"For many young people around the country, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a gateway band — a popular group through the ’90s alt-rock boom from whom you could trace the paths back to different progenitors than those of their peers. (Plenty ’90s rock acts could point you to Hendrix, but RHCP could also point you to Parliament.) And as such, they were also the first impression of a lot of things for those young listeners, whether you were a teenager when 'Mother’s Milk' came out or whether you were of the next generation, RHCP one part of your introduction by way of their massively successful late ’90s singles.
If you were part of the latter group, 'Californication' might live on as their definitive work, rivaled only by their 1991 breakthrough 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik'. This, in some ways, was the album that seemed to capture everything this band was always supposed to be. It made them feel, at the time and aided by a clutch of singles destined to soon be ubiquitous in every small town shopping mall and on every small town alt-rock station, as the embodiment of a certain kind of late ’90s iconography. Extreme sports and artificial energy drinks and turn of the millennium graphic fonts attendant to both. The same sun-drenched place glimpsed in ’90s alt-rock videos, where everything seemed more saturated than it could possibly look in real life...
“Californication,” the song, despite being named with a very characteristically RHCP pun, was actually about the darker side of things. You see that name, and you’d immediately assume it was another piece of ribald funk with Anthony Kiedis offering up a semi-juvenile rap. Instead, it’s a fairly mournful, balladic composition. There are still some clunkier lines, naturally, but there are also some truly poignant ones. Rather than a celebration of their hometown and its mythology, “Californication” echoed the addiction, alienation, and self-destruction that had actually colored the individual lives of the Chili Peppers’ members...
'Californication', the album, is not exactly “dark.” But it is more consistently gentle and somber than they had ever been before. At this point, this band, and its individual members, had been through it. And you could hear that in the music. 'Californication' represented a previously hard-to-imagine prospect: an older, ever so slightly wiser Red Hot Chili Peppers...
It was a strange place to be... They had already undergone runaway popularity, the valleys that can follow; they had already undergone addiction and recovery and loss in multiple cycles. The only album they had released since their breakthrough had been written off as a failure. And so, going into the late ’90s, they had rebuilt what in hindsight can easily be called the definitive Chili Peppers lineup — Kiedis, Flea, Frusciante, and Chad Smith. And they were positioned for, in need of, a comeback moment. They got one.
Whether it was the travails of life or having Frusciante back, RHCP returned with an album that broke new ground for them artistically. Softer, more introspective, more tasteful. Kiedis, suddenly, could really, really sing when he wanted to. (There’re plenty of annoying honks across the album still, but there’s also singing.) It was a rebirth for the band creatively, personally, and narratively. 'Californication' became a huge success, surpassing the heights of its predecessors and unleashing a series of singles that became some of the band’s pivotal tracks.
Along with the aforementioned title track and “Scar Tissue,” 'Californication' also featured “Otherside” — a genuinely pretty and cathartic composition that ranks amongst the band’s very best. It’s hard not to hear the reintroduction of Frusciante as being crucial to songs like these. In his second run with RHCP, there was always something odd about seeing him onstage. He seemed sadder and weirder than the rest of the band, or at least than the music they made. And that in turn pushed RHCP in this era, Frusciante’s guitar work effortlessly shifting between clean and fluid, then percussively funky and precise, classicist then wildly creative. Say what you will about the resulting sounds they made collectively, but RHCP could always boast a small collection of musicians who played off each other perfectly. Frusciante was vey much a part of that, his guitars adding just the right textures to the rhythms of Flea and Smith, his background keens lacing Kiedis’ melodies with melancholy.
There were still remnants of the old Chili Peppers, especially in the sex funk of “Get On Top” and “I Like Dirt” and “Purple Stain.” “Around The World” felt like a next step from the funk-rock of their past, not a retread nor repudiation, almost summing up the band’s extremes: the tightly wound verses giving way to a soft-alt-rock chorus, Kiedis rapping then showing off those new hooks he could deliver. And then, still … scatting towards the end of the song.
All of which is to say that, the more mature iteration of RHCP some of us saw in this stretch of their career wasn’t ever 100% true, nor was the aging/soft version decried by those who missed the partying goofball pranksters of the past. If you still wanted RHCP to be fun and silly and puerile, there was a bit of that on 'Californication'. If you had been curious what would happen if earlier, mellower tracks like “Under The Bridge” and “Breaking The Girl” had not been outliers, you got your answer on 'Californication'. Across its 15 tracks, the album had a whole lot of room for all the moods and sounds this band wanted.
And oftentimes, those explorations, those sounds of a just-about-middle-aged Red Hot Chili Peppers, resulted in some of their best songs, including but also beyond those major singles. “Parallel Universe” remains one of their nimblest and most propulsive rock songs. Working off an inverted structure, “Savior” flipped between thunderous verses and dreamlike, wispy choruses (or chorus stand-ins).
Frusciante’s guitar work was once more notable in “This Velvet Glove,” crystalline pinpricks and acoustic strums functioning like steadily intensifying rainfall in the verse before whipping sheets of water around in the chorus. Fans gravitated towards closer “Road Trippin'” as a quiet and matter-of-fact tribute to friendship, especially the longterm kind the band possessed, the kind that weathered awful ups-and-downs.
It was fitting that 'Californication' concluded with a tribute to journeys taken together, to the endurance of close bonds amidst trials and defeats. After their respective battles through the middle of the ’90s, 'Californication' was the sound of four guys coming back together, still with some unspoken musical connection between them in their bloodstreams, and revitalizing each other. They crafted themselves a turning point.
From here, their magnitude was confirmed. Rather than continuing a potential decline set off by 'One Hot Minute', 'Californication' redirected the path upward, to sustained status as one of the world’s last gigantic rock bands, to Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductions, to a striking amount of albums sold.
But more important than material metrics, 'Californication' remains one of the prime arguments in a messy, surprisingly convoluted career if you are going to try and make your case for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As popular as this band has been and will remain, debates will never go away regarding their actual quality. There is certainly a lot of embarrassing output to their name, and they’re being one of those bands you can get into easily at 13 years old always seems to saddle them with a guilty pleasure status as you get older." - Stereogum
Compact Disc Pressing
Tracklist:
1. Around The World
2. Parallel Universe
3. Scar Tissue
4. Otherside
5. Get On Top
6. Californication
7. Easily
8. Porcelain
9. Emit Remmus
10. I Like Dirt
11. This Velvet Glove
12. Savior
13. Purple Stain
14. Right On Time
15. Road Trippin'
