Jane’s Addiction – Ritual De Lo Habitual: #756 of best 1,000 albums ever!

Why is Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Lo Habitual on my best 1,000 albums ever list?

A delivery of a strange and wonderful musical experience.

What does Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Lo Habitual mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?

I might have been a little bit aware of Jane’s Addiction by way of their debut album, Nothing’s Shocking (an album that I would come to greatly admire over the years, as you can see by its #739 of best 1,000 albums ever slot), but they were definitely on my radar thanks to the popularity of “Been Caught Stealing,” their hit song off of Ritual De Lo Habitual.

Listening to “Been Caught Stealing” with fresh ears, it’s a pretty strange experience and good reminder that Jane’s Addiction is a band that excels in delivering outstandingly strange musical experiences.

After a wild bass line kicks off alongside a bunch of dogs barking for… reasons (because they’re guarding whatever’s been stolen, perhaps?), it becomes a big, fun, oddball, and bouncy adventure lead by Perry Ferrell’s distinctive high-pitched vocals and Dave Navarro’s excellent guitar work.

The “Been Caught Stealing” music video helped propel the song’s and the band’s popularity. Like the song, it’s strange, interesting, and a little bit funny. My favorite part was and is the catwalk of sorts that forms at a grocery store, with shoppers and the band strutting their stuff down one of the produce aisles.

As good as “Been Caught Stealing” is, it’s tempting to think that it could have been something of a novelty hit unless you knew better. Which is to say that Jane’s is a rangy band with all kinds of angles and sounds. I’m a huge fan of “Stop,” which captures the band’s exuberant, powerful hard rock-meets-alt rock vibe exceptionally well. This is also a song that very few singers except for Ferrell could do full justice to.

Two of Ritual’s nine songs – “Three Days” and “Then She Did…” run over eight minutes in length and are each epics of sorts. “Three Days” does a particularly good job of showing off the band’s quieter, gentler side before building up to an explosive final section.

Personal stuff that’s somehow related to Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Lo Habitual

During my freshman year at Binghamton University in New York, the floor that I lived on had a sign on it that read “The Ward.” So of course everyone referred to it as The Psycho Ward.

There was this one kind of strange but amiable guy on my floor who was a huge Jane’s Addiction fan. I recall precisely two specific things about him beyond that. One is that he had a poster on his wall that I believe was of Bruce Willis in his Moonlighting 1980s-era prime. The detail though that resonates is that my dormmate took some dirt or mud and created a dirt/mud mustache for Willis on the poster. To this day I find this to be slightly unsettling for reasons I can’t entirely explain.

The other specific thing I recall about him is a conversation that we had about music. As mentioned, he was into Jane’s Addiction, and also industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. I asked him where the direction of industrial and hard rock music might be headed, and he responded, “Harder and harder.”

Rock on.