mindfulness in old age
Anthony Kiedis (r.) mit den Red Hot Chili Peppers
Source: Warner Music
They’ve also been funnier with worse jokes and with socks on their tails. Now the Red Hot Chili Peppers are singing about black summers and the weak man. They owe their new album to two old friends.
Dhe heaven, sings the singer in the desert, refuses to cry. It’s just a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it’s their first new song in six years, and Anthony Kiedis strides through the video for “Black Summer” like an itinerant preacher.
What does he want to tell us with his anthem? That it never rains again? That the last forests are already burning in California? That summers on Earth are getting darker and darker? He sings that he hasn’t found any new friends for a long time.
But there are many older ones: In addition to the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, their producer Rick Rubin, to whom they owe their worldwide success, is back after eleven years. After 16 years, John Frusciante celebrates his return as the best guitarist in the band’s history. And that’s what their twelfth album sounds like. Like it was recorded around the turn of the century, between “Californication”, “By the Way” and “Stadium Arcadium”, during the golden era of their trademark sound of ballroom rock and funk, hip-hop and punk. “Black Summer” is the name of the first song, the most beautiful piece, the whole album.
However, some songs could also come from their earlier phase. “Poster Child” is a bass-driven gallop through pop culture and postmodernism, in which poetry is limited to keywords rhyming with famous artist names. “One Way Traffic” leads to an adolescent pun on traffic and sex. That’s how they were, the young Chili Peppers, when they gave funny concerts naked except for the red socks over their tails.
Then Rick Rubin appeared to them. A prophet as producer, a barefoot man with a long beard, who descended from his mountain to cast out their sins and forbid the synthesizers. Since then they have been meditating and making music for humanity – as long as Rick Rubin takes care of them and they don’t play as they want again, as they did on their last album six years ago without their master.
With Rick Rubin and John Frusciante the 17 new songs are very much the same as the old ones, for the most part: In “Bastards of Light” they shyly play a synthesizer from the eighties, “It’s Only Natural” sounds almost like free krautrock and therefore neither California nor after 2001. Otherwise: Flea’s bass, Chad Smith’s backbeat and Kiedis’ ballad voice for the messages.
In “The Great Apes” and “Not the One” he negotiates the flawed human being, in “These Are the Ways” the eternally American and in “Veronica” the ideal that all people should be as diverse as they are equal. In “The Heavy Wing” he calls out to the world to slow down. In “Black Summer” he sees China on the night side of the moon.
And the way the album started, it ends. The singer sings to the folk guitar: “I have to pray.” The music then simply blows away, somewhere in the sky above California.