This is a trend that goes back to Blood Sugar Sex Magick back in 1991 when they managed to pack 73 minutes and 52 seconds of music onto a single CD. The fact that they welcomed him back once more in 2019 only confirms that Frusciante’s artful style is the special spice that gives these Peppers their everlasting zing.Unlimited Love, the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, is long. They continued their chart-topping, festival-headlining reign well into the 21st century, even after Frusciante left the band again in 2009 to nurture his prolific solo career. But a cleaned-up Frusciante returned for 1999’s massively successful Californication, which twisted the band’s funk-rock template into a sobering, sophisticated collection of cautionary tales. Blood Sugar’s multi-platinum success drove Frusciante into a drug-fuelled period of seclusion, during which the band soldiered on with Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. But that album also revealed the melancholic nuances of Flea and Frusciante’s playing, providing Kiedis with an emotional outlet to reckon with his troubled past on the blockbuster ballad “Under the Bridge”. The arrival of muscular drummer Chad Smith and wunderkind guitarist John Frusciante helped thrust 1989’s hard-rockin’ Mothers Milk toward gold-record status and, as the alternative revolution raged, RHCP emerged as kings of the mosh pit with 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Majik. The band’s berserker bass-slappin’ energy, absurdist humour and strategic placement of tube socks made them college radio’s resident court jesters throughout the ‘80s, but Slovak’s death from a heroin overdose in 1988-and Irons’ subsequent depression-induced exit-forever altered the band’s DNA. That dichotomy was baked into their sound from the moment frontman Anthony Kiedis, bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary, guitarist Hillel Slovak, and drummer Jack Irons formed RHCP in 1983, fusing Black Flag’s furious punk and Parliament’s horny funk. “We represent the Hollywood kids/Hollywood is where we live,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers chanted on their 1987 manifesto “Organic Anti-Beat Box Band”, and decades later, these alt-rock icons still embody all that is sunny and seedy about L.A. But it’s also a mission statement: With Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Red Hot Chili Peppers made weightlifting music you can think with. “Lowbrow but I rock a little know-how,” Kiedis sings on “Give It Away”. Compared to Nirvana (whose Nevermind came out the same day), they were as Hollywood as Guns N’ Roses compared to Guns N’ Roses, they represented a vision of hard rock that paved the way for not just rap metal, but a universe of heavy, guitar-based music that felt mainstream in reach but still underground in nature. It’s that balance-between the crude and the contemplative, the direct and the obscure, the jock jam and the art song-that makes Blood Sugar Sex Magik not just one of the definitive albums of the 1990s, but one that helped push alternative rock into the mainstream. You can still hear their foundations in punk and rap (“The Power of Equality”), but you can also hear the romance of the Beat poets (“Breaking the Girl”) and the kind of Californian classic-rock ideals-free love, the expansion of consciousness, earnest poetry-that make the band feel as much like stewards of the ’60s as products of the ’80s (“Sir Psycho Sexy”). Nothing is as genuinely heavy as “Suck My Kiss” and “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”, or as political as “The Power of Equality”, which, according to Anthony Kiedis, prompted producer Rick Rubin to say he preferred songs about cars and girls (which Kiedis gave him in “The Greeting Song”). Nothing they’d done previously is as sensitive as “I Could Have Lied” or as beautiful as “Under the Bridge”. The joy of 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik is hearing a band break through and become something new.
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