Jane's Addiction
Ritual De Lo Habitual
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NATN Recommended
Jane's Addiction
Ritual De Lo Habitual
Warner Bros., 1990
RiYL: The Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana |
And so we have Jane's Addiction -- picking through trash and shooting up heroin, while taking on rites of personal freedom and making literal art of living. There are plenty of bands doing drugs and talking about it, but there' s very few who convincingly ascribe a spiritual value to their indulgence. In this way Jane's Addiction is ultimately elegant, like a houseguest who dances on your tables, overflows the toilet, has read all of your best books and would probably do a good job playing with your young nephew.
Jane's Addiction ripped up the L.A. music scene towards the tail end of the Guns N' Roses era -- the late '80s and into the early '90s. Drummer Stephen Perkins, guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Eric Avery were each six or eight years younger than Perry Farrell, the band's lead singer. Together they mixed hard rock, funk, drugs, religion, hippy style, surfing and Hispanic influences into a delicious stew that resembled L.A. in its diversity and seeming incongruity. Farrell, as the songwriter and outspoken frontman, set an artistic tone for the band with his controversial cover art and off-beat charisma.
Some background, for the uninitiated. The band's self-titled first album consisted of a few live songs and a few covers (including the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones), and was released on Triple X in 1987. The album cover was a painting of Farrell tied up and cut up in sweet repose. There was so much rage and grace combined in that first album, and Jane's would establish its skill at playing both fast and hard. This release made Jane's a hot prospect, sought after by the major record labels. Eventually, the band signed with Warner Brothers and released Nothing's Shocking, in 1988. Like the first album, the cover art was conceived by Farrell: a pair of life-sized naked ladies joined at the hip and shoulder, seated in a rocking loveseat, each with their head on fire.
And again, like the first album, Jane's laid down both hard and soft tracks, "Mountain Song" is severely hard rock, while "Summertime Rolls" is about the most delicious paean to the summer season heard since Porgy & Bess. The songs are longer and more expansive: "Ted, Just Admit It..." is a seven-minute meditation on violence in the media, and "Summertime Rolls" rolls in at six minutes. With these longer songs in the middle of the album, and a few new songs penned by the band, reccuring themes emerged: loss, love, drug use, exuberance and frustration with ignorant society.
Jane's first two albums were preparation for what was to come -- extremely passionate pieces. When you compare the first two albums to the third, Ritual De Lo Habitual stands as a more mature release. The songs just melt together better, forming an experiential whole. Along the way, Jane's works through fierce, frenetic rhythms of ritual, tribal music, soaring electric guitar, chanting and much cultural defiance.
The band hoists up a proudly freakish lifestyle as the best kind of everyday experience. The cover is a photograph of a life-sized sculpture by Farrell of autobiographical art: three paper mach or debate, you feel and you move.
Press play, or drop the needle -- a sultry woman greets you. In Spanish, she tells you that "We have more influence over your children than you do, but we love them." And she introduces the band. "Stop" propels you into the album. There isn't any time for messing around, STOP and pay attention to what's going on here: the world's going to end, stop complaining, get away from machines and liars!
"No One's Leaving" is as funky as the first song, just a little less fast. It's an argument for human racial equality based on greeting and common humanity. Farrell's storytelling "sister and her boyfriend slept in a park, had to leave home because he was dark" makes it resonant. It's got a point to make, but it's so damn exuberant that it never feels pedagogical.
"Ain't No Right" starts with rolling, randy beats, it's Jane's Addiction at their most visceral. To sing along with this screed for self-reliance is to spew spit and have your throat sore from overuse: "Ain't no wrong now / Ain't no right / There's only pleasure and pain." The band establishes its own personal anarchy here in no uncertain terms, and boy does independence party.
"Obvious" slows things down a bit, and injects some audible piano. It's a diatribe against snooping moralists, and it's a welcome change of pace after three songs of pure exhilaration. "Been Caught Stealing" picks things back up, felonies never seemed so fun. With dog barking and jaunting, rolling rhythms, "Been Caught Stealing" is about the best time you can have with a stereo -- Farrell singing "it's mine" so defiantly, and the sort of "nyeh-nyeh" chorus -- it's hard not to sing along to this, even if you're not down with shoplifting.
But "Three Days" is the emotional center of the album. Beginning with words of modern ritual: "At this moment, you should be with us / Feeling like we do, like you loved to, but never will again / We miss you my dear Xiola... / I prepared the room tonight, with Christmas Lights. / A city of candles ..." The song builds up the other instruments over this -- as the words fade down, a questing bassline comes up, and then a soft, lilting guitar riff. It is the start of a ten-minute song -- an epic, by rock standards.
Musically and lyrically, "Three Days" ventures into primal territory. For the first movement, the story starts in a bedroom, introducing a "proud man" in the midst of three days of three-way lovemaking. A hopping tribal rhythm starts up, initiating a still graceful but more energetic pace. We are now discussing broader social dynamics -- the dynamics of a tribe. The celebratory spirit of this movement is marked with the cry "all now with wings!" and we enter the bridge, where the bass, guitar and drums begin a slow crescendo, soaring higher until finally the drums begin a metallic slamming that urges you into the third, and most intense movement.
One guitar note repeats over the drums, and we are up with the band in the realm of heaven, all with wings, all charged erotic energy. There's a lull, of whispering and cooing, and then we are back into the fierce energy swirl at the center of Ritual De Lo Habitual -- a massive crescendo of lovemaking, drugs, religion, tribe, ecstacy, vulnerability and transcendance. "Three Days" is the height of the band's sharing of spiritual indulgence.
"Then She Did" is another lengthy number, but only eight minutes this time. A slower song, the lyrics take up both the drug overdose of Perry's lover Xiola and the suicide of his mother. The track has an expansive sound, and a pained core.
Defying all accepted record industry wisdom, the band stacks the three longest songs of their career back-to-back-to-back, rounding out the set of enormous numbers with "Of Course." With electric violin and acoustic fiddle, chanting and clapping, this song comes as a sort of sobering wind-down from the frenzy and dense emotion of the previous two songs. "Of Course" argues for the kind of fatalism that lies at the logical heart of the band's politics: "One must eat the other who runs free before him" -- all this seizing of pleasure makes for a definite food chain.
"Classic Girl" languidly celebrates the beautiful, thoughtful women that inspire the band. We've been through politics of property, equality, self determination, we've revelled in lovemaking and death, and now Farrell sings, "For us, these are the days." Time to turn your radio off and make love to your woman! It's a male fantasy in that way, worshipping the woman -- the album is filled with a charged reverence and use of the female.
There's a dense sculpture of politics and passion here, Ritual De Lo Habitual showed that you can make something majestic that's also human. You can comandeer violins and Warner Brothers Records and the First Amendment to put on an Art Party to say Fuck Bullshit. Perhaps fittingly, big and beautiful was a tenuous position, very soon after Ritual, during Farrell's Lollapalooza touring concert festival series, Jane's Addiction publicly decomposed and its members went their separate ways.
JUSTIN HALL |