What are my criteria for a great album? I’m not sure I know, but I can tell you this—it helps if I want to put the thing, at least once in a while, on my turntable and actually listen to it. And by this standard the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “landmark” 1991 LP Blood Sugar Sex Magik is not my idea of a great album. Because the truth is I’d sooner listen to Kool & The Gang any day. Or Blood Sweat & Tears even. Sure I hate ‘em, but at least they make me giggle.
I realize I’m in the minority on this one. Everybody loves the lovable Red Hot Chili Peppers, who put the funky in alternative and wore socks on their dicks and in general made good time music for drunken frat boys and drunken would be frat girls and even briefly won me over with their eponymous 1984 debut, which brought the funk to the punk rock party with such songs as “Get Up and Jump.”
But the thrill soon wore off, at least for this guy, and by the time I found myself listening to the schlock heroin recovery ballad “Under the Bridge” 54 times per day on the radio I started rooting for the dope. I’m as sappy as the next guy—the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow” is one of my all-time faves, fer Christ’s sake—but “Under the Bridge” is to heroin recovery what “Tears in Heaven” is to child defenestration and it made me, and still makes me, want to puke. Does that make me a bad person? So be it, I’m a bad person.
And “Under the Bridge” is far from my only problem with Blood Sugar Sex Magik. When push comes to shove, I only like two songs on the LP: “Give It Away,” which is so ferocious that even Anthony Kiedis’ leaden vocals (he definitely slows the flow, except on the song’s tag line) can’t keep it down, and “Breaking the Girl,” which is a bona fide lovely song that I never would have believed the Red Hot Chili Peppers had in them. It taps into the same vein of emotionality as “Under the Bridge,” but Brendan O’Brien’s turn on the mellotron adds a poignant feel to the song that sucks me in every time. Hell, even Kiedis can’t sidetrack the damn song.
What mostly kills the Red Hot Chili Peppers—and Blood Sugar Sex Magik in particular—for me is that Anthony Kiedis is a shitty singer. One must not say so. And yet there it is. The man’s phrasing is stilted and wooden, especially when he attempts to get serious. He’s okay when he’s spieling at a fast clip, but at every other speed his voice grates. As for John Frusciante he’s justly lauded as an excellent guitarist, and Flea’s bass speaks for itself. But I can’t listen to Kiedis’ spoken sections in, say, “If You Have to Ask,” without wanting to remove LP from turntable, pronto. And the minute he slows the flow on “The Power of Inequality,” ditto.
I can’t listen to the lumbering and not all that funky “Funky Monks” without wondering what Funkadelic—or the Beastie Boys for that matter—would have done with such a title, and I find the title track equally ham-fisted. And Kiedis’ vocals on the clumsy and never-ending “Sir Psycho Sexy” are ill-making rather than illin’—if I want to hear a white boy rap, I’ll take any of the three Beastie Boys any day. And on it goes—take away Frusciante’s spastic-elastic guitar playing from “The Righteous & the Wicked” and what you have is so much unedifying bluster and sludge, while Kiedis’ sincere turn on the acoustic “I Could Have Lied” is too sappy for words. I’ll say it again—the boy can’t sing, and by that I mean convey an honest emotion without making me, at least, want to gag.
I could go on and on—Kiedis’ vocals render “Naked in the Rain” virtually unlistenable, while “Suck My Kiss” sounds too much like too many other songs on the LP, etc. But what I’m wondering is this—is Blood Sugar Sex Magik supposed to be a party album? If it is, I can tell you one party I won’t be attending. I don’t find it “fun” and it doesn’t make me want to dance, and for the life of me I don’t understand why people consider this ersatz funk foray one of alternative rock’s classics. Call me cantankerous if you want. But I just listened to Blood Sugar Sex Magik about four times in a row, and I’m feeling mean. And if you don’t like it you can suck my kiss.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
