Jane's Addiction

Anyone who found themselves listening to "Nothing's Shocking" for the first time in 1988 probably had the sense that something was shifting in the world of alternative sound. It was impossible not to recognize entirely new qualities in that strange mix of seemingly irreconcilable elements, especially in a decade that, up to that point, had made dividing walls (post-punk, synth-pop, hardcore, indie-rock, metal) a primary stylistic trait. The hybridization, specifically between European and American influences, made Jane's Addiction's music sound, right from the first listen, both noble and ragged, whole and coarse, or, to put it less subtly, saintly and whorish — a game of contrasts in which Perry Farrell and co. seemed to move with astonishing ease, tour guides on a journey loaded with morbid psychedelia, post-punk bass lines and hard-rock aggression rendered in Hollywood letters. But let's take things in order.

Even before the urge to mock the prudishness of the respectable classes (which earned it censorship in some record store chains), the cover of "Nothing's Shocking" seems to conjure a search for exoticism, with that pair of wooden statues of an almost Egyptian flavor, captured as their heads burst into flame. The fact that they are conjoined twins, fused at the shoulders and hips, with a vaguely catatonic gaze utterly indifferent to the combustion, brings to mind Joan of Arc-style fanaticism more than archaeology. At the same time, their naked bodies seem to hint at a willingness to be sacrificed both for the already, in various ways, incendiary cause of rock'n'roll and for that of sexual freedom — two themes very dear to Farrell himself, who created the artwork together with his longtime girlfriend Casey Niccoli. It's a collection of ideas that the album's very title reinforces, feigning to deny the shocking qualities of a tracklist that does everything it can to actually be just that.

Peretz Bernstein (aka Perry, to which the man himself added Farrell, both in reference to his brother's name and for its assonance with the word "peripheral") is the only member of the band not originally from California, having moved there from New York only in the early Eighties. Even so, he instantly learned to wallow in the stylistic codes of the L.A. way of life, starting with those of the surfer. The artsy imprint of the Big Apple left him with a certain fascination for UK-school post-punk sounds, particularly evident in the repertoire of his first band (Psi Com) and useful for exploring common ground with a host of local musicians, including bassist Eric Avery.

Eric makes no secret of despising Psi Com, but he has a soft spot for Joy Division, Bauhaus and Velvet Underground, and that makes him the ideal candidate for Perry's new artistic venture, by now focused on the need to leave a tangible mark on the underground culture of the city of angels. Still, one more paradigm shift is needed, a transgressive leap that Farrell has long craved, and thanks to mutual friendships it polarizes (not without an initial dose of skepticism) around the metal pedigree of two regulars on the local scene, drummer Stephen Perkins and guitarist Dave Navarro.

Jane's Addiction emerge from a hippie melting pot that also includes Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone, positioning themselves as an alternative to the Hollywood music industry of machismo and six-figure contracts (a field in which Guns N' Roses reign supreme), and they synthesize urges that make them instantly popular in the very club circuit they're often banned from. Eager to sign them, Warner Bros. forgoes any form of control over the band's artistic choices, even honoring their wish to release a live album recorded at the Roxy Theatre for the independent label Triple X, in 1987.

By the time the band enters the studio to record "Nothing's Shocking" with producer Dave Jerden, the hype within L.A.'s underground scene is at fever pitch. Farrell and co. are ready to turn their debut into a sort of treatise in which family history, sex, drug addiction and the portrayal of a society built on televised violence converge into a bizarre, elusive organism, a kind of snake with butterfly wings.

All things considered, Jane's Addiction flaunt a strong guitar-driven component but can't be filed straightforwardly under metal, they climb along bare, introspective bass patterns but don't belong to the post-punk camp, they swing between rhythmic fury and sudden moments of tenderness but can't be traced back to the prog fold. Their recipe is a gamble held together by Farrell's shrill vocals, capable of shifting fluidly from hysterical aggression to a ragged lullaby, likely a legacy of the frustration he suffered within a Jewish family that, from his teenage years on, frowned upon his passion for Led Zeppelin, Sly & The Family Stone, Stooges, David Bowie and Lou Reed. His element (in a surfing sense too) is water, and the first two tracks on the album (the instrumental intro "Up The Beach" — sublime in conveying the windswept epicness of a ten-meter wave rolling under your surfboard — and the programmatic statement of "Ocean Size") are enough to make that clear.

Some people tell me

Home is in the sky

In the sky lives a spy

I want to be more like the ocean

No talking

All action

("Ocean Size")

To assemble the influences of the band's four members into a cohesive whole and bring out its full distinctiveness compared to the main competition, Dave Jerden makes a few simple choices: he keeps the drums' noisier side (cymbals and hi-hat) on a leash, pushes kick, snare and toms to the fore (underscoring Perkins' tribal streak) and recreates the tons of delay under which Farrell habitually buries his voice on stage. In this territory it's easier to bring together the two most distant elements in the band, namely Avery's smooth, dark bass (on which the aforementioned "Up The Beach", "Ted, Just Admit It…", "Summertime Rolls" and "Mountain Song" are sumptuously built) and Navarro's torrential cascade of blues and Mixolydian pentatonics.

But, as we were saying, "Nothing's Shocking" is also a kind of confessional, one that reveals how Farrell's symbolic quarrel with God in "Had A Dad" also concerns Avery, who discovers in high school that he has another biological father ("I had a dad/ Big and strong/ I turned around/ And found my daddy gone"), or how the dreamy, two-chord realism of the eternal "Jane Says" — dedicated to his friend Jane Bainter, a leading figure in an artistic collective founded by Farrell himself — also reflects the drug addiction that pretty much everyone in the band had to reckon with, and finally how the echo of history's first serial killer (Ted Bundy) in "Ted, Just Admit It…" somehow also tells the story of Navarro's mother, murdered at 15 by an ex-boyfriend.

Perry becomes the still through which all the elements of humanity embodied by the band leave their initial state to crystallize into the representation of an ideal existence, free from institutional conditioning (in the amphetamine-fueled funk of "Idiots Rule", featuring the horn section of Flea, Christopher Dowd and Angelo Moore, or in "Pigs In Zen").

His surfer's skills let him ride every boundary, including the one separating the messianic image of the guru from the toxic allure of the street-corner dealer. An aesthetic blend of dreadlocks, headgear and gaunt faces that chases the sound and effectively anticipates the Nineties, even if not explicitly in terms of spleen. Jane's Addiction articulate a thoroughly Los Angeles take on contemporary life and reflect a local hedonism that is perhaps even more deeply rooted than the prevailing Reagan-era one, one that inevitably takes aim at the distortions of American television culture, so brilliantly summed up in the more than 7 minutes of "Ted, Just Admit It…", the true zenith of the record. Here, the sweet, almost reassuring opening gradually gives way to a sermon that detonates into a hyperkinetic finale, a perfect analogy for the normalization of violence on TV (especially violence tied to sex) and society's inability to admit it exists — just like the title character, Ted Bundy, who in the opening spoken segment denies ever committing those crimes (he would only admit to them in his final prison interview before dying, claiming his behavior had been shaped by pornography).

The sonic melting pot of "Nothing's Shocking" smooths a path that starts with the deconstruction of American rock's dogmas, passes through an alternative rebirth and ends up becoming one of the most striking cases of underground turning overground, effectively institutionalizing the so-called crossover. What remains clear is the band's desire to be revolutionary in their own way, making as few compromises as possible with the dictates of the American record industry, across eleven tracks (ten for those who got their hands on the European edition right away, which closes with the uptempo jazz of "Thank You Boys") brimming with all the sincerity of a lean, nervy, charismatic, cocky world, terrifyingly sexy in exposing the respectability of the folks next door. Where, by now, nothing is shocking anymore.

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23/04/2023