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

Everything I Know I Learned from the Red Hot Chili Peppers

I doubt that I was terribly unique as an American teenage male to start buying up as many RHCP albums as I could find by the time I was old enough to cuss. Nor do I think that music has magical powers to do things like start revolutions or heal a troubled heart. However, I do think music can be particularly good at getting in your head and pumping life into all the little ideas you have ever pondered on while waiting for encouragement to act on.

It is through music that we regularly find validity for things we are unsure about. Not only do break-up songs, love songs, protest songs, and party songs give us inspiration to proceed on the seeds of our own ideas and let us know others have been there, they also give us a melody to whistle while we work. Weather we are smashing headlights on a cheating boyfriends truck or taking a midnight train going anywhere, music shows us that we won't be doing it alone. I owe so much of my inner companionship to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The band's forthcoming album slated for the end of August started me on a path of reverie because for the first time in my freethinking life the Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the studio without John Frusciante. Yes, I was alive for Dave Navarro's filling in while Frusciante took a brief heroin hiatus from 92-97 but because of well meaning parents and those pesky obscenity labels I was not able to get my hands on any album prior to Californication until I got better at The Internet (more on that later) and thus had a Frusciante-centric Chili Peppers experience. When the rumors were confirmed to me that John Frusciante had left the Peppers to make room for, quintessentially, his understudy Josh Klinghoffer I felt as though I had been dumped by my first girlfriend...again. 

When asked why I took it so hard the only conclusion I could reach was that I basically owed my life to those four dudes from L.A. Not in a tragically highschool way of having some emotional instability that I self medicated with their music, but rather, somewhat more maturely, that I owe a lot of the vivacious growth in my personality to interests and ideas that I believe directly correlate to and were cultivated by their music. 

Probably most illustrative of this is that I started playing bass at age 13 in the summer of 2002. The band had just released their first album of my pubescent life, By The Way. I remembered awesome things from the late nineties such as the video game music video and refrain of 1999's title track, "Californication." And Otherside's psychedelic, Man Ray-influenced video played well to my overactive imagination. I would eventually get back to these pre-teen memories as my affection and obession grew but in the summer of 2002 I memorized and still know by heart almost all the basslines from By the Way. Flea played bass the way it was meant to be played: out loud, more than just root notes and rhythm and with blue hair. 

From left to right below: Flea on the By The Way Tour in 2003, Dave Samms and myself in Emporia, KS 2008, Nick Probst and myself in Wichita, KS 2008

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