The first year or so I wanted to be in the band so bad, I wanted to do a good job so much,” he said in an oral history of the group. “I was trying too hard to be like what I thought a Chili Pepper should be rather than just being myself… musically on guitar and in my personal life.”