So why is Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
There’s music that I associate most closely with my high school experience (Led Zeppelin’s first six albums are a perfect example of this) while other stuff ties tightest to my college years (I’ll go with The Mighty Mighty BossTones here).
There’s a smaller number of things that span both eras and even more rare is a single album that bridges the gap between the end of my high school life on Long Island, New York and my early college years at Binghamton University.
The Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head is one, and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik is another.
If you weren’t around at the time and perhaps not of a certain age and demographic, it’s hard to describe how massive and pervasive the Chili Peppers and Blood Sugar Sex Magik were for a few years.
Example: during my freshman year at Binghamton University, I can recall witnessing multiple college bands covering songs from Blood Sugar Sex Magik, most typically “Suck My Kiss” and “Give It Away” (though I’ll note that none of the lead singers of which could quite match Anthony Kiedis’ delivery or intensity on give it away give it away give it away NOW).
And that’s not even getting into the wall-to-wall pop cultural penetration that “Under the Bridge” enjoyed at its peak. I’d wager that to this day it remains the single most well-known Red Hot Chili Peppers song of all (corroborating this assertion: it’s the most popular RHCP song on Spotify, with some 1.5 billion+ streams and counting as of this writing).
Looking at Blood Sugar Sex Magik as a whole, it’s a massive and ambitious undertaking, jam packed with 17 tracks that play for 73 minutes, enough to get through a chunk of a party and then simply hit “play” on the CD player to run it back again.
And I dig the entire thing – there’s not a single song that I dislike. I even have great adoration for the final track, the minute and change of “They’re Red Hot,” which shows off the frantic pace the band can put on when they feel like it, and it’s a great fun ride.
Overall, the mood and tonal shifts throughout the album are impressive, especially in the way that it all works as a whole. There’s the melodic funk of “Mellowship Slinky in B Major,” the funk verging on hip-hop of “Apache Rose Peacock” (a track I adored back in the day), the earnest and beautiful pop/rock of “Breaking the Girl,” and the attacking and slashing funky metal of “Give It Away” and “Suck My Kiss.”
Oh and then of course, there’s the gorgeous, melancholy, and almost hypnotically compelling “Under the Bridge,” a song that could have only been written by someone who had experienced severe drug addiction.
Could the album have been reined in here and there (see: the eight minutes-plus of “Sir Psycho Sexy”… which honestly is fun, funky, and goofy if sophomoric)? Sure, but overall Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a sprawling, sweaty, funk-metal monster by a band suddenly unleashed on every mainstream rock kid in America.
Some stats & info about Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, SoCal Bands, Funky Metal, Hard Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #186
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Blood Sugar Sex Magic released? 1991
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #127 out of 1,000
Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
What I’ve got, you’ve got to get it, put it in you. Reeling with the feeling, don’t stop, continue.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.