See No Evil, Listen to No Evil

The last post about Jane’s Addiction makes me think about my revisionist musical history in general. There are a good amount of bands or albums that I once loved, subsequently abandoned in shame, only to later to buck up and get back into those songs later down the road.

Of course, everyone wants to have a story like “I was in 5th grade when I hitched a ride to Manhattan and saw the Voidoids and Television at CBGB; I was changed forever!” to make themselves seem cool. And some people do have those kinds of stories. But most of us live boring lives, especially when we’re 12 or 13, and our introduction to cooler music isn’t nearly as pristine or heroic as we’d like it to be.

So I mentioned before that I first started to get into some respectable bands when I was 13. Before that, I had two musical “revelations.” In 5th grade, I decided that I was no longer interested in the tastes of my older sisters (rap and metal, respectively), and that I should seek a sound of my own. I was watching TV and came across one of those “Sounds of the 80’s” commercials (where all the song titles scroll up against a romantic fireplace), and decided that 80’s music would be my thing. But then later my sister suggested I check out a new radio station that played “weird” music. This was Y100, a new station that specialized in alternative rock. Comparatively, this was cooler stuff, but I was still very young, and couldn’t differentiate Nirvana from Collective Soul at this point. Then, in middle school was when my bro and I befriended some hip outsider kids, and we started to soak up music that wasn’t in heavy rotation. Here the seeds of my awakening were sown.

But it wasn’t that easy. It’s true that, in my freshman year of high school, my favorite band was Jane’s Addiction, and around this time I was first getting into punk bands like the Cramps and the Germs, as well as Sonic Youth and Siouxsie & the Banshees. But I was still listening to the radio. I still loved Metallica, especially the Black album. My two favorite new bands were Everclear and The Presidents of the United States of America. Even my transition to punk had a lot of skater pop-punk peppered in there. My first two shows I ever went to (other than Christian music) were the Queers and the Pansy Division, both on the pop-punk haven Lookout! Records. I really loved NOFX, as well as the Dead Milkmen. Plus, my hormones made me particularly susceptible to the angst of Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson was another charismatic figure who sucked me into his cult of personality, at least for his first album. I remember making one of my first mix tapes for myself, and it was a mess of styles! Jane’s Addiction, the Bloodhound Gang, Jim Carroll Band, the Roots, the Queers, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie (Hunky Dory), Type O Negative, the Cramps, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Violent Femmes, Bone Thugz n Harmony, and more. Yikes!

By Sophomore year, my tastes were further refined. My punk was getting purer, with the old ska-core and pop-punk bands ignored in favor of 2-tone ska, classic punk like X-Ray Spex, hardcore and riot grrl. I realized that Marilyn Manson was supremely uncool once he was all over the radio, and vehemently spoke out against him (though I secretly harbored a respect for him until at least one more year). As a replacement, I was being turned on to the more respectable goth and industrial bands like the Cure and Skinny Puppy. Nirvana and Metallica were definitely off limits, also supremely uncool. I eventually renounced hip hop a second time (the first being when I decided to get into 80’s pop), further chiseling down my preferences to suit some mad concept of sonic purity.

By 11th grade, it could probably be said that I was “cool.” I was hanging out with the slacker kids, doing drugs, and philosophizing on the merits or faults of various underground bands and styles. I guess I was happy, but looking back, that old self sure seems insecure and stuck up. It was all quite a rapid change of lifestyle though; from 1994-1997, I had gone through a dramatic transformation of environment, physique, hormones, cognition, culture, religion, morality, and identity. Perhaps this quest for musical purity was in some way a move toward a stability of sorts, a way to synthesize everything that I had absorbed into something coherent. But it was also because I wanted to seem cool.

Eventually, the importance of adhering to the underground began to wear off. Even as early as 12th grade, I began to take an interest in classic rock bands I had very recently dismissed as soulless dinosaur music. But still my progress was slow. A few years later, I realized that the Weezer album I had at age 13 was actually really damn good. I eventually made amends with Jane’s Addiction, and with hip hop music in general.

Not too long ago, I came across an old Dead Milkmen album I used to have, and I think it’s fucking brilliant. They may not have been authentic punks in their day, but they had a self-deprecating sense of humor that makes them a hell of a lot more appealing than the snide punk derision of Angry Samoans. I’ll listen to the Bosstones once in a while, though mostly for nostalgia. I can listen to early Metallica now without a flinch of embarrassment, and I’m actually really into Nirvana. I’ve grown to like some Nine Inch Nails (Downwward Spiral), but generally still find it and Marilyn Manson a bit hard to bear after puberty. Some other stuff I’ve revisited, and wish to hide away forever: Type O Negative and The Fucking Presidents! So embarrassingly bad...

The 90’s in general are a period that I’ve been revisiting for some time now. Part of the fun/challenge is immersing myself in sounds that I’ve been trained to be ashamed of, and seeing how those feelings hold up. I’m in the process of reevaluating early 90’s R&B, like Boyz II Men and En Vogue, and there’s some damn fine pop music here that is often reflexively scoffed at by folks trying to protect their credibility.

Which, of course, I understand. I may be getting better at not caring about seeming cool, but I’m not completely there. Which is why I’m not going to discuss my short-lived infatuation with trance and techno music… That shit Never happened, ya hear me??

Wrestling With Addiction

I’ve lately been revisiting the albums of Jane’s Addiction, a band with whom I’ve had a tumultuous, tempestuous relationship.

They have the honor of being one of the first bands to get me into music outside of a radio DJ’s playlist. It was 1994: My brother and I were recent transfers from a culturally cloistered private Christian school, now attending a public school filled with kids who were shipped in from the tougher parts of town. Needless to say, we didn’t fit in. Our perfect bubble of social harmony had since burst, and people everywhere were looking at these two shy, preppy kids like the new meat in prison. It was our first taste of being outsiders, so it was appropriate that the three or so kids we eventually came to befriend happened to be into music and movies that actually celebrated outsider culture.

I knew that my one friend really liked Jane’s Addiction, but I myself had never heard them. One day, I noticed that my older sister had a copy of Ritual de lo Habitual, and so I got her to play some tracks for me. Coming from someone who, not long before, considered the 10,000 Maniacs’ cover of Because the Night to be “weird,” heavy qualification is necessary, but I was totally blown away when I heard “Been Caught Stealing.” It was just so…different…from everything I’d heard before. A bit later, I got my own copies of the albums, and a love affair had begun.

Jane’s was the first band that I really obsessed over. I was slowly getting into more authentically underground bands at this time, such as the Cramps and Siouxsie & the Banshees, but Jane’s Addiction had most of my attention for at least a year. In truth, I had fallen victim to the cult of personality of Perry Farrell, whom I regarded as equal parts audacious and profound. His lyrics opened me up to ideas of hedonism and bohemian decadence, and his quasi-philosophical navel-gazing was revelatory for an adolescent whose analytical faculties were just reaching their peak. The remaining chips of my childhood shell—unquestioning conformity, a morality shaped by belief in a Christian God—were beginning to fall away, and Jane’s Addiction had a significant part in this process.

But as I immersed myself deeper and deeper into the sights, sounds, and philosophy of outsider culture, I began to regard my once beloved band as not being radical enough. Their albums sounded too flashy and overproduced to someone now absorbing the Germs and John Waters. And Perry’s pontifications had helped to stir my own ruminations about the world, but at some point his lyrics began to seem vapid and narcissistic rather than profound. I eventually abandoned JA in favor of bands that were rawer, more direct, more extreme, and more underground than this prog-rock revival act from the LA Strip.

Time thankfully has softened my scenester elitism, though it wouldn’t be at least until 2000 or so that I would give my old favorite band another listen. And even then, I would only listen to their first LP, a live album, free from (most of) the production trickery that, in my eyes, marred their reputation as an underground band. Then I brought back Ritual, since it is relatively cleanly produced compared to Nothing’s Shocking--and then finally I just gave in and went back to all of their stuff.

I had been blinded by my expectations of the group for so long, but at long last, I saw them for what they were, and embraced them. Yes, Perry is indeed a hopeless narcissist, a spoiled trust fund wannabe posing as a bohemian street rat. Yes, Jane’s arrangements and solos can be ostentatious, and yes, their production really takes away the effect of a band playing live. But that’s okay.

All those years, I had been shocked and ashamed to realize that, despite their reputation as a punk fusion act, or an alternative legend, Jane’s Addiction had so many trappings of a metal band. Not punk at all!

But who the hell cares? They do have the grandiosity (and the egos) of progressive rock and metal musicians, but thankfully they temper that with beautiful, hypnotic melodies. And the production sure doesn’t fit a neo-punk band, but I’ve since stopped caring about what is punk or not, and instead appreciate the hazy, syrupy quality that the studio effects bring to their sound, adding to their feel of sensual mysticism. I still can’t really take most of Perry’s lyrics seriously anymore, but he does have some gems, usually when he sticks to being vague and poetic, as on Ocean Size and Three Days. The lyrics on No One’s Leaving still make me cringe, but, hell, I can still enjoy the music.

I never gave their reunion album “Strays” much of a chance, but given this quote from Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble about the album’s producer:

‘Bob Ezrin didn't really understand Jane's Addiction musically. I remember arguing with him, "Like man, have you listened to Ritual?" He goes, "Frankly, I can't get through it. I think it sounds horrible. I'm going to make this a real rock band instead of an art rock band." Well, he succeeded. He took all the magic out of it. He made a rock record.’

I think my evaluation of the songs as neutered, contemporary rock dilutions of the Jane’s sound is probably accurate. I hear that the band has reunited once again, this time with original bassist Eric Avery, and that they’re working on a new album. Here’s hoping they make something worthy of their legacy. Over the years, I have come to appreciate just what they brought to the music world, and it would be great if they could bring it back just one more time.