Just as bands can be guilty of falling into a “style over substance” mindset administrative to their creative outputs, such can critics, as well, overemphasize a band’s “style” as a potential pitfall, and ignore emotional authenticity, poesy of lyrics, brilliance in song structuring, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned undeniable energy.
Now, granted, the Chili Peppers original shtick of white-boy-funkasauruses was likely pretty fun to make fun of. Pretending to be George Clinton, that is, doesn’t typically make you many friends in the hipster world.
Were their forays into “funk” completely regrettable, on the whole? I’d say close but not quite: a couple tracks on Blood Sugar Sex Magik like “If You Have to Ask”; “Funky Monks”; “Mellowship Slinky in B Major” and “The Righteous & the Wicked” help to solidify, finally, the band’s status as genuine groovers, with “Falling into Grace”; a number from their next album, which featured Dave Navarro (Jane’s Addiction) on guitar, only delivering them to excelsior heights in the funk world. This track is probably Rick Rubin’s best mix of his career and is sure to take the tension in any room and beat the pants off of it.
I think we all know, anyway, about “Under the Bridge”; “Aeroplane”; “My Friends”; “Otherside” [1]; “By the Way” and “Snow (Hey Oh)”; just to name a brief few of their tracks which both don’t rely on funk whatsoever for their musical vehicle and also seem preternaturally incapable of ever getting even remotely old or stale. These songs, I think, would lay to shreds any pipsqueak claim on the part of critics of the band being beholden to a “style over substance” blueprint.
Ahead of getting long-winded, here, and beating a dead horse, I’ll just focus in on the song structure of “On Mercury”; from 2002’s By the Way album, as strident proof of this band’s songwriting genius. As it were, this track happens to be a favorite of mine from a lyrical standpoint, which isn’t even a building block of my unfolding argument in this article, but did, as an aside, provide my current Facebook mantra: “Memories of everything like (sic) lemon trees on Mercury.” Getting back to the song’s structure, the tune consists of what Noel Gallagher calls a “prechorus.” Actually, interestingly enough, it seems to have two, or differently sized versions of the same phenomenon. Following the first verse of “On Mercury”; the band institute prechorus A: “Come again and tell me what you’re going through / Like a girl who only knew her child was due”. Then, the chorus ensues of “Memories of everything…” After the second verse, then, they alter the structure, granting the song an incredible freshness and zeal, pitting prechorus A against a newfound prechorus B: “To the moon she gave another good review / Turn around and look at me / It’s really really you”. Things only get zestier on the last verse, when they forego the verse entirely, heading straight to the bridge of “Sit up straight / I’m on a double date…” to then, in unprecedented fashion, skip both prechoruses and plunge straight into the chorus, which they repeat a second time, for the first time in the entire song.
One time, a long time ago, in Indy, my cousin and I were sitting in my car talking, before an Albert Hammond Jr. show. And I had on Sonic Youth’s album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. My cousin commented on the music to my reaction that I indeed hadn’t even been noticing it. I remarked that, That must be the sign of good music.
Almost similarly, for the longest time, I didn’t notice the structural intricacy of “On Mercury.” And part of the reason, sure, is that, once upon a time, it was a foregone conclusion that the popular bands, the ones whose songs make ubiquitous, familiar territory in all of our everyday lives, would be ingenious from this standpoint, and would invariable, continually wow us with their fresh approach to phase sequencing. Well, somewhere around last year, the whole thing rang out to me as more special, almost certainly, the result of being part of a dying breed: a classical approach to music (likely the handiwork of guitarist John Frusciante, no doubt) combined with a flawless understanding of rock and roll, and all its tenets of sadness and sacrifice.
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[1] I managed to sneak “Otherside” in on the jukebox a couple weeks ago amidst a litany of this gay dude’s weird music, and, as a result, had many people in the bar singing along and nodding heads, even the gay dude himself.
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