Limp Cock Blocking: The Luke Warm Chili Peppers and the Biggest Piece of Shit Ever Recorded

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Every time I hear the song “The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I have to stop and listen.  I only hear it because WXRT seems quite fond of the song, evidence of how low they have fallen.  And I only stop and listen because I am in awe of what a piece of shit it is.  Not only it is a piece of shit song, it is the biggest piece of shit song ever recorded.  Easily.  Name another?  Nope—“The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie” is worse.

So why the awe?  And why do I torture myself?  Why when I know the fucking song will be in my head for days?  Because I like the pain?  Maybe.  Who hasn’t put their tongue against the sore spot of a bad tooth?  And this is the most rotten of rotten teeth.  Hillbilly teeth mixed with British teeth.  Blackened teeth from years of tobacco chew and neglect. 

Why is it such a piece of fucking shit?  Well, give it a listen.  Or not.  Do yourself a favor and ignore it.  But if you're like me and just have to know how big a piece of shit it is, well, then I suspect you’ve given it a listen by now.  Okay, so now we can talk about it:

The music itself is generic, uninspiring, and lazy.  This is a band that has been phoning it in for many years.  Hell, anything post Mother’s Milk is really a waste of time, but even the bloated, uneven Blood Sugar Sex Magik (with a fucking K!) has a few good songs.  But that’s where the trouble started.  The unlikeliest band to ever have a hit managed to get themselves all over adult contemporary stations with a flaccid little ditty called “Under the Bridge”.  Oh, how I remember 1991!  That song was fucking everywhere.  That and the heart breakingly disappointing R.E.M. record Out of Time (what a bad year for your humble narrator). And I, who had loved the Chili Peppers so much, who had their first four records in constant rotation, who annoyed friends at parties by hijacking the radio and playing Freaky Styley, I did my best to convince myself that I liked “Under the Bridge”.  But it was a quiet, forgettable song (or it would’ve been were it not for the wall-to-wall radio play) that I skipped on my way to something with power chords and slap bass.  But the masses seemed to really like it.  (Ballads get you airplay, you see.  And money.) And the masses get what the masses want.

Newfound fame and money now taking the place of heroin, the Chili Peppers became not-so red hot.  Gone was the funk, the punk, the locker room grossness, and the stupid, party spirit.  Ballad after ballad after lame ballad followed.  They may have tried to rekindle the hard rockin’, but even that felt tired and sad.  Yep, the party was over.

What makes good party music?  Deep meditations on existence?  Explorations of contemporary ennui?  Political consciousness?  Nah… cocks in socks is all you need.  This is the band that never aspired to deep, intellectual fare.  They were clowns— goofy, sometimes funny, more often not, but their shtick was genuine enough.  Meaning I believed them.  I knew they were brainless goofballs appropriating funk and mixing it with watered downed punk rock, but that was fine.  Still, every party ends and we all grow up eventually.  Even the Chili Peppers grew up.  But sadly they didn’t get smarter.  Just lazier.  Now we have a band that has not had the good sense to break up.  Still feeling the need to make records but lacking new ideas or any shred of the spark they once, briefly had, the band now relies on the least offensive, least interesting brand of three chord rock to prop up its singer’s horrendous lyrics. 

So let’s get to the lyrics.

Not only does Anthony (the biggest douchebag in music) Kiedis actually sing (if you can call it that) “Tick tock I want to rock you like the 80s” he actually follows it up with “cock blocking isn’t allowed.”  Thank god he told me!  I was about to cock block him!  Okay, as I stated before, this is not a band that ever wrote anything akin to poetry, but in the past Kiedis sang/rapped his shit-strung words so fast that groaners like this sailed by quickly, followed by something better or, at the very least, a cool little bass fill.  Now they simply precede “Hey now.  We’ve got to make it rain somehow.”  Whatever that means.  Yeah, this is the typical Kiedis lyrical wizardry: stale sex rhymes and a pointless, filler of a chorus.  He may as well mumble some syllables.  Why not? I suspect no one's really listening.  

And when the hell did Kiedis decide he can sing?  He has no range and less tone.  Someone ought to mention it to him.  Or, better yet, kick him out of the band.  If sentimental reasons prohibit shit canning this boob, then they ought to split up.  End it!  I mean, Flea can always find work on his own.  Why bother backing up this lousy a front man?  Friendship is one thing, but sometimes you just have to look at the bigger picture.  In this case, Kiedis, with his marginal talent and asshole behavior, is making an already tarnished band look even worse.  Oh Flea, who would have ever thought that you, a guy who wore pants made out of stuffed animals, would be the mature one? 

But I digress...

This winning combination of soft rocking and callow lyrics would be forgivable if this were a high school band barely done working its way through “Smoke on the Water” but this is a seasoned outfit, one of the most popular bands of the late 90s (for some reason), a group that has toured the world and made more money than I can conceive of.  They ought to know better than to try and pass this crap off.  I mean, most bands don’t make 9 records before shitting out something this bad, but these guys decided to save the worst for (hopefully) last. 

So why do I care?  Well, for starters: I don’t really give a shit about the Red Hot Silly Putty, but this song is so bad, worse than anything else they've ever written, that I have to publicly object.  Their fans will surely defend this piece of stinking crap, and others will tell me that there are worse, infinitely more offensive songs.  “Achy Breaky Heart”,  “Mambo Number 5”,  “What’s Up?”, or “Bad Romance”.  All bad, sure, but those songs are bad in obvious ways.  “The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie” is insidiously bad.  It slithers through the swamp of adult contemporary radio planting a sack of reptilian eggs in the brain.  It is too easy to miss, thus very dangerous.  This is why I care.  When something this shitty is allowed to exist, it lessens all of human experience.  It makes us have to endure a sadder culture, one that willingly tolerates crap with a blithe dismissal of "Oh, its not so bad.  And you have to admit it's catchy!"  Yes, and so it AIDS but I don't want that shit either.  So listener: beware.  Here there be shit you can’t wash off.  And it will stain all of us forever.