For the critic, cover versions present a seductively easy option, letting you frame the conversation and review with discussion of the original. This is a tempting choice because it’s something very obvious to talk about. But it also puts excessive scrutiny on any changes or new readings the cover artist makes, leading you away from thinking about the track as a whole.
On this single All Saints slashed apart both songs, taking liberties that might leave lovers of their originals fizzing and furious. Indeed, I have empirical evidence of that: when we played the All Saints album in the bookshop I worked in, a browsing skater dude came over when “Under The Bridge” was playing and angrily demanded we turn it off or he’d complain to the manager. The stated reason was that the original deserved more “respect”.
But I’m not sure ‘respect’ comes into it much – it’s too loaded a word, too full of implied status. Cover versions and remixes can be crass, seemingly thoughtless, with no apparent ear for the song they’re using – it’s a hazard of pop, and I just criticised Jason Nevins quite harshly for it. But whether that approach offends or thrills mostly boils down to whether you like the song as it was – I might respect “It’s Like That”, but I don’t think Nevins had any duty to do the same. He took some decisions about it, and for me they didn’t pay off.
That’s not a bad summary of this double-header, either. I think both these cover versions are bold, but not quite successful. Before thinking about them as covers, though, it’s worth rejecting the easy route for once and just considering them as songs – forget, since a lot of their buyers surely never knew, that “Lady Marmalade” and “Under The Bridge” had any other life.
From that perspective, this single is all about a flip in moods – one side playful and horny, the other drifting and vulnerable. All Saints obviously like that sort of contrast – the party-ready “I Know Where It’s At” was followed by the shattered “Never Ever”; the assertive “Bootie Call” by the paranoid “War Of Nerves”. Even the language keeps repeating: “Never ever have I ever felt so low” / “I don’t ever wanna feel like I did that day” / “I don’t ever want to feel pain”. Parties and rejections, one-night stands and loneliness, sex and insecurity – All Saints’ world isn’t a judgemental one exactly, but it’s as carefully balanced as a soap opera, every high matched with its low.
“Lady Marmalade” and “Under The Bridge” take their place in this drama. “Marmalade” is plain-spoken in a way the Spice Girls have never yet quite let themselves be: an anthem for girls out on the pull, its busy, overlapping hooks evoking the bustle of the club, its cheeky raps showing the band’s mischievous side. “Under The Bridge”, on the other hand, finds a lonely, single urbanite wandering her city, getting her emotional bearings back after some unspecified, awful event. Nellee Hooper produces – his lonesome, muted keyboards on the verses making for one of the most discreetly atmospheric number ones of a largely maximalist era, until the song swells with determination on the chorus: the singer may not know where she’s going exactly, but it’s certainly not backwards.
Both titles are mysterious, too: “Under The Bridge” is probably a reference to ‘water under the bridge’, the will to move on from a bad situation. “Lady Marmalade” might hint at breakfast in bed – titling as winkingly saucy as the “kitty-kat”s and “bedroom fight”s of the raps…
…But here my conceit has to break down: the titles are only mysteries because the group chopped out their context in refitting the songs. “Under The Bridge” loses its final verse, about taking drugs. “Lady Marmalade”, about a New Orleans call girl, gets completely taken apart, with a full rewrite on the lyrics leaving only stray bits of chorus intact. But viewing them as All Saints songs, not covers, makes it obvious why the edits were made. Songs about sexually confident women on a night out, and loneliness and resolve in the city, don’t need sex work and heroin to beef them up – would, in the All Saints context, have been actively harmed by that, made too specific. Anthony Kiedis’ comments about the All Saints version of “Under The Bridge” – essentially that the band were clean-cut girls who couldn’t possibly have understood the song – seem even more churlish now: rather than being silly pop stars who couldn’t understand the story, All Saints most likely understood the story all too well and opted to use the song to tell a different one.
Unfortunately, imaginative and thoughtful cover versions don’t always net out at ‘good’. Kiedis’ sneers may have been misplaced, but the “under the bridge downtown…” section All Saints cut out really is the peak of the Chili Peppers’ song (and possibly career), the sudden intrusion of falsetto backing vocals a chilling moment. Without a climax, All Saints’ version is rudderless, the group struggling to make anything out of weak, wandering verses and falling back relieved onto the chorus. “Lady Marmalade”’s faults are easier to spot – cutting up the chorus means leaning on the “voulez-vous couchez avec moi?” hook to an exhausting degree, so by the end even the band sounds sick of it. Meanwhile the singers just don’t have the brassiness to compete with Labelle, and the solution – Shaznay’s rapping – is more awkward than seductive.
But while these aren’t great covers, the ideas behind them are sound. And the single helped cement the group’s identity – at least some of the point is to signal to record buyers (and the newly judgemental Radio 1) that All Saints were the kind of band who did Labelle and Chili Peppers covers. Tasteful, in other words; eclectic, older-aimed than the rest of post-Spice pop. More credible, for sure – it’s just on this showing, that means more frustrating and drab too.
Score: 5
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I actually loved the original ‘Under The Bridge’ for a few years (an American ‘Wonderwall’? But “better”? Altho by the time of ‘Wonderwall’ I’d lost interest in RHCP…until ‘Scar Tissue’ – oof) and, after watching Jacob’s Ladder for the first time not long before this release, became convinced that ‘Lady Marmalade’ was one of the best things ever…
We went to see Jackie Brown in the cinema and the big(ish)-budget video for both songs (where iirc LM is first before switching into UTB) was shown beforehand in what felt like a first (and seldom repeated?) experience.
It all just felt too karaoke though – 5 at best and a predictable, frustrating exercise in career sustenance. Fortunately they would do better.
There is something so insane about covering a song and leaving out the (yes, perfect and climactic) lyrics that explain the title. Drab is the word for it: I really don’t understand why UtB was a single.
Except maybe I do: personal reasons and a desire to go back to the sound-world of Never Ever. You wonder what Lewis’s ex thought about it. Has a journalist managed to catch up with him?
@1 Yes, the videos are a matched pairing: the night before followed by the morning after.
All Saints most likely understood the story all too well and opted to use the song to tell a different one
Nice try Tom but AS’s different story not only omits the heroin/addiction drama it also leaches away the sense of place, of LA that marked the original: the City of Angels is now the, er, ‘City of Cities’. LA’s a big driving town and also a big ‘nature’ town (the city’s big but nature is always right there and much bigger) and these things come through in the RHCP song. Translated to London or Anycity, they’re nonsense. When the aggressive guitar comes at the end and ‘all the way’ gets repeated, what’s the point? what *is* the different story?
And AS’s Lady Marmalade breaks the propulsiveness and perfectly arrangement of the original to no good end at all that I can hear. Indeed they apparently have so little to offer by way of new story or interpretation that the vid. risibly introduces an earthquake in the second verse to pep. things up and then runs with that for the rest of the time! Oy.
Amazingly, the vid for UTB follows on from LM’s, so we’re post-earthquake and….really, what is this ****? The strangeness of Nellie Hooper’s keyboards jumps out over the crazy visuals. Well done sir! But there’s little else redemptive here:
3
I can’t abide the RHCP – I don’t like the singer’s voice and they were always being pressed upon me by old rockists as a new band that was keeping the flame alive. The original song is dreary and the All Saints version preserves the mood and then drag it out for 5 minutes. I like Lady Marmalade, the original version so I’m more positively inclined towards the AS version. Nevertheless it lacks the dynamics of the original and the unchanging rhythm track again makes it seem over long.
The video is dominated by cleavage and midriffs. They’re gonna catch a chill if they stay in that room.
#4 I think “sense of place” is usually bullshit, unfortunately! Or at least, music is a pretty terrible medium for communicating it to people who don’t know the place (certainly compared to visual or verbal media). Having never been to LA, I don’t get any specific place-iness from the original “Under The Bridge”. If I had been to LA, doubtless I would. Whereas All Saints’ “anycity” reading* works perfectly well for me for London (because I know it, not because AS come from there) – the song makes me think about wandering around West London when nobody else is about, feeling part of the city but out of place too – the Nellee Hooper production is a big part of that though, the hushed piano giving a sense of 5AM quiet. Kind of proto-Burial! So the “other story” is one about city living, specifically – given the theme and tone of the rest of the band’s songs – being a young single woman in the city. Which for 1998 feels like a more interesting thing to be making records about than smack (or, indeed, LA).
*googling “the city of cities” gets you quite a lot of Sydney urban planning documents, my guess is that’s not where they’re singing about.
#5 I also loathe the RHCP, though not quite yet – at this point all I knew was “Give It Away” from student discos, the original UTB passed me by at the time. The Californication / By The Way / Stadium Arcadium years – when they were all over UK radio, TV, shops etc – are what really made me hate them. But I can tell why “Under The Bridge” is their most famous song.
> The Californication / By The Way / Stadium Arcadium years
Did ever a run of such dreadful records get such a critical free pass? That bloody zephyr song. Like musical Thatcher voters after about 2000 I never seemed to meet anyone who’d admit to liking them yet they were all over the place and the music press never had a bad word to say about them. I did like the original UtB, at the time I started to learn guitar and stand around in guitar shops not being able to afford anything that intro and first verse seemed to be something of a 90’s ‘Stairway’: sufficiently widdly to sound impressive but pretty easy to play. The parent album might be listenable if it was about half the length (75 minutes!)
The rewrite and consequent structure that All Saints put onto Lady Marmalade (two rap verses, only one sung verse) make a lot of sense to me, inasmuch as the rap is needed to provide contrast to the sung parts, which don’t exhibit much in the way of dynamism – especially by contrast with the other version of this that we’ll run into in due course (where the different performers trade off winningly – I will now placate the bunny with a carrot). Without switching it up a bit, All Saints’ Lady Marmalade would veer dangerously close to one note; as Tom points out, the hammering of the main hook is problematic by the end. The rap is also the only thing going for this version that refers a bit more to the sass and sex of the original – rather than awkward, I think it’s a creditable stab at updating the song but isn’t supported well by what surrounds it.
It seems that the general criticism of Under The Bridge (certainly what I have seen elsewhere) is less about the removal of the climax of the song and more about the supposed missing of the point – doubtless a lot of this is bound up in sexism and/or rockism. Take off the vocals from the All Saints’ version though and this plays out pretty well for me; a trip hop version of this song would probably be more successful for me than the original if this is any indication. Certainly something I could relate to more, I think. What it has in common with Lady Marmalade is that there doesn’t seem to be much dynamism here either, notwithstanding the group harmonies on the chorus. It just feels a bit listless – which may have been the intention given Tom’s interpretation of All Saints’ version being about city living, etc. A retained backing and one of them tackling the climax with a vulnerable vocal and this could have been rescued.
I wouldn’t choose to listen to either of these, personally, but interesting failures are better than boring successes, in my view, and I’d put these into the interesting failure camp.
I’ve got to say that ‘city of cities’ change always bothered me, because it was so awkward – it felt like a placeholder that was meant to be fixed when somebody thought of something better and they never did. Overall, the effect of this double A side was to make me think I’d rather be listening to original All Saints stuff rather than listening to the original versions of these tracks.
I’ll confess to a vague soft spot for the drifty Red Hot Chili Peppers of Californication (oh, that terrible title though) or Scar Tissue. I’ve always hated them in full funk rock mode – Give It Away would have me fleeing the room – but the mopey stuff seemed OK when it popped up on The Box.
My only real contact with RHCP is that a mate had a spare ticket to a gig they did at Hyde Park (I think it subsequently came out on CD) which I wound up taking on the basis that I had nothing else to do and it seemed like it might be a decent day out with some friends, even if I wound up not liking the band much.* The prevailing thing that I thought coming away from it was that Flea and John Frusciante were both really good – at one point, the two of them combined to play current FT Reader’s Poll #1 I Feel Love (no drums, no Kiedis – just Flea pounding out the bassline and Frusciante doing the vocals) and it was the highlight of the show. I thought they should probably have made a living playing something else. Best thing Flea has been involved in is still probably Back To The Future 2.
*James Brown was in support. I say James Brown – there was a guy up there who looked like James Brown who counted the songs off and said a couple of lines of each of the songs that were played. In reality, his backing singers were probably the ones who were the support act.
Apparently we’ve been having comments and login difficulty again – sorry about this if so, things should be smoother than earlier in the week but I don’t know if the underlying technical issues we’ve had have been resolved yet. CTRL-C your comment before you hit send, in any case!
#9 I think it’s awkward because Shaznay isn’t a particularly good rapper, more than anything – though we’ll be seeing a lot more of this “British pop star required to do the rap bit” type of flow on Popular and sometimes it works. But when I first re-heard “Lady Marmalade” I liked the rap bits better, so it might just not wear very well.
#8 They were absolutely hated in the interweb critical bubble I hung out in – my opinion on them is ultra-orthodox “00s pop internet” (and I see no reason to change it yet), but in general their positive press image is another case of the baleful influence of Q Magazine isn’t it? Nothing against their fans (and I’m sure the band are fine musicians) – I think every office I’ve worked in has had one or two RHCP fans – usually men, usually perfectly nice fellows who like classic rock and a smattering of other stuff (in my experience most RHCP fans also dig the Beastie Boys, for instance).
#12: Fair enough – you’ve probably listened to it more than I have getting prepped for writing it up. 2 or 3 listens only for me, I am afraid.
Less cover versions, more meditations or distracted, distant thoughts inspired by the songs, the sequence should really read the other way around, especially as their videos are linked; in the video for “Lady Marmalade” people are dancing in a tall, multistorey building so insistently and frantically that the floor eventually gives way and the building collapses; the video for “Under The Bridge” appears to have been filmed in the ruins of the same building, three years ahead of 9/11. Knowing that they would gain nothing and lose much by trying to emulate Patti LaBelle – as the celebrity tag team who later topped the chart with a relatively straightforward cover would prove – the Saints keep their “Marmalade” discreetly sassy; the “voulez-vous couchez” is succeeded by a concerned “Where d’you think you’re sleeping tonight?” The sensuality of this “Marmalade” is never quite confirmed or opened up; there’s the feeling of hidden guilt pervading the pores of the performance.
It works best as the prologue to “Under The Bridge,” which is something of a masterpiece of reclamation. Always a rather self-pitying and self-obsessed song when performed by its authors – that church choir is particularly grating in this respect – the Saints recast it as a waking dream, never sure whether the city truly reciprocates their love, slowly wilting under the harshly welcoming illuminations of neon, passing open, underpopulated chain restaurants and questionable club basements, hearing fragments of the RHCPs’ original being scratched and flipped before the aquatic vibraphone leads them back out into the impending storm, accompanied by suppressed downhill squeals of guitar drones (performed by the man who some years later, back in his hometown, would plaintively lament that there was “nobody real waiting for me”). Always after that Frusciante/Hawley chopped up intro comes the hesitation, the pause, the decision about whether to absorb or absolve; perhaps the Saints represent the lost girl to whom Terry Callier would later write a letter. One of Nellee Hooper’s most subtle productions (all the more subtle because it initially sounds so deceptively obvious), the Saints’ “Under The Bridge” pays yet further tribute to the systematically overwhelming influence that Massive Attack were now exercising on pop (and indeed in 1998, with their Mezzanine album, the latter would turn their influences back to front and come up with a record which would have been entirely in place on 4AD in 1982, the lead singer of “Teardrop” included); teetering on the tightrope between nirvana and hell, an urge to crawl out of the wreckage and rebuild or reshape it instead of dying there.
Tellingly, I have absolutely no memory of the Lady Marmelade cover although I remember the version of Under the Bridge.
As well as being fine musicians, at least some of them seem to have interesting musical tastes. Their Mojo freebie CD from 2004 introduced me to lots of great music (Harmonia, The Slits, Ohio Players…) as well as being one of the few free CDs which felt like a coherent collection of music and not just whatever tracks record companies felt like licensing for promotion purposes that month. But good taste doesn’t have to lead to good music obviously, and I’ve struggled to muster enthusiasm for much after Blood Sex Sugar Magic.
I’d been reading about the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Rolling Stone since the late 1980s, back when the most notable thing about them was their habit of wearing cock socks in photo shoots (see the cover of The Abbey Road EP), but hadn’t heard much of their music until Blood Sugar Sex Magik was everywhere. “Under the Bridge” never did anything for me back then, so All Saints’ version doesn’t strike me as being disrespectful, it strikes me as being dull. Richard Hawley’s guitar intro piques my interest, but that’s about it. Kiedis’s original vocals were like nails on a blackboard for me, and this cover has a similar effect, so it must have been the underlying melody all along. 3.
As for “Lady Marmalade”, it’s a great ’70s song, although Labelle’s pronunciation of “marma-laaaahd” sounds so jarring (even if it makes sense in creole) that I’m not bothered that All Saints drop it altogether. The titillant français bit is the hook everyone remembers anyway, and it’s enough to carry All Saints’ version. Turning a hooker’s pitch into party pick-up lines works tolerably well, but it loses the transgressive impact of the original, and keeps this from being more than a 5.
4 overall.
#12 They were certainly Q-approved but seemed to be one of the few bands that could get on the cover of NME, Q and Mojo at the same time. By then Bono & Stipe were only getting those NME covers where you have to turn up to an awards ceremony and wrestle a Gallagher.
The original picture sleeve of the Labelle track had “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?” on it – just to make sure everyone knew what to buy.
“Lady Marmalade” in this version I can more or less take or leave: the performance and arrangement seem flawed (and occasionally incoherent) compared with the original, although the joie de vivre that All Saints inject into it saves it. It did at least introduce the song to a new generation in a not entirely unpalatable form.
“Under the Bridge”, however, I prefer to the original. (And yes I too loathe the RHCP, and had done from when I first encountered them, during the “socks on cocks” period, 1989 or so): to my ears they got a bit better (more melodious, at least) in time, but not much, and the swagger was almost always intolerable. Yes the mood here is different, a lower degree of despair, without the drug-inflicted self-absorption. The beat and groove add something worth adding, and it is all rather seemingly effortlessly cool. 7 for this, 5 for LM, makes 6 overall.
“Sometimes I feel like doing some skag / so I go to the bridge and I find me a bag / I find me a needle, I find me a vein / I tighten my belt till I’m feeling the strain. Under the bridge downtown / is where I do some skag / under the bridge downtown / I shagged the dirty old hag…”
That is what my brother and I used to sing. I’ll have my Ivor Novello now please.
I didn’t mind this UTB or the original but to my teenage ears, a quieter, more subtle cover could never be a good thing (still not a bad rule of thumb though of course many notable exceptions – actually, it’s not ‘more subtle’ that’s the problem, it’s the assumption that quieter and slower = more nuanced and more intelligent that grates, not that I think that’s the game All Saints are playing, I’m digressing…)
I never quite understood the animosity towards RHCP. John Robb said they were a band that ‘got big without the critics’ permission’ but I’m not sure that’s the case, I don’t think most critics are trying to make their favourite bands big, more to alert the niche audience to the existence of things unlikely to have mass appeal.
Did RHCP suffer a Razorlight/Scissor Sisters backlash where they were a hip underground act that suddenly got massive and robbed the hipsters of their private property? Or are they just collosal dickheads like everyone says…
For what it’s worth, I’m far from a fan, but I find Anthony Keidis’ vocals a lot less grating than a lot of stadium rock singers: for a singer who does a lot of rock ballads, he doesn’t seem to descend into the ‘pinching out a difficult shit’ singing of a lot of his US peers, nor the ‘stomach ache’ vocal style of the British mope rock brigade. In general RHCP strike me as a rock band who can do pathos without descending into melodrama. Most of their funk stuff is boring as fuck though and I say that as a fan of funk!
Sorry, this thread was meant to be about All Saints, I’m aware that on several recent threads, I’ve contributed to the rockist sidetracking of threads about pop singles, which I feel is not particularly helpful in the scheme of things.
Tommy @22, there’s an eye-opening recap of RHCP’s reception over time from Rolling Stone on this page (part of a fantastic labour of love calling out the mag’s critical inconsistency over the years – essential reading for past readers like myself). Search the page for “arcadium” to skip down to it.
Ha, it’s Morning Glory and Be Here Now all over again, or rather, all under again, given the dates.
#23: That synopsis of RS’s views of RHCP seems to suggest that as Oasis were to Q, RHCP were to Rolling Stone.
ETA: Beaten to it by Tommy.
All Saints’ picking apart UtB was quite welcome to these ears. I had a soft spot for the original UtB, but not RHCP themselves. Their eat-all-you-can funk buffet became very boring very quickly and they came across as dicks in interviews. UtB seemed to be the only heartfelt song Keidis ever managed to record and I had a smidgin of respect for that. What All Saints did was strip away anything that could be attributed to Keidis’ own story and supplant it with theirs. It’s a heart transplant. Nellee Hooper provides all the requisite ’90s noises and the four girls keep it on the low, and ensure all the rough edges are smoothed, chamfered and polished. It bears little or no resemblance to the drug ballad that RHCP recorded. In retrospect, that’s a good thing. If Keidis was miffed about it, so much the better, but I bet he kept the royalty cheques. (7)
LM is a different propsition. The original thrives on excess: larger than life vocals, horns, lots and lots of percussion. Opulence everywhere. Fantastic stuff.
Strip back all that and AS are terribly exposed. It’s not all bad, but it’s barely memorable, with few flourishes to make it stand out. Work in a “will this do?” rap and tack it all together with a dose of AS attitude, and that’s all there is. We’ve not seen the last of LM, but I’d say the Labelle original is still the definitive version IMO. (4)
(6 overall)
Well, this was a general disappointment. Not sure what I was expecting though….
“Under The Bridge” was a surprise US#2 back in 1992 when RHCP were relatively unknown outside their modern rock base, at least compared to the superstars they would become. One interesting thing that got little noticed at the time was the fact it was a hit immediately following the LA riots that spring. Of course, the song was as much about Kiedis’s personal demons as the city itself, but still…interesting.
Anyway, I never heard the All Saints version until now, and I must say I was underwhelmed. I agree with previous posters that there’s nothing wrong with re-interpreting a classic song in one’s own way, but if you’re going to do that, you better be prepared to do something interesting with it (ex: Pet Shop Boys). Otherwise, then what’s the point? This seems to be…let’s rerecord the song to be about I dunno, London I guess, ignore the drug references, and well that’s about it…. Doesn’t do it for me.
I was relatively unfamiliar with “Lady Marmalade” in 1998, although the original was a US#1 in 1975. Seems like a relatively straight cover. I missed the lyrics change here – guess I was distracted by the ongoing earthquake in the video. I still prefer the bunnied version to come.
Overall, 3/10 for UTB, 5/10 for LM, 4/10 overall.
I remember feeling very let down by this single. Never Ever was sublime, but these two half-arsed utterly pointless covers…(rolls eyes) tsk!
WRT the “mysterious” title of Lady Marmalade: there’s a character referred to as “Madame Marmalade” in one of the anecdotes in Truman Capote’s “Answered Prayers” – perhaps there’s a New Orleans connection.
The problem with this one for me is that it’s two covers of songs I’ve never much cared for. ‘Lady Marmalade’ has suffered from overplaying to the point that my heart sinks whenever I hear ‘Hey sister,go sister etc’ and with respect to Patti LaBelle, is ‘marmalade’ really that difficult a word to pronounce correctly? – I mean if Paddington Bear can manage it…..
‘Under The Bridge’ is a dirge and I’ve long since lost patience with that druggier-than-thou dullard Anthony Kiedis. Neither of the covers won me over, in fact the whole thing suggested a paucity of new material.
Something I might as well confess about All Saints – Excepting Shaznay – for the obvious reason – I can never tell the other three apart from one another. It doesn’t help that two of them are sisters and they all have similar first names with all those N’s, L’s, I’s and E’s.
I’m sorry but I’m with the skater dude in Tom’s original piece. I considered All Saints’ version to be a point missing insult to the original. That said RHCP are an acquired taste and if you didn’t care for the original in the first place it’s less of a problem. But I hated this then, I’m still angry about it now and anything I say needs to be seen in that context.
In context the RHCP were slumping at the time following the disappointing One Hot Minute album; their commercial peak was to come although we’ll never get to discuss them. I was one of those who was impressed by Californication and overawed by the glorious sunkissed pop landscape of By The Way which soundtracked summer 2002. It’s worth noting that not even all of the band were happy with that record (Flea considered leaving) and they couldn’t sustain their commerical and critical peak. I played BTW to death in 2002 but can’t even remember the title of their most recent album, let alone any of the songs.
Going back to All Saints, this release fell at a point where Never Ever had mopped up the Brit Awards and the first signs of tension within the Spice camp were showing – their stock could not have been higher. With the hindsight this double A of covers shows that Never Ever was a fluke; they had nothing anywhere near as good to follow with. It will be interesting to see how the follow up (bunnied but forgotten) scores – we can assume this was the best original song they had.
This is one of the few records I’d happily give a minus score to. What’s even more depressing is that it is not, for me, the worst number one of 1998.
RHCP, perhaps, filled the same niche which Zep and Rush did for earlier generations: Proper Musicians making Proper Music, and not wannabes (sorry) making wimpy commercial pop songs strictly for the money. If you couldn’t prove that you listened devotedly to their entire output every week, you could safely expect your credibility to be called into serious question. Hence the skater dude’s reaction to the cover of UtB, reminiscent of some Zep fans’ Outrage! at the “Stairways to Heaven” project.
I’m not familiar with either of the originals, so I have only these versions to go on. Neither tries very hard to hold the listener’s interest: UtB has some atmosphere but doesn’t do much with it, and LM – every inch a B-side – is too one-note and lacking in meaningful variation to convince at all. After registering the best Number One for, ooh, at least five and a half years, this is a real pair of disappointments. FOUR.
I wouldn’t put rhcp in that Rush/Zep space at all. In fact as I remember it they were more in a kind of boyband-but-not-actually-a-boyband place.
By which I mean no connoisseur took them remotely seriously, yet they inspired devotion among their own faithful and made a lot of decent records along the way.
In that light their success is something of a poptimist triumph. But because they obviously are a rock act, their rightful acclaim has been slow in coming.
It’s an awkward space to fall into – Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance have all probably suffered the same thing since. Who before them? Queen? U2 even? They all deserve better.
Actually, didn’t Zep kind of kick the whole thing off, come to think of it? Aiui they were initially derided in the UK for being kids playing no-nonsense to kid audiences, when their prog contemporaries were donning capes and making music for heads. I guess time (and great records) rewrites the record book in the end.
Except connoisseurs – or at least the rock press – very much did take them seriously: that’s what a lot of the thread’s been about. They got into the rock n roll hall of fame at first attempt too. I agree that the hipster press – Pitchfork etc – detested them, but that was tiny during the period of their populist success.
Their arc is interesting, I agree – unappreciated as a cult band, praised as hit makers: U2 are close, Queen less so, and the newer bands you cite simply never got the critical recognition (or the mainstream crossover, you might say).
“Best thing Flea has been involved in is still probably Back To The Future 2.”
“BUST-A-MOVE” FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RHCP’ s recent arc is fascinating – from 6x Platinum for By The Way to 2x Platinum for Stadium Arcadium to a mere Gold for the Pointless answer I’m With You. Now Frusciante has left they are clearly a busted flush and will not trouble us here.
All Saints were last seen supporting Backstreet Boys and having their own headline/90s revival tour cancelled. It’s tough out there.
I think Izzy@33 has it basically right. I remember the reception of Blood Sugar Sex Magic (released the same week as Nevermind) and the Chilis’ initial tour of that album vividly: critics just mocked them. Then the Chilis blew up commercially, esp. with UTB, but also just as part of the broader Alternative Nation wave that caught everyone by surprise in 1992 and 1993, and the critics noticeably changed their tunes. Poking around I’ve been able to find a representative NY Times review of the Chilis live from November 1991 (so this is shortly after UTB’s come out as a single but still 5 months before the vid for it was released, chart action began in ernest, and UTB ends up becoming one of the hits of Summer 1992, possible song of the year). Feel the scorn:
Review/Pop; A Hyperactive Evening With the Chili Peppers
By JON PARELES
Published: November 14, 1991
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t get the screaming ovation they expected on Monday night at Roseland, the group’s bassist, Flea, called the audience “hoity-toity” before the band started its grudging encore. But the problem wasn’t the crowd, which gleefully slam-danced at every hint of a beat; it was the band, which played a fitful, poorly paced set.
Back in 1983, when the band emerged from Los Angeles, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were one of the first bands to put funk, hard rock and rap side by side. They became a major draw on the collegiate circuit as a post-punk version of a frat-party band; they play dance music, talk dirty and have gained a wild-man reputation by sometimes taking off their clothes. At Roseland they were bare-chested, but their pants or bicycle shorts stayed on.
Over pounding riffs, Anthony Kiedis chants or sings about individualism — “I do what I want to do,” he insisted in “Funky Crime” — and about rampant horniness. Now and then, perhaps because the Chili Peppers are white musicians borrowing a predominantly black style, a song denounces bigotry and praises equality. By hip-hop standards, the raps are slow and rhythmically monotonous. But they gain muscle because they are backed by a live band, and the Chili Peppers can shift easily from one-chord funk vamps to two-chord heavy-metal stomps.
Monday night’s show, the first of four at Roseland, seemed intent on dissipating any momentum it built up. Bouts of hyperactivity — Flea doing flips, Mr. Kiedis jumping and strutting — started and stopped as abruptly as if they had been choreographed. A jolting song would be followed by a slow one, or the band would play parts of songs by the Velvet Underground, Parliament-Funkadelic, Public Image Limited and the Sex Pistols, revealing by contrast its own lack of melody. Without memorable tunes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have to rely on visceral appeal — a big beat, punchy guitar chords — and on Monday, they didn’t find the groove.
Ah, OK – I took izzy’s phrasing (“has been slow in coming”) to mean that the RHCP still didn’t get their rightful acclaim even now, rather than their reception when they emerged – but yes, certainly they were sneered before they were praised. My first knowledge of them in fact came from a 1992ish omnium gatherum review of previous albums in (I think) Q which seemed to me to be an exercise in asserting that the magazine had been right to ignore this bunch all along.
So the critics back-pedalled very quickly when the band became popular amongst their mags’ core constituency. Any historical wrongs done to the RHCP critically have long since been righted (sadly IMO).
Of bands since maybe No Doubt is a good comparison. Local party-starters from a critically-maligned scene (funk-metal/3rd wave ska) change tack for more personal hit (UTB/Don’t Speak) and become huge off the back of it, prompting a certain amount of rock press catch-up. ND split up an album after, of course: RHCP kept going.
Yes, I was trying to express two things really – rock critic catch-up, but also the idea that they still don’t get their dues as a great pop band (ft critic catch-up, for want of a pop press reference point). Applying the latter to their funk-rock work is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but imo the hooks and beautiful simplicity of their playing since Frusciante rejoined (for Californication I think; I’m sure there was still one dud album after UTB) qualifies them.
As for them being a critical joke, I remember them getting an NME cover circa 1992 and looking utterly hackneyed – leathers, otherwise topless, on harleys iirc – even Def Leppard would’ve blushed. And that’s leaving aside the fact that grunge was happening on every other page.
No Doubt: I did think about them for my little list, but didn’t count them as I still have no idea how popular they were before they got big. I don’t think I’d ever even heard of them.
RHCP’s best moment arguably their Simpsons appearance. “How about ‘what I’d really like to do is hug and kiss you’…” / “Forget you clown!” etc.
I have to say I really don’t recognise any of these accounts of early critical neglect or scorn for the RHCPs.
As I remember it in the 1980s, they were not exactly a critics’ darling, but certainly a reasonably cool name to drop. In the context of ‘Licenced to Ill’ and Fishbone, they made a lot more sense as cult heroes.
‘Freaky Styley’, the second album, was produced by George Clinton, who was an uber-hip reference point in 1985, and the first one was produced by Andy Gill! Think of them not as funk-metal but as punk-funk, and they suddenly seem a lot more acceptable to critical orthodoxy. And their total inability to write a decent tune – which Jon Pareles rightly identifies as their greatest failing in the review posted by Swanstep – didn’t seem to matter so much. Critics loved James Blood Ulmer, for example.
Unfortunately, a bit of casual googling has not found much evidence to support these dimly recovered memories. But Simon Reynolds includes in ‘Bring the Noise’ a review of an RHCP concert in 1988, in which he is tepid about them as a live act, but describes the new album as “extremely fine”. I rest my case.
Footnote: that new album must have been ‘The Uplift Mofo Party Plan’.
A good selection of favourable coverage of the RHCPs in the 80s here: http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Artist/red-hot-chili-peppers-the
Re41: I agree – I remember them getting decent press in the UK at the start. They seemed to know interesting people (George Clinton, Penelope Spheeris) the concept seemed maybe promising, they were always good copy. I think as time went on the feeling crept in that there were people trying to do similar kinds of stuff who were felt to be cooler (Fishbone, Sabotage-era Beasties), or nailed the broad concept more successfully (Faith No More, Licensed To Ill-era Beasties) or both (Jane’s Addiction). Also, any sense they might have ever been cool was surely banished by the Bob Marley lines from Give It Away, which sounded like a college freshman straight out of Peoria trying to show he’s down with black folk.
I think I read Kiedis’ autobiography for work – I remember nothing about it.
Is my memory failing me in my old age, or didn’t All Saints perform UtB on TotP out-of-tune or something?
@43, etc.. To be clear, yes, RHCP got decent coverage well prior to Blood Sugar… (nearly everyone loved their Higher Ground cover for example), but, and this was my only point, critics had well-and truly turned on them by the time Blood Sugar came out,… just in time for the Chilis big commercial success to come along and force those critics to eat crow. For what it’s worth, my memory is that the shady incident in 1990 where Flea and drummer Chad assaulted some girl on an MTV dance party show (I believe they ended up getting off with just community service) played a role in hardening attitudes against them. As for whether their subsequent pop career has been underrated by critics; I don’t have a view about that. But first ballot Hall of Fame and splitting the Superbowl half-time with Bruno Mars this year suggests that they’ve received plenty of love where it counts.
Being relatively new to pop music in general, this was the first version of the song I heard although, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been usurped for many years now by the original.
I think RHCP filled some kind of niche, hence their late 90s/early 00s success – they seemed to create the occasional wistful, yearning songs that probably didn’t have too much beneath them. But at the time as a fifteen year old boy, Californication and By The Way soundtracked summertime it seemed.
Under the Bridge has become canonical in some way but perhaps to the point of it being ‘safe’ now. I sing in an (all male) choir who perform contemporary stuff, and we abandoned it after our first couple of rehearsals because it seeemed too obvious (we now do The Magnetic Fields, The Leisure Society and, erm…Christopher Cross). Wasn’t it sung by that American choir of senior citizens? However well intentioned and emotional that endeavour was, I can’t quite see it having had a ‘Johnny Cash’ effect on the stuff they covered…
No #2 watch yet (I think). Anyway, this kept Madonna’s Ray of Light off #1. Would have been up for that to be honest.
LM was the one I remember hearing more of on the radio as it was by far the more sassy of the 2 and the video had more of an appeal! Being the spice girls alternative was the big selling angle here.
It hasnt aged well really. Not the worst by 1998 standards but not partiularly memorable. 5 is about right.
I’ve never liked Under The Bridge all that much and its ‘classic’ status. Even by 1998 it had become one of the decades most recognisable songs and for me it’s always been a guilty displeasure. If it wasnt part of a double a-side I doubt it would have been ‘popular’.3 for UTB, a 5 for LM.
As for the RHCP well I would give the nod to Californication however unavoidable it was in 2000 but I like that one a lot more than I did.A few friends I knew from bands got me into that one. Other than that I can’t understand their mass appeal. Gigs would sell out in no time when they played in Ireland and the hype was unbelievable especially in the early 00s.It’s been all downhill though since Stadium Arcadium. Oasis comparisons made here are on the money.
Whatever about the musical quality of the albums the titles they gave their albums were just dreadful.
Re: early RHCP. I’m sure their intentions were pure but they went through a few guitarists before finding Frusciante, who appears to be the fulcrum upon which the tunefulness rests. Now he’s gone again, so has any hope of being successful. I’m half expecting a 60 year old Kiedis to stick a sock on his cock soon, such is the dearth of ideas.
Goodbye Bob Crewe, who I think made his first Popular appearance with a co-write on this, even though he wrote UK hits from Daddy Cool (Darts) to Silhouettes (Herman’s Hermits) to Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and pretty much every Four Seasons hit. Music aside, by all accounts he was a great man, threw the best parties, and did a lot for LGBT awareness.