Everything I Know I Learned from the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Vocabulary

The boys in...not much released the first single off of I'm With You (their album slated for August 30th with Josh Klinghoffer not John Frusciante on guitar). It is titled "The Adventures of Raindance Maggie" and it sounds awesome. My fears of the Fru-less crew have be assuaged. Klinghoffer appears to have done just fine but I will reserve judgment until August 31st.

As this blog and my other pursuits may have indicated, I am somewhat of a book worm. I used to call myself a writer, now I say I am a "reader, writer" because to write well you really have to read well. I feel like I have that down at this point. However, this was not always the case. I am pretty sure that in high school I read a grand total of three books: The Catcher in the Rye, One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, and The Complete Works of Robert Frost.  

Somehow I took to writing poems but with the narrow list of things I read (and yes that list is indicative of the required books that I actually read cover-to-cover as required [note: there are none]), inspiration had to come elsewhere. It was, as my teenage fanboydom would dictate, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When I found out their first performance EVER was just Flea slapping a bass and Keidis reading a poem I was gung-ho to try it out. And the rest, as they say, is...what do they say it is again? Anyway most important to poems are the words and without good books as a guide I had to find words somewhere else; here are some words I learned from RHCP:

altruistic

microcosm

emolliate 

masochistic

ingenue

lexicon

dopamine

malinger

melancholy

The process was much like reading. When I came across a word in the lyrics as written on album notes I looked it up and the word became a riff for me for days. Anytime I hear these words I immediately think back to these songs. I do not use the words much, really they are pretty obscure or techno-specific, but I think about them and I can probably sing (off key, of course) all the lines these words are lifted from.

Hey, it may not seem like much, but I would argue its pretty good for a kid who hated to read.

Though I've gotten decidedly better about it.

So continues this series of posts about one man's coming of age thanks to one band's music