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.”
Part of this smoothing process was also due to their newly signed multi-million record deal with Warner, which pretty much necessitated they try to release something approaching a blockbuster. As producer, they brought in Rick Rubin, who by 1991 was already a monastic, perma-bearded guru with a reputation as band whisperer, having made high-profile career-best records with Slayer, the Cult, Danzig, and half the rap world. Unlike early producers, who gave the Chili Peppers specific direction and sounds to shoot for, Rubin allowed them to relax. Instead of recording in a studio, the band decamped to a spacious house in Laurel Canyon, where most of the members lived in between sessions. (Drummer Chad Smith commuted from his nearby Los Angeles home, because he was spooked by rumors the house was haunted; Frusciante reported once hearing a woman scream in some coital outburst, while Anthony Kiedis said psychic mediums had detected “sexual energy” in the house. Believe what you will.)
Funky Monks, a documentary capturing the whole operation, presents an interaction between Frusciante and Kiedis that sums up the pull-and-push between their newfound artistic focus and their irrepressible sophomoric fuckery. Frusciante, earnest and clean-shaven, is exuberant. “We’re making an amazing, amazing, groundbreaking, revolutionary, beautiful, artistically heightened, incredible record,” he gushes. Next to him, Kiedis suppresses an eye-roll, deadpanning: “If Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated the four of us, being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, onto a chessboard, I would have to say Rick Rubin would be the perfect chess player for that particular board.” Frusciante, undone by his own guilelessness, grins like a dork.
But Kiedis was learning to be earnest, too. “Under the Bridge” might have remained a scribbled-down poem had Rubin not spotted it while flipping through Kiedis’ notebook; he suggested he show it to the band, despite Kiedis’ reservations that it didn’t sound like it could be a Chili Peppers song. He was right, but that didn’t matter: They worked out a tempo and key, and later, Frusciante came up with a lonesome chord progression for what would become their defining moment. The power ballad sounded wildly different than anything they’d ever recorded; the lyrics were completely unmuddled by Kiedis’ rhetorical gesticulations, speaking plainly about an isolation felt after wandering the city in search of something your loved ones couldn’t provide. Millions of MTV viewers didn’t need to shoot heroin in order to connect with Kiedis’ allusive plea to be freed from his demons: “I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day/Take me to the place I love, take me all the way.”
The video, which featured the enduring shot of Kiedis running shirtless in slow motion toward the camera, looking very zen-Danzig, played constantly on MTV, pushing their record sales even higher. It legitimized them as a “serious” band, for all their denuded giddiness, and became a mainstay of MTV’s “Buzz Bin” section, which plucked out promising singles and pushed them toward greater success. “Buzz Bin” videos were explicitly programmed to play three times a day, seven days a week, for eight weeks, while also receiving tangential news coverage around the network—and the Chili Peppers had two of them in “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away.” In an era where MTV could still break new bands, that was no small tool in pushing their music to the mass audience they’d always craved. As they shared airspace with artful videos like “Losing My Religion” and “Jeremy,” a band that had once written a song called “Party on Your Pussy” was suddenly meaningful.
The faded, tender spirit of “Under the Bridge” went with yearning songs like “Breaking the Girl” and “I Could Have Lied,” both penned about Kiedis’ doomed relationships. (The latter was allegedly inspired by a brief fling with Sinéad O’Connor—imagine those conversations.) They sounded sweeter, and somehow mature. For a long time, the Chili Peppers had been preoccupied with the grime and uninhibited physicality of sex. As Kiedis put it in his autobiography, which is punctuated every 15 pages with an X-rated anecdote: “You’re young and you’re not jaded yet and so the idea of being naked and playing this beautiful music with your best friends and generating so much energy and color and love in a moment of being nude is great. But you’re not only nude, you’ve also got this giant image of a phallus going for you.”
That says it all, as does the album’s subject matter. A lot of songs are about what the boys liked to do best. The title track? It’s about fucking. The Cretaceous oogie-boogie of “Funky Monks,” in which Kiedis sneers “Every man has certain needs/Talkin’ ’bout them dirty deeds”? It’s about fucking. “Sir Psycho Sexy,” an over-eight-minute wet dream defined by its burping bass tone and letter-to-Penthouse lyrics? It’s about fucking. “Suck My Kiss,” with its “Mr. Brownstone” flow and fighter’s groove? Definitely about fucking—and by the way, one guess what the original title was supposed to be? The unapologetic attitude toward sex was reflected in the extended jams that dot the album. The Chili Peppers saw no need for a 30-second outro when two or four minutes might work, creating extra time for dancing and whoever-knows-what.
You don’t have to read the Kiedis book to intuit that the Chili Peppers saw nakedness not just as lascivious romp—though, of course, there was that—but as pathway to a more unconscious, unrestrained state. They weren’t total goons; they were into mindfulness, and all that. The album opens with “The Power of Equality,” an explicitly anti-racist missive where Kiedis professes his love for Public Enemy and bellows “Say what I want, do what I can/Death to the message of the Ku Klux Klan.” “The Righteous and the Wicked” intones about a forthcoming environmental apocalypse owing to man’s selfish behavior, with Frusciante’s guitar tone sounding like a dark cloud pumped through a smokestack. Their gestures toward social justice were hardly sophisticated, less a well-reasoned dialogue than a full-throated “Racism fuckin’ sucks,” but that was the point. They were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way. During their performance at Woodstock ’99, they were asked by Jimi Hendrix’s sister to cover one of the late guitar legend’s songs as tribute; they picked “Fire,” which they’d performed for years, and ripped into it right as real bonfires were spreading at the festival, leading to the not-inaccurate charge they were literally fanning the flames. They mostly meant well, but didn’t always stick the landing.
They were also still sometimes prone to fratty, unjustifiable behavior: Kiedis was once convicted of indecent exposure, and Flea and Smith were charged with battery and sexual harassment after an incident where they spanked and yelled at a female fan present for an “MTV Spring Break” performance. Many more examples of inappropriate behavior are out there, and while it’s easy to imagine their defense—“We were just having fun”; “we got out of control”; “we were too drunk”; pick one— it doesn’t mean they weren’t acting like assholes. This attitude found a home with a certain segment of listeners. In his book, Kiedis notes the label’s concerns that “a large segment” of their fan base would be alienated by a shot in the video for “Warped” where he and Dave Navarro (who played with them in the ’90s; it’s a long story) briefly kissed. As they got older, the Chili Peppers never really grappled with the ramifications of all their bad behavior (like, say, the Beastie Boys). They were a classic Los Angeles rock band, a city where thousands of behaviorally repugnant transgressions have been ignored in the name of entertainment.
At their best, they folded their unbridled mentality into their burgeoning pop sensibility. “Give It Away” remains one of the memorable rock singles of the ’90s. Led by Flea’s hiccuping bass line, and filled out by Frusciante’s chrome-plated guitar work, it split the difference between the lizard-brain rock of their early days and the blissed-out spirituality they would later adopt. Kiedis was extremely on one, waxing existential like a naked priest you find at Burning Man: “There’s never been a better time than right now”; “Low brow but I rock a little know how”; “Reeling with the feeling don’t stop continue.” Gutter-minded it seemed, lines like “what I’ve got you’ve got to get it put it in you” weren’t sly ways of suggesting he’d like to hug and kiss you. (It’s a reflection on how love—the spiritual, not physical kind—has to be given away, taken from a life lesson gifted by the musician and artist Nina Hagen, with whom he was briefly involved.) Likewise, “Come and drink it up from my fertility” wasn’t only a literal request to suck his dick, even if he grabbed his junk in the video.
For all the snark that Kiedis’—shall we say—unique lyricism attracts, he was nonpareil amongst rock singers at chaining solecistic, seemingly dada-esque thoughts into melodically effortless, rap-inspired verse. Though the Chili Peppers would inevitably inspire “rap-rock,” that wallet-chained spectre haunting the conclusion of the ’90s, Kiedis’ rubbery delivery, filled with hard inflections to catch your ear, softened what could’ve been an ugly clash of styles. “Give It Away” was certainly the best example of that virtuosic talent. It was also aided by an instantly eye-catching video, directed by French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, which must have been storyboarded simply: “We’re gonna take you to the desert, smear you in silver paint, and let you Chi Pep the fuck out.” The indelible image of the shined-up Chili Peppers edited together in the same frame, writhing and flowing in balletic motion, snapshotted their vibe better than a million magazine profiles could.
Generation-signifying album it might be, it’s hard not to notice that a quarter of the record could be lost at no harm. “Mellowship Slinky in B Major” sounds like the worst of the limpid funk-rap they’d later inspire; “Apache Rose Peacock” and “Naked in the Rain” are redundant with other tracks; “The Greeting Song” is openly despised by Kiedis himself, who said he was pushed to write it by Rubin. (Here he is, unequivocal: “To this day, I hate that song. I hate the lyrics, I hate the vocals.”)
Of course, no one is listening to the album 25 years later because of “Mellowship Slinky in B Major.” It’s endured as a document of the moment when the Chili Peppers went widescreen—when they suddenly seemed like a band that might last for another 25 years. In 2016, the Chili Peppers signify nothing but themselves. But unlike the surviving members of the 1991 alt-rock class, their new music gets on the radio, and they remain massively popular by conventional metrics. (Their latest album debuted at No. 2 on the charts; a worldwide stadium tour is ongoing.) Blood Sugar Sex Magik is also a lodestone for a brand of more aggressive, politically negligent rock music that would emerge by the end of the ’90s. Their red-blooded punk-funk hybrid was the Beatles to a generation of misunderstood, aggro listeners who started bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and that sound was best exemplified on this record. Maybe that’s a dubious legacy, but it still makes them a significant reference point for any serious look at how the decade would turn out.
Flea once praised Chad Smith’s drumming by saying he kept them from “floating off into the sissy-boy ether,” which explains their subliminal tilt toward jock rock. Nevertheless, a special mysterious something permeates the album. They were directly influenced by the darkened moods of Jane’s Addiction, their closest peer in the alternative scene (which is part of why Navarro joined the band), who drove them to pull something unexplained from the fringes of their creativity. It’s in the glitchy, lapping solo that plays in “Give It Away,” the ghostly flute touches on “Breaking the Girl,” the pyrotechnic outro to “Sir Psycho Sexy.” It’s in the album’s mythology: “They’re Red Hot,” a cover of the apocryphally Satan-indebted Robert Johnson, was recorded outdoors on top of a hill, as though the band were communing with the dead. A cosmic weariness brought on by Kiedis’ drug addiction, and the band’s realization of mortality in the wake of Slovak’s death, surrounds the songs. It’s seen through the lens of antic cock rock, but it’s there.
All of it set the stage for the whole mystical California thing that would define their later years, and allow them to grow into a legacy rock band. It unlocked their ability to write any type of song within the Chili Peppers framework, and enabled them to write their biggest album, Californication, upon Frusciante’s reunion with the band due to a brief, exhausting separation. Frusciante would eventually leave again, and the band would struggle to reach the same creative heights, but it didn’t matter. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Super Bowl halftime performance, the bass solo at Kobe’s last game—they slowly became iconic, known by their mononyms and their socks and the pleasure of trying to imitate Kiedis’ inimitable flow off the top of your head. Not bad for some Cali yucks.
