The Friday Canon

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It wasn't Simply Red. Sorry.


You have SEVEN ticks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' surprisingly large range of UK Top 40 hits. Use them wisely.

[Poll #995309]

Normal canon service is resumed next week!

Comments

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

You have got to be kidding me.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

P.S. Tom - you have gmail at the LoP address. Help needed!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

21 hits :(

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be the only person voting here, aren't I?

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

I managed two, to my eternal shame.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I voted, but I didn't manage 7.

A criminal writes

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This WAS going to be the M4n1cs canon but then my meetings went ON and ON and I thought, right, I'm not going to have time for actual conversation, and why should anyone else be happy?

Re: A criminal writes

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

You forgot their latest single, which missed the top 40. It was called - this is the only reason I noticed it lurking ominously in the top 75 in recent weeks - it was called, ahem, BUMP DI HUMP.

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

I have trouble telling one Chilis song from another. Everything from 1999 to 2007 merges into one big musical shit.

Could it happen again?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Is there a band with a certain amount of cult appeal now who could go on to sell massive amounts for the next decade and a half a la RHCP?

Re: Could it happen again?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Oh my god Razorlight.

Okay now seriously

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Could people start forming sentences regarding the hate?

Re: Okay now seriously

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Can I fob you off with a wordless howl of anguish?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

(i've said this before elsewhere...)

about 2 years ago my sister suddenly said 'thanks for telling me about the red hot chilli peppers, i love them... etc'

she was CONVINCED that i had been raving to her about them. bonkers in the nut.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

Egad, you lied! This canon IS of a dread and dark nature.

All of my friends in high school loved "Scar Tissue", which I always hated. It's worth mentioning that some of RHCP's earlier work, like that guitar song wot Crazytown sampled, are much better than a lot of the stuff here. I managed to tick "Give It Away", and even that was a fairly borderline tick, but it's got a nice guitar and nice energy.

[koganbot]

At 8:40 AM Mountain Daylight Time, "Give It Away" has taken a commanding lead (of three ticks). Can "Under The Bridge" mount a comeback?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think if I had to summarise why I don't like them, I'd go for the word "strained" - the flightless funk, the overstretched imploring voice, the occasional stabs at meaning or poetry in the lyrics, the melodies that sit around in my head without ever giving me joy or surprise or energy.

None of these are 'facts' about RHCP but they're what I hear in the music and what repels me in it. And there's the ubiquity and the critical approval (which even then is slightly shrugging). There's a bit of the careerism of bands like Prml Scrm or the Manics too, professional rockers hard at work. Actually they really bring out the worst kind of music snobbery in me - I simply can't *believe* the people who like them do, or have heard other alternatives. :(

[zenith.livejournal.com]

It's also the fact that... even bands like Tool or A Perfect Circle and all that nonsense have some kind of genuine "kids who probably get picked on at school like them" thing going for them. RCHP are alterna-jocks. What is worse than an alterna-jock?

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

I picked the seven which I like best (which is not saying much, since I only really like 'Love Rollercoaster' and to a lesser extent 'Give It Away'. I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate them, certainly not to the same extebt that I hate Simply Red for example. But I'd never buy a record or pay to see them live, and if they come on the radiobox, I'd normally channel-hop to see if I could find something better.

'Love Rollercoaster' is quality though.

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

It must be Friday afternoon, my typing has completely gone to pot.

SRSLY though

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

mother's milk (their FOURTH alBUM and last one with no hits on) was actually quite good in parts, that one about Magic Johnson and their versh of Higher Ground...

Re: SRSLY though

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, disappointed not to see "Higher Ground" here even if I have grown to hate it based on it being the song my former bassist always warmed up with, annoyingly.

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

Blimey, it's back-loaded innit. No early hits, evidently. Lots of awful stuff not present in the poll due to missing the 40 mercifully.

I ticked one. "Otherside" - apart from the stupid ROCK bit in the middle - is an excellent song. "Can't Stop" was borderline, but no tick in the end. Had it been there, I might have considered ticking "Breaking The Girl".

Heard the All Saints cover of UTB in the supermarket, where I do most of my pop consumption these days, and I was astonished at how blank it was, and how blankness is such an improvement on whatever it is that RHCP do.

They're my housemate Sophie's favourite band. She listens to them every morning, so I just hear the basslines through the floor which often sound quite good. Shame about the rest of the song.

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

Haha I have had to listen to the Grebtest Hits in the office so many times that I honestly like some of their... er grebtest hits. There's some good bass playing on there! honest!

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

A parallel test case for me is the Beastie Boys--in the 90s they had a similar level and kind of fandom, I remember someone telling me they saw them at a festival and were overwhelmed by US military people moshing, which given how she knew the Beasties was super incongruous. (Similar thing for old RHCP fans I imagine.) But the Beasties, instead of rolling with it like RHCP did, went and embraced Buddhism and took themselves seriously and went "old-school" and got really, really boring. They redeemed themselves but simultaneously wrote themselves out of existence, almost.

So is this a better way of dealing with it, a worse way, or just a different way?

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the tragedy there is that the Beasties did it all in pretty good humour, until po-facedness happened, whereas RCHP always seemed to take themselves v v seriously even when they were attempting to do goofy things to convince us that they too were having a laugh.

Surprising your audience is surely a good way of dealing with a perceived image problem, even if it doesn't quite work out the way you'd like?

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

I have tried to like RHCP. They are very popular in church youth clubs for some reason - all the popular kids at my one liked 'Give it away', and later when I worked at a similar club, the youth club band would practise an interminable dreary cover of 'Otherside'. Their guitarist seems like an interesting chap, and 'Can't stop', erm, spoke to me at a confusing point in my life, and contained the phrase "Addicted to the shindig". HOWEVER, I tried to watch them at a festival once, realised that almost everything they have ever done is wanky nonsense, and caught the early train home.

Feel my pain

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

I had to read the bloody singer's autobiography for work. If there's one thing worse than a smackhead, it's a self-satisfied, somehow smug smackhead who takes himself way, way too seriously...

"the worst song that is loved by everyone"

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that "Under the Bridge" is a good candidate. I think it's pretty hard to argue that this isn't a classic song, and one that somehow speaks to a diverse group of people. I certainly loved it at the time and for a few years after. But somehow the sameness and the shtick that have followed have made them unbearable. A few of their later singles ('Scar Tissue' but also I think 'Road Trippin' and 'By the Way', maybe) have sounded kind of okay, but this guys really are one of the bands that will actively move me to turn off the music if they come on.

(Also, as Steve says above, there were kind of interesting around the time of Mother's Milk, although the fact that the best thing they did was a cover of a Stevie Wonder song pretty much sums up the band, IMO.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm with dickmalone here...some of these are just too embedded in my subconscious not to tick. I think I had the same problem in History of Jop. Everything post-"Californication" has been pretty negligible, so I've neglected. (I remember liking "Suck My Kiss" and loved "Soul to Squeeze," which IIRC was on the Coneheads OST. But haven't heard either in forever.)

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

ha! i remember looking around for "soul to squeeze" for weks on slsk back in the early days

HOC&OWS

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Where does this phrase originate? I'd never heard it before today, but then as well as being on here it was in one of my comics purchases,

Re: HOC&OWS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Which comic?

It was the phrase the cleaner at my boarding school used to yell when he did his rounds. His other one was "Wakey Wakey, hands off Snakey!"

Guilty.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was 15 and when 'By The Way' came out. It was BRILLIANT.

Actually no seriously I do like quite a lot of things off that album. 'Don't Forget Me,' aside from conjuring images of my worstfearevar (getting trapped in a garden shed with some crabs the size of labradors, which is a bit abstract but truly terrifying) with the line about toolsheds is really very beautiful. Or, well, it was when I was 15 and angsty and v. lonely.

I do not like to incriminate myself further (is it possible) but Anthony Kiedis looks HOTT in the 'Otherside' video.

As a slight redemption I do actually hate all other output by them aside from some select bits of 'Californication...' and 'Give It Away' is a bit like hot knives in ears isn't it?