The day Flea stopped mocking hair metal: “A great band”
One of the worst things that can happen to a genre, be it rock, rap, punk or anything else, is its becoming cool and commercial.
This isn’t a declaration of ‘I was there before it was cool’, but the issue that a lot of genres face when they become too commercial is that then you have people who start making that music, not because they love it, but because they want to profit from it. There has never been a more sure-fire way to ensure that quality and integrity are flung out the window.
When a genre proves that it can be popular and generate revenue, there is a blueprint set that a lot of other artists choose to follow. They don’t bother trying to think of a new approach to the music they want to make, or put anything genuine into their sound at all, instead satisfied with just replicating what successful artists have done and hoping it rubs off on them. Many a genre has become overly saturated because of this attitude.
When Flea first met Anthony Kiedis, the two didn’t exactly hit it off. In fact, the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist found the soon-to-be frontman pretty intimidating. When they first bumped into each other, they had just started school, and it wasn’t evident to Flea that the two of them were going to get along as well as they wound up doing.
“We had just turned 15,” said Flea in a recent interview with Mojo, “It was the beginning of the school year, and we had just gotten to high school, so we were all new. Anthony had been in LA for a few years, just like me. He was an intimidating presence. He had his hair cut real short.”
Of course, the rest is history in a sense, as once the two of them started having classes together and realised that they had a mutual adoration for music, it was only a matter of time before they started making it together. Flea and Kiedis, along with some other school friends, ended up forming the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are now one of the most famous funk rock bands on the planet.
When they originally started out in this line-up, they had a pretty clear image as to what kind of sound they were chasing. They were coming up in Los Angeles, where hair metal was all the rage, and they wanted to stay as far away from that genre as they possibly could. This was a style of music that had succumbed to that commercial curse, with bands merely following the blueprint that those who had come before them laid out, and who were very much style over substance. Flea and the rest of the band, it’s safe to say, hated it.
“We were definitely against the hair metal scene,” he said in an interview with Classic Rock, “We were like ‘Fuck them. We’re the underground, art-rock, get-weird east side guys; those guys are just rehashing Aerosmith and Kiss’.”
However, with the power of hindsight, Flea realised that amongst the crap, there were a couple of gems, one of whom came in the form of fellow LA rockers, Guns N’ Roses. “In retrospect, it was all pretty bullshit,” he said, “A lot of those bands were fucking great. Guns N’ Roses was a great band.”
Slash, Guns N’ Roses guitarist, will certainly be happy to receive such an endorsement, given that when he originally set out to make music with Guns N’ Roses, he did so with one goal in mind: to kill hair metal.
“I fucking hated the whole scene, man […] In Los Angeles, it was just bullshit. And we were coming up in the midst of all that,” he declared, “Everybody was fucking converting to the industry standard to get a record deal and get girls, this whole thing. Where our band was coming from was the antithesis of all that, and it’s something I’m really proud of.”
