“When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.”

Anthony Kiedis

 

 

There’s a hilarious stand-up that the comedian Jack Finnegan did recently, in which he roasted the Red Hot Chili Peppers, particularly Anthony Kiedis’s songwriting.

Singing the lyrics to Can’t Stop, Finnegan joked that in any given Chili Peppers song, Anthony could go from writing the most beautiful choruses to having a “medical emergency” in the verses.

It’s a well-known meme that the Chili Peppers’ lyrics don’t seem to make a lot of sense. For one thing, there’s the perennial reference to their home state of California, alongside a montage of ambiguous imagery and nonsensical vocables.

For some people, this is what turns them off from being able to engage with the band’s music. But really, within the fanbase, it’s something that the fans love to poke fun at as well. We just accept that Anthony is a colorful character, and we celebrate Anthony for being Anthony.

Even as someone who has been a Chili Peppers fan for nearly his whole life, I couldn’t remember most of their lyrics. And well, even Anthony forgets them often when he performs the songs live — which is another thing we like to make fun of.

My point of writing this article, though, is to show you that there are more to the lyrics than they may seem.

Right from the get-go, you first need to understand Anthony’s songwriting style. He has never been a singer-songwriter in a conventional sense, as his style emerged from writing free-verse poetry and rapping in the band’s early days.

When it comes to Anthony’s nonsense-singing, like in the bridge of By the Way, and the “ding-dong-dengs” in the final chorus of Around the World, there is such a thing in music — though most predominantly in jazz — called “scat singing” or “scatting”. It’s when you sing ad-lib rhythms and melodies without using any real words. Because sometimes, feelings don’t have words.

When Anthony does use real words in his lyrics, they tend to be incredibly cryptic. But at least for me, it’s the not-knowing aspect of the lyrics that makes the listening experience so meaningful and endlessly exciting. Whatever backstories and little information I may have about the songs are really just a tiny lantern for me in navigating a vast lyrical treasure room.

At the end of the day, I may never know what many of Anthony’s lyrics truly mean, but at least I know how they make me feel, and that’s the most important thing to me.

With this article, I don’t intend to analyze the nitty gritty details of Anthony’s lyrics, but to instead shed some light on the ideas and inspirations behind them, or how they tend to be written. 

Drawing on backstories (mostly from Anthony’s memoir Scar Tissue) as well as my own interpretations, I’ve picked five of the Chili Peppers’ hallmark songs to comment on.

 

 

1. Soul to Squeeze

“Where I go, I just don’t know,

I might end up somewhere in Mexico.”

Generally, Anthony’s lyrics are often inspired by real events, people, and emotions. Though arguably, Anthony has quite a gift for shrouding these inspirations in riddles.

As with many of the Chili Peppers’ most prominent songs, Soul to Squeeze deals with the subject matter of sobriety and recovery. It’s likely that the song references Hillel Slovak, who was their long-time friend and founding guitarist, before they broke through in the mainstream music scene. 

Hillel was often the paternal figure in the group. With Anthony, Hillel would worry and give him tough love about not indulging in his vices. But tragically, Hillel himself would unravel in his own drug addiction, becoming more and more of a shell of the lively character he used to be. And unlike his friends, Hillel battled his demons privately and wasn’t open to the idea of getting help. He would eventually die of heroin overdose. 

Meanwhile, Anthony’s own addiction only got worse. As he wrote in his memoir Scar Tissue, “It’s a myth that something like that scares you into going straight. Even when your close friend dies, you maintain a false sense of invincibility. You don’t want to deal with your own wreckage, you just want to keep getting high.”

When it came time for Hillel’s funeral, Anthony couldn’t get himself to attend. Instead, he ran away to a small fishing village in Mexico, hoping to find peace, and to slowly be able to make sense of losing his good friend. “When I find my peace of mind,” he sings in Soul to Squeeze. “I’m gonna keep it for the end of time.”

 

 

2. Under the Bridge

“I don’t wanna feel like I did that day,

Take me to the place I love, take me all away.”

 

After Hillel died, his big shoes were filled by a young Chili Peppers fanatic named John Frusciante. With John being the youngest in the group at only 18 years old, Anthony looked after John like his own younger brother.

By the time they worked on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which was their second album with John, John had already eased into the band dynamic. And as a result, John and Anthony’s friendship grew apart. John started resenting Anthony’s overbearing authority, especially for his disapproval of John’s dabbling in drug use. 

On one particular day, Anthony’s loneliness and sense of loss for John triggered in him memories of his former partner, Ione Skye. He remembered how, instead of being present in his loving relationship, he was throwing his life away and shooting up drugs under a bridge. But driving on the streets of Los Angeles that day, he sensed a deep connection with the city, and he no longer felt so lonely.

“I felt I had thrown away so much in my life, but I also felt an unspoken bond between me and my city,” he wrote. “I’d spent so much time wandering the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me.”

As he drove, he thought up a free-verse poem in his head, and affixed the words to melodies. He sang the poem all the way home, and later wrote it in his notebook. Some time later, producer Rick Rubin discovered the poem and convinced Anthony to turn it into a Chili Peppers song. Together with the rest of the band, they worked on what would be titled Under the Bridge. 

 

 

3. Give it Away

“Greedy little people in a sea of distress,

Keep your more to receive your less.”

 

Give it Away was inspired by Anthony’s friendship with singer Nina Hagen. One day, Anthony went through Nina’s closet and found a nice jacket that he liked. And without hesitation, Nina gave the jacket away to Anthony. 

“I can’t take this,” he told Nina. “This is the nicest jacket you have in there.”

“That’s why I gave it to you,” Nina explained. “It’s always important to give things away; it creates good energy. If you have a closet full of clothes, and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place.”

Personally, I wasn’t that into the song until fairly recently, when I heard it in person at their show. Paying better attention to the lyrics, and seeing past the sexual innuendos, it finally sunk in that the song is about altruism, or being kind and unselfish towards other people. 

The lyrics pay homage to the song Misty Morning by Bob Marley and the Wailers, particularly to the line, “There is one mystery I just can’t express. To give your more, to receive your less.” And this speaks on the paradox of charity: the more you give away your possessions, the more likely you are to feel that you have enough in your life. 

Alongside Under the Bridge, the song Give it Away put the Chili Peppers on the world stage, with critics hailing the tracks as the new gold standards for funk rock. Unable to cope with the ensuing breakthrough success, though, John would leave the band. Like his hero Hillel, John would spiral into a vicious heroin addiction. But unlike Hillel, John would just narrowly make it out alive. 

 

 

4. Californication

“It’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication.”

 

After long years of extreme addiction, John finally made a last-ditch effort to commit himself to rehabilitation. Meanwhile, in John’s absence, the Chili Peppers floundered.

Unable to find a replacement that could match his musical grit and shared chemistry, the Chili Peppers decided that the only way to move forward was if they could get John back in the band. Now in a much healthier place after completing rehabilitation, John happily agreed to rejoin the band.

In their 1999 comeback album, Californication, the Chili Peppers sought to tell their story of survival. In the title track, Anthony writes about the underbelly of Hollywood, and how hollow a life in the limelight truly is.

Inspired by Anthony’s travels around the world, the song points out that many people fail to see this dark and undesirable side of Hollywood, due to how it is being glamorized in the media all over the world — a phenomenon that Anthony calls “Californication” — combining the name “California” and the word “fornication”.

In the lyrics, Anthony makes references to social issues that are prevalent due to the Californication phenomenon, such as plastic surgery to reverse aging, teenage pregnancy, and even the conspiracy theory suggesting that Neil Armstrong’s Moon landing never happened except in a Hollywood studio.

If you still dream of a perfect movie-like life in Hollywood, Anthony sarcastically addresses the listener, then “dream of Californication.”

 

 

5. Snow (Hey Oh)

“All my life to sacrifice.”

 

According to Anthony, Snow (Hey Oh), from the Chili Peppers’ 2006 album Stadium Arcadium, is about “surviving, starting fresh. I’ve made a mess of everything, but I have a blank slate — a canvas of snow — I get to start over.”

Every present moment that we live and breathe in is our opportunity to start anew — to not be weighed down by our past failures, and to be better than we used to be. But of course, this is much easier said than done.

It’s the cold truth of life that it is never without struggle. Sobriety and recovery are rarely linear. There will always be bumps in the road where we struggle hard not to fall into the familiar patterns of addiction and self-destruction. There will always be tests to our inner strength and character.

Adding to this struggle is another inconvenient truth of life, and that is, growth doesn’t always feel good. It’s not unusual for growth to be accompanied by grief.

We may admire the better person that we are today, but on some level, we may still miss who we were yesterday. We may still miss the false comfort of our vices that ruined us in the first place. We may still miss the unhealthy relationships we used to keep, back when our values were very different than they are now.

For me, this is partly what I think about when I listen to the song. I tend to think of the lyrics as if Anthony is looking back at his wild journey up to that point, and is wondering if the long and endless struggle for recovery has even been worth it. Teetering between falling back and moving forward, he sings in the chorus, “Privately divided by a world so undecided, and there’s nowhere to go.”

But ultimately, he rightly decides to move forward. “Running through the field where all my tracks will be concealed,” he continues in the chorus. “And there’s nowhere to go.”