Day 21 – Pleasure spiked with pain

Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers

www.redhotchilipeppers.com

Song: Californication

Album: Californication 

Interesting story of how I came to hear and eventually become a RHCP fan. Their first song I heard was ‘By The Way’ on much music, but that doesn’t count, because I didn’t even know what the band name was. This was sometime around 2004. I was just getting used to the enormous amounts of music that were available in a variety of sources. It was like music nirvana as I began expanding my horizons. Of course, I listened to rap, hip-hop and R&B, but I started to expand into rock, alternative, jazz, and every other genre under the sun.

It all came to a head in late 2006. I was living away from home for the third (or maybe fourth. It’s hard to keep track) time in my life. One day in residence, a group of us were hanging out in a friend’s room as he listened to his itunes collection and Californication somehow came up. We got to talking about our musical preferences. He introduced me the RHCP and I introduced him to Gorillaz. It was a fair trade. And that’s how it started, but it wasn’t until my first job that I started listening to as many of their songs as I could. We were allowed to bring our mp3 players to work and there was a network which allowed everyone to share their music. I shared my meagre tunes, and there must have been someone who was a big RHCP fan because their entire music library was shared. It made the long days at work go by much faster.

They’ve been around since 1983, and their style of music is mostly rock infused with some funk, punk and a bit of psychedelic rock thrown in the mixture. They’ve released nine albums with a tenth on the way. ‘Californication’ was the most commercially successful and ‘Blood Sex Sugar Magik’ being the one I most enjoy listening to. Lead singer Anthony Kiedis and Bass player Flea are the two best known members of the band and have been mainstays of the band in all its incarnations. The fifth member of the band is probably Heroin since it has played such a huge role in the band’s ups and downs. Their history has been a rollercoaster, but they’ve made great music all along the way and had a great amount of success. With such awesome songs as ‘Under the bridge’, ‘Scar Tissue’, ‘Stadium Arcadium’, ‘Can’t stop’ and ‘Aeroplane’, there’s something for everyone especially since their songs tend to blend genres. Anthony Kiedis’s vocal style is also unique in the rock genre with his use of spoken word and freeform rap with the lyrics being a way of the band working through their myriad struggles. Excellent band making excellent music.

Best lyrics:

Space may be the final frontier
But it's made in a Hollywood basement
Cobain can you hear the spheres
Singing songs off station to station
And Alderaan's not far away
It's Californication