They’ve preserved their californicating essence through countless reinventions and funk-rap breakdowns for nearly four decades. Here are their finest moments
Flea, Anthony Kiedis, John Frusciante, and Chad Smith (from left) MTV/Getty Images
By ANGIE MARTOCCIO & JON DOLAN & CHARLES AARON & DAVID BROWNE & SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON & HANK SHTEAMER & BRIAN HIATT & JOSEPH HUDAK & LISA TOZZI & KORY GROW & ANDY GREENE & ROB SHEFFIELD
“I didn’t want to tell the same old story that we’ve been hearing for the last 50 years in rock music,” Anthony Kiedis reflected in a recent interview. “Hopefully we’ve said something that hasn’t been said before, or at least said it in a way that hasn’t.”
He was talking about Unlimited Love, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 12th album, but he might as well have been describing the entire long arc of their nearly 40-year run. A band that released its full-length debut the same year as Run-D.M.C. and the Smiths became alt-rock’s ultimate survivors by sounding like no one but themselves, making it up as they went along and following their love rollercoaster ride wherever it took them.
The core duo of shameless verbal acrobat Kiedis and blissed-out bass bopper Flea — along with certified guitar god John Frusciante, steady drummer Chad Smith, frequent producer Rick Rubin, and all the other doctors of rhythm with shorter tenures at RHCP University — have preserved the Chilis’ californicating essence through countless reinventions and funk-rap breakdowns. They have endured because no other band would dare be this ridiculous and this great for this long.
Here are their 40 greatest songs.
It took 16 years for the band’s first new song with Frusciante, but Unlimited Love’s “Black Summer” was totally worth the wait. The wayward guitarist brought the song structure with him when he rejoined the Chili Peppers, and Kiedis, Flea, and Smith jumped on it. The result is the group’s most vital — and most RHCP-sounding — song in ages, propelled by Flea’s slinking bassline and Frusciante’s melodic but in-your-face chords. “I was sitting there with the guitar thinking that I hadn’t written any rock music in so long,” he told NME. “Could I still do that?” Uh, yeah. —Joseph Hudak
When the rhythm section crashes in on the chorus, it’s a respite from the verses’ plaintive melancholy, but the truest form of this Californication track evokes the image of Kiedis and Frusciante unplugged, perched on stools facing each other, as if making amends. In one of his most affecting vocal performances, Kiedis acknowledges his bandmate (“John says to live above hell”) over a playful rhythm guitar and meditates on the damage inflicted by addiction. —Charles Aaron
In their own way, the Chili Peppers have never been strangers to brooding nights of the soul, and the kick-off single from 2016’s The Getaway wallows in them: “You don’t know my mind/Dark necessities are part of my design,” Kiedis sings. The song’s somber textures, enhanced by a rumbling piano, reflect their first-time collaboration with producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse. Kiedis was given an instrumental demo of the song by Burton and the band and supplied lyrics that, he said, addressed “how much creativity and growth and light comes out of those difficult struggles we have inside our heads that no one else can see.” —David Browne
A funky declaration of freedom, “Fight Like a Brave” is Kiedis’ call-to-arms for anyone struggling with addiction. “Get it through your head and get it off your chest,” he raps, “Or get it out your arm because it’s time to start fresh.” The chorus is forceful and rhythmic, making it the perfect anthem for that iteration of the group. “The Chili Peppers at the time, they were a different band,” drummer Jack Irons remembers. “We were sort of that wild energy — full-on 100 percent energy went into every song. It wasn’t necessarily about playing dynamically or playing a song, per se. We were like this four-piece rhythm machine that just wanted to rock really hard and do what we did.” —Kory Grow
A meticulous tableau. Over hushed acoustic fingerpicking, Kiedis croons another drug-redemption story, then brusque acoustic strums announce the loping, country-rock chorus (with Frusciante on luminous backing vocals). There’s a towering, bending teardrop of a note, a brief, buttery, blues-rock outburst, and finally, the delicate backwards guitar flurries on the outro. After hearing the instrumental, Kiedis soon envisioned the song’s theme: “It’s about that beautiful feeling when life becomes slow motion and all the chaos and distraction fades away for a moment and you can see things very clearly.” Frusciante already knew. —C.A.
Slovak played sitar on “Behind the Sun,” giving the tune a psychedelic flare that worked well with the group’s innate funk similar to Prince’s Around the World in a Day album, which came out a couple of years earlier. But where Prince sang about raspberry berets and his “pop life,” Kiedis embraced truly trippy psychedelia, singing about talking dolphins who live behind the sun. When the song came out as a single in 1992, during peak Blood Sugar mania, it became the only Slovak–era track to make the charts, reaching Number Seven on Billboard‘s Alternative ranking. —K.G.
Although Kiedis namechecks Frusciante again in the first verse of his word-jumble, pop-culture rap (including one of his ickiest double entendres), this is all about Flea’s rubbery, resounding bass as it ricochets, promenades, sidesteps, twerks, and flutters into a blissful frenzy. The main, funk-rock-throwback section eventually gives way to the delirious outro jam with Smith slamming his entire kit into oblivion and Frusciante squalling away breezily. —C.A.
Three-and-a-half minutes of pure thrash-funk, “Sikamikanico” was likely too red-hot for Blood Sugar Sex Magik, so the group released it first as a B side to “Under the Bridge” and later as their contribution to the Wayne’s World soundtrack. As a standalone track, though, it rages in a way that few Chili Peppers songs do, as Frusciante plays scratchy guitar against Smith’s funky drums, eventually locking into a fresh punk rhythm on the chorus, which is as exhilarating anything Suicidal Tendencies or Dead Kennedys ever wrote. Thanks to Kiedis’ mumble-rapping about funky monks and the odd dick joke, it becomes one of the Chili Peppers’ most hardcore numbers. —K.G.
“Sir Psycho Sexy” stretches past the eight-minute mark, making it one of the longest songs in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ catalog. It’s also one of the most sexually explicit, which is really saying something considering this is the band responsible for “Party On Your Pussy.” The narrator of “Sir Psycho Sexy” is a slightly exaggerated version of Kiedis, proudly relaying tales of wild sexual conquests. He even gets with a female police officer that pulls him over. “She stuck my butt with her big black stick,” he sings. “I said ‘What’s up? Now suck my dick.’” In a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, Kiedis was asked if we okay with kids listening to the song. “If parents think their child can’t handle the language that I use, then they shouldn’t expose their kids to it,” he said. “That’s more up to the parents than me.” —Andy Greene
The Chilis have been fusing disparate sounds together since their earliest days, and they took that to a new level on 1999’s “Get On Top” when Frusciante took a Public Enemy-style rhythm and mixed it with a guitar part inspired by Steve Howe’s work on the 1972 Yes song “Siberian Khatru.” “[Yes] sounded really big — and they’re playing really fast — and then this clean guitar solo comes out over on top,” said Frusciante. “It’s really beautiful, like it’s on its own sort of shelf. For ‘Get On Top,’ I wanted to play something that contrasted between the solo and the background.” —A.G.
Flea’s anxious bass line drove home the restlessness of this By the Way deep cut. Despite he and Smith being locked into the most airtight of grooves, “Throw Away Your Television” feels like it’s just seconds from going off the rails. In this case, that’s a good thing: It reconnected the band with their unpredictable roots and gave them one of their most frantic studio recordings. (The song killed live too, like in this 2003 performance at Ireland’s Slane Castle.) The lyrics are rich in TV allusions: Kiedis sings of “repeats” and “intermissions.” But he was likely talking about cutting a different kind of cord — one tethered to drug addiction. —J.H.
The Chilis professed had already professed their love for Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix on Mother’s Milk by the time they put those influences to work for themselves on closing track “Johnny, Kick a Hole in the Sky.” The way they combined Wonder-style soul and Hendrix-y wah-wah guitar with Kiedis’ hip-hop obsession (and interest in his own Native American heritage), as well as Flea’s bass-slapping Bootsy Collins worship, created the blueprint for everything they did on their next album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. —K.G.
Yes, it sound a whole lot like Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane.” Yes, the lyrics and even the title veer very close to self-parody, especially the part when Kiedis seems like he’s about to name all 50 states — but what great latter-day Chili Peppers song doesn’t? The chorus is one of the band’s most gorgeous, and the layers of vocal and guitar harmonies on the bridge, and the Hendrix costume party of a solo, are a perfect showcase for the glorious overdub madness of Frusciante in his Stadium Arcadium era. —Brian Hiatt
Californication is one of rock’s all-time great road-trip albums, and it closes on a fitting note with this gentle folk lullaby: “Road trippin’ with my two favorite allies/Fully loaded, we got snacks and supplies.” Rick Rubin tapped a session musician to play the vintage Chamberlin keyboard solo that gives this otherwise Zeppelin-y song a late-Beatles twist. “That was Rick’s doing,” Frusciante admitted of the keyboard part. “None of us were there for that. But it was good. I liked it.” —Simon Vozick-Levinson
Up until 1989’s Mother’s Milk, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were in danger of becoming a party band with a “What consequences?” worldview. But following the drug overdose death of guitarist Hillel Slovak in 1988 and the departure of Irons, they looked inward, emerging with this cautionary tale of ego and addiction. “If you see me getting mighty, if you see me getting high/Knock me down,” Kiedis pleaded in the chorus. “I’m not bigger than life.” He and Frusciante, now a Pepper too, recorded a dual vocal for “Knock Me Down”: Listen to the original version and you can hear Frusciante drown out Kiedis. No matter who’s singing, “Knock Me Down” remains one of the band’s most self-aware best. —J.H.
Like everything else about 1995’s One Hot Minute, “Aeroplane” is polarizing. Part of the band’s Dave Navarro Period, it was made after Frusciante quit the band (for the first time) and while Kiedis was using again. The lyrics are darker, the sound harder. You know what they say, that motherfucker’s always spiked with pain. But the bop of the “Aeroplane” chorus and Flea’s euphoric slap groove are like a dysfunctional family trying their best to put a happy face on for the holidays. And maybe when the children’s chorus (featuring Flea’s daughter Clara and her pals) comes in at the end to creepy-cute sing “It’s my aeroplane” over and over, we can pretend that all is forgiven and we had a good time. —Lisa Tozzi
A showcase for Kiedis’ bluesy belting and dodgy poetic ambition — “I’m an inbred and a pothead/Two legs that you spread inside the tool shed” — this By the Way ballad is an ode to addiction and the freedom promised by sobriety. On early versions, the working title was “The Most Beautiful Chords Ever” and that’s no surprise listening to Frusciante’s extensive work. On the verses, using mellotron, wah-wah, and echo, he conjures moods with intense trills and drones, while his solos are like gorgeously minimalist paintings of an electrical storm. —C.A.
Closing By the Way, this is a two-section tribute — first half brisk but doleful, second half more urgently yearning — to Kiedis’ longtime drug counselor-mentor Gloria Scott, for whom the band bought a house on Venice Beach before she died of lung cancer. Kiedis admits that he cried while writing the lyrics. “Part of it was because I missed her, but part of it was because it feels good to sing about someone who meant so much to me. I’m good at losing. It’s one of my specialties.” —C.A.
This delicate song, just a rippling guitar figure, a pensive bass, and Keidis’ whispered vocals is so soft and subtle it could be on the third Velvet Underground album — it’s hard to imagine the band further away from their chest-popping funk-rock. Kiedis sings with moving empathy about a homeless woman and her infant child (“Nodding and melting and fading away”), reflecting their fragile state with one of his most delicate vocals to create a lullaby of comfort to ward off hard times. —Jon Dolan
The Chili Peppers’ cover of this 1972 Stevie Wonder classic was the band’s first big MTV hit, introducing them to Eighties kids who in many cases probably thought the song was a RCHP original. And in some ways it was, with Flea’s precision-strike slapping replacing the clavinet on the original and Frusciente’s metal power chords making the song feel totally up to date — a made-in-L.A. hotwiring that still honored the song’s greatness. —J.D.
One of the qualities that has helped Californication endure is its impeccable sequencing. Halfway through the album, just as the moody grandness of the title track leaves you feeling a little low, the Chilis rev things back up with this burst of melodic energy and bite. Frusciante shreds, Flea bops, Smith keeps it steady, and Kiedis recalls “the story of a woman on the morning of a war/Remind me if you will exactly what we’re fighting for?” The answer is the free, wild rock & roll brotherhood heard on “Easily.” —S.V.L.
“Show Me Your Soul” was a sweetly mushy valentine, not exactly common in the Chili Peppers songbook in those days. “Into my life you were injected,” Kiedis muses, maybe not the most romantic metaphor in the world. “Now I smile from your affection/We have made a soul connection!” “Show Me Your Soul” comes from the period in between Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, ending up on the soundtrack to Pretty Woman. Hot cowbell, too. —Rob Sheffield
It’s unclear to whom Kiedis is directing this love song, but regardless, it’s one of his most straightforward, clearly conveyed, romantic sentiments (“This is what I want to be and this is what I give to you”). A jangly, midtempo ballad with Flea’s resonant bass grounding everything, Kiedis’ singing is remarkably vulnerable and unaffected, even when the bridge shifts slightly to a funky shuffle. Frusciante sets a subtly hopeful mood with gentle strums, muted embellishments, and keyboard murmurs. —C.A.
Blood Sugar Sex Magik transformed the Red Hot Chili Peppers from curiosities into household names, thanks mostly to the inescapable power ballad “Under the Bridge.” But to get to that hit, you had to go through this lead-in title track, a Frankenstein’s monster of funk, heavy-metal guitar, and tribal drums all sewn together with sexual innuendo. Kiedis goes on about how every woman “has a piece of Aphrodite” to “copulate to create a state of sexual light.” It’s a celebration of sex — with yet another allusion to Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who participated in “sex magic” rituals and whom Frusciante said influenced “Otherside.” Be it dark magic or sex magic, “Blood Sugar” is irresistible. —J.H.
Frusciante runs circles around a kicky punk-funk riff, while Kiedis aims for the anarchic Beat-poet bliss of “Give It Away” and comes as close as he has this century. “Coming from space to teach you of the Pleiades,” the SoCal starman talks beautiful nonsense right up until a closing koan that sounds fake-deep until you realize it might actually be really-real-deep: “Can’t stop the spirits when they need you/This life is more than just a read-through.” “We’re coming from the viewpoint of being alive at a time of such a preposterous media reality,” Kiedis elaborated in a 2002 interview. “You have to be willing to laugh at yourself.” —S.V.L.
Kiedis reflects on love and loss on “Dosed,” a gorgeous highlight from 2002’s By the Way that shows off the band’s knack for creating tempered psychedelic rapture, somewhere between Brian Wilson at his most in-my-room doleful and Hendrix at his most benedictive. There’s four guitars on the song, played by Frusciante and Flea, lapping against each other and wandering off in strange directions to mirror the dream-like flow of Kiedis’ lyrics. —J.D.
“There were a lot of romantic feelings,” Kiedis told a reporter who asked about this song in 1999, “intertwined with sexual rhythms and melodies.” That about sums up the Chili Peps’ very own “California Girls,” updated for the late Nineties with lyrics about boning in Switzerland, Sicily, “the woods of Wisconsin,” and other scenic locales. In between Kiedis’ cartoonish raps about rompin’ and stompin’, there’s an unexpectedly sweet, harmony-rich chorus that immediately reminded anyone who popped a Californication CD into their stereo to be thankful for Frusciante’s return. —S.V.L.
The Chili Peppers’ third album, 1987’s The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, was improbably their first to feature the band’s founding lineup, since Slovak and Irons were originally more committed to their long-forgotten other band, What Is This? Once those two figured out what that band wasn’t, and re-joined, Kiedis toasted them on the hard-rocking “Me and My Friends.” Irons was “a working-class drummer, he’s strong as a horse,” while he dedicated another verse to Slovak, “for whom my love is soul-brother sacred.” Tragically, Mofo would be the only album that lineup would make; Slovak died of a heroin overdose less than a year after it came out, and Irons quit out of grief for his friend. —K.G.
Suggesting Led Zeppelin III relocated to the Venice Beach boardwalk, “Breaking the Girl” is a spiraling acoustic highlight of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, complete with a John Paul Jones-like mellotron solo from Brendan O’Brien, who mixed and engineered the album. Kiedis sings about his feelings of guilt and regret over his part in a failed relationship — not a romantic vulnerability you usually got from Zeppelin, which is part of the song’s luster. —J.D.
Seasoned comics know a “hard K” sound will almost always get you a reaction. The Chili Peppers wholeheartedly embraced that trick in “Suck My Kiss,” a song that finds Kiedis dropping “motherfuckers” left and right, spelling out “k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” and scatting “Chicka chicka dee/Do me like a banshee.” That’s in addition to the chorus, where the music drops out and it’s just Kiedis’ naked voice begging you to “Suck my kiss!” One of the most primal of RHCP songs, it’s the beating heart of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and proof that what you’re singing about sometimes matters less than how you’re singing it. —J.H.
Recorded during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions but only released as a single two years later — when it turned up on the Coneheads soundtrack, of all places — “Soul to Squeeze” felt a little like a sequel to “Under the Bridge.” It had the same mellow, mystical vibe, driven by an airtight Flea–Smith groove and a dreamy Kiedis chorus hook. Frusciante had left the band by the time the video dropped — a carnival-themed clip featuring a cameo from Chris Farley and Kiedis befriending a chimp— but the guitarist’s double-tracked lead break is the cherry on top of the song’s melancholy lope. The lyrics found Kiedis lamenting soul-deep malaise (“I got a bad disease/Out from my brain is where I bleed …”) en route to nonsense-syllable rapping (e.g., the timeless couplet “Doo-doo do-do ding a-zang a-dong bong/B-dang b-dong b-somma-nomma kong-dong day”). In other words, this one, which made it up to Number 22 on the Billboard chart, checks pretty much every classic-Peppers box. —Hank Shteamer
A surprise influence on Californication: the Spice Girls. Flea’s 10-year-old daughter was a superfan, so the Chilis dressed as the Spice Girls for her birthday party. (Anthony was Posh; Flea was Baby.) Kiedis did some writing about his weird friendship with Sporty and Scary, in tunes like “Parallel Universe.” It’s a sad lament about feeling isolated, as he sings, “Far away you were made in a sea, just like me.” It was never a hit, yet became a live fan favorite, as Flea’s bass goes full disco. —R.S.
Starting with its gently flecked guitar, the title track of the band’s 2002 album feels at first like one of the Chilis’ quieter moments. But then Flea starts mauling his bass, the groove kicks in, and the song becomes, as Kiedis said, “an uber-bombastic assault of non-commercialism.” Kiedis spits out non sequitur rhymes, even bringing back the mysterious (and thought-deceased) character Dani. In each of its sections, “By the Way” veers off into a different direction. But in a testament to the way the band can effortlessly fuse practically every genre except Gregorian chants, it all hangs together beautifully. —D.B.
The early Nineties. A ruminative ballad. Themes of loneliness and missed opportunities. Bryan Adams? Sting? No, the Chili Peppers, who not only calmed things down for this Blood Sugar Sex Magik gem but infused their music with out-of-nowhere maturity. Their gentlest and most touching song to date, “Under the Bridge” emerged from an awkward starting point. While making that album, the newly sober Kiedis found Flea and Frusciante toking up in a studio and, on the drive home, freestyled a poem and melody “to deal with my own anguish.” (The title referred to an actual overpass in L.A. where Kiedis used to get high.) He initially resisted giving the nascent song to the band — telling Rubin it was out of their wheelhouse given how “slow and dramatic and melodic” it was — but eventually Kiedis relented. What emerged was a downcast tune that still managed to soar and be hopeful (like in the way he stretches out the word “love”), leaving behind all the pain and drama that went into it. —D.B.
One of Californication’s more tender tracks on the surface, “Otherside” has a chill mood that belies its harrowing message. “How long will I slide?” Kiedis sings, an apparent reference to his drug use and perhaps the addictions of Peppers past like Slovak. Not so fast, Frusciante said in a 1999 interview: In his world, “Otherside” was about the human mind’s ongoing fight between the conscious and the subconscious. “It’s the kind of lyrics that I really love,” he told Guitar World, claiming they were inspired by the occultist (and Jimmy Page muse) Aleister Crowley. “His books have a vibe that appeals to me a great deal.” Perhaps too much — in a recent interview, Frusciante admitted he was “deep into the occult” when he left the band in 2009. —J.H.
It’s all about that sublime, tendonitis-inducing, endlessly repeating guitar riff from Frusciante — which would, years after this song’s release, become a rite of passage for young amateurs on TikTok. Live, he’d play it over and over, in an impressive feat of endurance — no loop pedal in sight. Kiedis deserves major credit just for somehow finding room for a vocal part over that blizzard of notes, let alone packing it full of hooks. —B.H.
At any wedding, high-school game, state fair, or Super Bowl, when you hear the Chili Peppers, “Give It Away” is probably the hit blasting on the PA. The 1991 lead single from Blood Sugar Sex Magik became their most famous tune, summing up their freaky-styley funk at its most crowd-friendly. While Flea slaps the bass, Kiedis shares the spiritual lessons he’s learned from sages like Sly Stone and Bob Marley, proclaiming, “There’s never been a better time than right now!” (Sick burn on the Kaiser — though Wilhelm II died 50 years too soon to hear it.) —R.S.
“The Zephyr Song” is the closest the Chilis ever got to sounding like the Beach Boys — this is their “Feel Flows.” The melody is euphoric yet somber, a psychedelic trip that results in a cathartic sobbing session. The track is so magical, in fact, that the band’s guitar tech Dave Lee thought the opening notes were eerily similar to “Pure Imagination,” and Frusciante realized he was right. “I wrote that song during a period that I was way into watching Willy Wonka!” the guitarist told him. “That song must’ve been in my mind when I wrote ‘Zephyr Song.’” —Angie Martoccio
The Chili Peppers channeled personal and band history into the prettiest song of their career, the soft-bomb debut single from Californication. One might’ve expected the first new song from the band after the four-year break since their last album, 1995’s One Hot Minute, to be a funk-rock party starter. Instead whey went with returning member Frusciante’s plaintive guitar, a gentle grooves, tender singing, and Kiedis’ most personal reflections on an RHCP hit since “Under the Bridge.” The lyrics alluded to departed guitarist Dave Navarro, as well as Kiedis’ past with drugs and his own lifelong feelings of isolation and alienation. “Life can get good again despite all of that psychic and emotional and spiritual scar tissue that you gather along the way,” he said at the time. “Scar Tissue” is an anthem of overcoming for a band that has lived several lifetimes of trauma. —J.D.
The title track to Californication is the greatest song Kiedis has ever written, and yet, it almost didn’t happen. It was one of the first tracks he worked on with Frusciante when the guitarist rejoined the band, but the last one they’d record for the album — they just couldn’t get the right arrangement for it. Kiedis fought with the band to record it as the sessions were winding down, convinced there was something special about an opening image like “Psychic spies from China,” words that he claimed a woman actually told him on the street while he was visiting Auckland. “We have to do this,” he recalled telling his bandmates in his memoir Scar Tissue. “This is the anchor of the whole record.” Frusciante suddenly came up with the brooding notes that hit you like a sunburn, and “Californication” was born. Kiedis’ many verses reference everything from Kurt Cobain to Star Trek to Hollywood, ultimately summing up the ethos of the Chilis in one song: California dreaming is a lot darker than it seems. —A.M.
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