It seems like, out of nowhere, everyone wants to have an opinion on Jane’s Addiction, these days. It also seems, unfortunately, that none of them amount to anything acknowledging of the band’s accomplishments — it’s all tearing meat from their bones, jumping on this occasion of feud and tour cancellation to try to throw a cinder block to them and sink them.
Jason Heller of the A/V Club tried this same thing, in 2011, when he gave an “F” rating to the band’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape Artist, claiming Dave Navarro “simply strums some sh**,” when the guitar solo of the first track, “Underground”; is an absolutely swirling mosaic of psychedelic texture and rapid-fire riffing.
I mean, I guess, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what people say. Fans of Jane’s Addiction are going to listen to The Great Escape Artist, and to their next album, if it ever comes out, regardless of these vindictive journalistic also-rans. And when I share “Ain’t No Right” on Ultimate ’90s Fan Page as DJ Simpson, it will get over 300 “likes,” in all its Dionysian, Nihilistic glory: “There ain’t to wrong now / Ain’t no right / Only pleasure and pain” [1].
Similarly, anyway, on a recent NME post, there was a litany of spiny dweebs calling for the band to break up, or implying that they were worthless, even “fake,” which should be asinine to anybody even cursorily familiar with the history of alternative rock. The band, as it were, has received accolades from Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and also contributed guitarist Dave Navarro to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for what’s probably the best album they ever did, One Hot Minute.
It is of course surprising that I have to defend this band to anyone and it is equally surprising to encounter resistance to my idea of a Perry Farrell book of poetry. Now, one detracting element to my argument, I must admit, would be just how underwhelming these things usually are. The best poetry collection by a rock star I’ve ever read is probably PJ Harvey’s The Hollow of the Hand, and even this one has a way of coming off disjointed, contrived, and, really, nothing like the music itself.
But come on, just look at Farrell’s discursive track record. He’s a city changeling, by trade, his most important song taking the topic of a homeless junkie woman, and right away on his first album was telling us “TV’s got them images / TV’s got them all / Nothing’s shocking / Show me everybody / Naked and disfigured / Nothing’s shocking”. And how about that second half of “Pigs in Zen”; where he claims to be “in the midst of a trauma”; then pleading you to “Leave a message and I’ll call you back / Leave it by the bed”; before launching into a semi-homicidal rant against spiritually dead people, or so I approximately understand it. “Just Because”; then, was an undeniably uplifting rant for all of us young adults in the early 2000s: “When was the last time / You did anything / Not for me / Or anyone else / Just because?” As far as The Great Escape Artist goes, on “Irresistible Force (Met the Immovable Object)”; “Everyone went tossing / Everyone was talking / Making up their faces / Wonder what we look like naked / Oh / The irresistible force / Met the immovable object / Bangin’ and bangin’ and bangin’”; this absurdist poetry set up, apparently, as a sort of metaphor for the creation, and sustenance, of this universe in which we currently live.
What would a Perry Farrell book of poetry look like? Well, I dunno… nobody knew what any of their albums would sound like and they all turned out pretty da**ed awesome, with rockers like “Wrong Girl”: “You messed with the wrong girl / She’s small but she’s fierce / She shattered the glass out / With the highs of her heel”. If I know Farrell, anyway, if he were to do this, the final product would be “un-poetic,” in a Bukowski sort of way: erring on the side of directness, readability and clear transmission of imagery. And if you’re not curious about what Farrell has been up to in inner-city LA in the last 35 years or so, then I sure hope your collection of plaid shirts keeps you warm at night.
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[1] Elsewhere, this album, 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual, acts as a veritable gold mine of disturbingly rich and dystopic urban poetry, all throughout “Three Days”; “Then She Did…” and “Of Course.”
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