We come neither to bury nor to overpraise the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but merely to suggest a nap. On the evidence of their snoozy new album, The Getaway, a weariness lately pervades these uncouth purveyors of bro-funk shoogity-boogity, the footwear concealing their nether regions having mutated over the course of 30-plus years from sweat socks to tasteful dressy numbers to compression support hose. Yeah. Their first album (self-titled; unlistenable) came out in 1984. Same year as Purple Rain, friends. The raucous Mountain Dew enema Blood Sugar Sex Magik itself turns 25 this year; verily, that alt-rock-superstar breakthrough album’s “Sir Psycho Sexy,” the junior-high-homeroom urban legend that sounds like someone taught the Penthouse Forum to play slap bass, is now old enough to rent a car. Do not rent a car to “Sir Psycho Sexy.” Thank you.
Weariness has worked for them before; many feelings (and many guitarists) have. Nowadays, these fellas put out a new record every half decade or so, which is too short a layoff to qualify as a “hiatus,” but plenty long enough that you forget they exist for long, blissfully calm swathes of time. They’re not quite superstars anymore, but very few active rock bands have more hits, or better name/face/bare-torso recognition, or a more intriguingly volatile structure. Phallic rap-rock, which remains their core proposition, has fallen in and out of favor countless times, but your boys never quiiiiiite go all the way out of style.
This requires a certain restlessness, which explains why the RHCP saga has four distinct phases. First came their ’80s run as volatile SoCal street-rat hellions, white and flirty, the Pat Boone to Fishbone’s Little Richard; even the snootiest among you might still get down to 1985’s gnarly funk morass Freaky Styley, produced by George Clinton (!) and blessed by James Brown horn-section gods Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley (!!).
Over their first four albums, the boys covered, in ascending order of tolerability, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Dr. Seuss, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Meters, and, of course, Stevie Wonder. The universe eventually warmed to frontman Anthony Kiedis’s wibbity-wabbity vocal stylings, his oft-pornographic profundities ranging from, “My love is my dick in my hand,” to, “Riding down the path on the back of a giraffe / Me and the giraffe laughed ’cause I passed some gas.” Flea’s joyous, frenetic bass lines have no such learning curve, of course. Flea is great, and he pairs nicely with only-slightly-less-frenetic drummer Chad Smith, who joined up before 1989’s Mother’s Milk (sheesh) and stuck. Stability was never this band’s strong suit, but the center would hold.
Beach-prog savant John Frusciante, the band’s longest-suffering guitarist, was on board in time for Blood Sugar Sex Magik to go supernova in 1991; his solo up there on “I Could Have Lied” is a sneak-attack highlight on a record with 20 of ’em. (As a whole, it’s too long — all of this band’s albums are — but ah, so were the ’90s.) BSSM is also great. Don’t overthink it. It’s their best record by orders of magnitude and constitutes its own Towering Success phase. You can’t conceive of how dour, joyless, and self-loathing most of the other Alt-Rock Gods were, and how welcome these quick, gleeful bursts of anarchic oxygen could be. My wife recalls teenage sleepovers from this period where one girl would watch and rewind and rewatch the scene in the “Under the Bridge” video when Kiedis sprints, shirtless, in slow motion.
Drugs — the band’s greatest muse — knocked Frusciante out of the frame for 1995’s overmacho but weirdly compelling fame-hangover blip One Hot Minute. (This is likely sacrilege to the faithful, but it’s the only RHCP record in which the identity of the gentleman playing guitar truly matters, or at least is particularly noticeable: Dave Navarro just wilds out, the effect like an elite SWAT team of wah-wah pedals trying to break into your house.) It flopped (relatively), Navarro bailed, and Frusciante got it back together in time to establish phase three. The Savvy Veterans era encompasses 1999’s spirited insta-cliché Californication and 2002’s By the Way; the band’s radio presence still robust even as the songs got slightly softer, quieter, more thoughtful. They seemed to be reckoning with what their outsized appetites and barely concealed nether regions hath wrought: A Horndog Looks at 40. There was much horndoggery on which to reflect.
In fact, hold on a second.
All-Time Worst Red Hot Chili Peppers Song Titles, Ranked From Least-Worst to Worst-Worst (Redeeming Factors in Parentheses, if Applicable)
17. “Get on Top”
16. “Shallow Be Thy Game”
15. “Lovin’ and Touchin’” (35 seconds long)
14. “Sir Psycho Sexy” (sorry)
13. “Ethiopia”
12. “Suck My Kiss” (dope)
11. “No Chump Love Sucker”
10. “She’s Only 18”
9. “Grand Pappy Du Plenty” (instrumental)
8. “Funky Monks”
7. “Skinny Sweaty Man”
6. “Catholic School Girls Rule”
5. “Party on Your Pussy” (renamed “Special Secret Song Inside” by shook label mandate)
4. “Sex Rap”
3. “Stone Cold Bush”
2. “Sexy Mexican Maid” (those aren’t maracas)
1. “Hump de Bump”
“Hump de Bump,” the title, is the one memorable aspect of 2006’s utterly exhausting two-plus-hour monolith Stadium Arcadium, the rare double album to somehow suggest that its creators were out of ideas. Thus began our current Uneasy Legacy Act era. Frusciante bailed yet again thereafter, and the largely nondescript Josh Klinghoffer took over guitar on 2011’s nonetheless surprisingly animated I’m With You. (He is, however, the best part of the band’s stint last week on James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke,” chilling in the backseat in sunglasses, keeping his trap shut, very pleased that no one forcibly opens his door and pushes him out into traffic.) ”Brendan’s Death Song” is the band’s best tune in a decade, catchy and hypnotic and elegantly forceful.
But they might be out of ideas again. The Getaway — the first RHCP record since the ’80s without superproducer Rick Rubin at the helm — is a somnolent affair, the pianos given more weight than the guitars (Elton John even shows up), the tempos slower, the arrangements awash in white space that mostly turns gray. “Go Robot” is trying for early Prince robo-funk but doesn’t have a dirty enough mind, which, as previously mentioned, has not historically been this band’s problem. “This Ticonderoga” is a terse, surly Queens of the Stone Age-style elevator fight, and “Detroit” harkens back to the garage-borne freaky styleys of old, but Kiedis might drive you away before then. All this wide-open space and super-serious singer-songwriter import does him no favors: He can hack it fine when only half-audible and not at all discernible in the midst of this band’s historically effective kinetic chaos, but if you’re forced to focus on his moondog pitchiness and word-salad lyricism, you may eventually notice that most of what he’s singing does not translate into conversational English. To wit: “Do you want to go dancing in Chicago / Trinidad’s got it bad for Tobago / Take me to the lake where we do the Avocado / Hallelujah, a desperado.” God bless.
This all gets pretty dour. “Time just gets its way,” Kiedis mewls late in the game. “Strawberries left to decay.” They’re trying to make a very specific sort of album here, a World-Weary Lamentations of an Aging Warrior Poet sorta deal, where a bunch of famously rambunctious elder statesmen lay down their arms — or at least stop grabbing their crotches — long enough to try to sound reflective and sensitive and dignified and adult. But they already made this pivot once, and beat the odds then: What you usually get in this situation is plain-old boring soft rock, and that’s what they get this time. They aim to sound deep, but they just sound tired.
The other problem is somebody already made a surprisingly great Aging Warrior Poet record in 2016: Iggy Pop. If any part of The Getaway resonates with you at all, you are hereby advised to return to his recent Post Pop Depression, a gruff, sinewy gutter-rock moan buffed by QOTSA boss Josh Homme to a dim but hard-won shine. Iggy is making noise like this is it for him, album-wise, which is hard to believe, given his brusque vivacity here. The Getaway clearly aspires to be yet another shrewd RHCP pivot, unexpected and dynamic, a harbinger of surprising and delightful new phases still to come. But it doesn’t come off; it’s a bold new direction in the sense that walking toward your couch is a bold new direction. Don’t bet against these guys revitalizing or at least rebranding themselves, but don’t wait around for it, either. They’ve earned a good, long rest, and so have we.
