| sleepy jack |
09-23-2010 02:43 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by duga
(Post 935025)
I love the Chili Peppers personally... They are one of the first bands that really sparked my interest in collecting a complete discography. I was obsessed with how different their early stuff was from their later stuff. They also get some respect for having more than one peak. They were pretty popular in the 80s, they were gigantic in the early 90s, and blew up again in the early 00s after seemingly being past their prime. Only Aerosmith has had so many recoveries.
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I don't really understand why I should respect a band for making multiple "comebacks." All that says to me is they either compromised musical integrity for the sake of being loved by the mainstream, or they never had any to begin with and just churned out crap that was so bad even the masses couldn't get attached to it.
That aside I think you may be a little off on just how many peaks they've had. Go back and look at the dates of their singles and albums. They didn't catch the attention of the mainstream at all until the release of Mother's Milk at the very end of the 80s. I suppose you could argue the album before it had some success, but not much and the point remains it would still be a progression to success from there. After that was Blood Sugar Sex Magik in early nineties, which was an even bigger album for them. So, as you can see there was no real peak-and-dip in success from the 80s to 90s.
If you follow their career after that you don't really see any substantial change either. The following album, One Hot Minute, while not as successful as it's predecessor, still had Aeroplane and My Friends, which was a number one single. Hardly a dip. They then followed that up with Californication (which came out at the very end of the 90s - when you claim they were on one of their supposed 'dips') which had a song that won a Grammy, as well as Californication and Otherside, two huge songs. After that was By the Way, which had two number one singles and then another song that hit the top 10. So unless you consider the period when they didn't release an album as a dip in their popularity, I don't understand where there peak in the early 2000s come from if they never were unpopular in the first place. Then of course, they released their most recent album, Stadium Arcadium, which debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers never went away once they got into the mainstream's eyes. One album may have been less popular then the one before it (e.g. One Hot Minute following Blood Sugar Sex Magik) but that's only if you consider having one less chart topping single then the album before it a huge dip in popularity. One could go on to make a different argument, which is that "oh well that's even better that they managed to stay popular" but I don't think popularity has any relation to musical credibility. It's a bad argument if you want to defend the supposed worth of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any artist really. |
