What if Jane’s Addiction ruled the world? Are you afraid that you’d turn gay? Did Dave Navarro turn you on, shirtless, in leather pants, noodling out some of the dopest guitar riffs you’ve ever heard?
Ok, just to backtrack: the primary source of my virulent rage toward Jane’s Addiction criticism is The A/V Club, which saw fit to give an “F” rating to the band’s last album, The Great Escape Artist (2011) [1]. Now, I realize it’s a matter of opinion, to an extent, and there’s no OBJECTIVE, right answer to whether TGEA is good or not. I happen to like the album, anyway, so I wield an especial bitterness against the article.
Either way, in general, there seems to be a pervasive disrespect factor infesting lots of Jane’s Addiction chatter I see online. Some British rag called Daily Mail pigeonholes them, in this one article, as an “Iconic 80s rock band,” as if their music only held efficacy in that decade, like, say, Debbie Gibson. To this day, I still hear “Jane Says”; a celestially great acoustic rock number off their first album, Nothing’s Shocking, on rock radio, as well as on satellite radio and even in TV shows. It’s the epitome of ubiquitous, in its lilting, majestic glory, as well as, commendably, capturing the band’s penchant for gritty, Dionysian street commentary, depicting as it does a homeless junkie and all the human aspects she oversees as she struggles with many of the everyday things which might come more easily to others of us. The video for “Been Caught Stealing”; the lead single for their 1990 album Ritual de lo Habitual, was one of the most popular spots on MTV, when it was released.
The primary point I want to make, anyway, is that EVERY alternative rock band was influenced by Jane’s Addiction, a point I make in response to Google’s laughably specious, finite list of “bands influenced by Jane’s Addiction,” which included neither Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage against the Machine or Soul Asylum. To leave these bands out of the genus of JA pupils is absolutely asinine — Krist Novoselic of Nirvana has, at very least, made public accolade of the band, and the grunge sound and straight-ahead riffing of founding tunes like “Had a Dad” seem like proud progenitors of grunge music as a whole, more or less, and at very least similar crunchers like Pearl Jam’s “Satan’s Bed” and Rage against the Machine’s “Guerilla Radio”; et. al. I mean, did grunge just fall out of the sky? No — it fell out of late night LA clubs and Nothing’s Shocking, the benchmark in concise, expedited radio rock, more focused and powerful than Talking Heads and more beautiful and musical than Metallica. I mean, if you take away JA, who is doing this grunge stuff — who is informing this entire movement? The U-Men? Mother Love Bone? Neither of those bands has a song one tenth as good as “Pigs in Zen”; let alone “Jane Says.” JA is a bigger RRHOF snub than Jethro Tull, by a landslide, and I’m a huge Jethro Tull fan. Stop penalizing Jane’s Addiction for writing great, catchy songs, and bisecting the angles of heavy metal and pop, before Nirvana did.
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[1] I’m not sure if this is important, but, interestingly, JA has released exactly one album in each of the last four decades — Nothing’s Shocking (1988); Ritual de lo Habitual (1990); Strays (2003) and The Great Escape Artist (2011) — and, per rumor, has recently graced the studio in the past year or so for some further recording efforts.
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