10 years later: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Stadium Arcadium’

stadium arcadium

You would be hard-pressed to find a more polarizing band than Red Hot Chili Peppers. Despite their detractors, people have continued buying their records by the millions and flocking to see them live for the last three decades. Along with their numerous hits, they are a band that has continually evolved. Everyone knows Flea is a world-class champ on bass and Chad Smith has always beaten his drums like they owed him money. It’s frontman Anthony Kiedis who has gone from a yelping pseudo-rapper to a singer who can genuinely belt out tunes.

The X-factor for the band has always been guitarist John Frusciante. His glorious return on Californication—from absence and addiction—was a fairly restrained performance that breathed new life into the group. By The Way was the sound of Frusciante becoming comfortable with his own vocals and generously infusing them into the songs.

Stadium Arcadium was where everything came together in the form of a wildly unhinged double album. If it seems excessive, it is, but in a good way. The guitars sound simply huge and are incredibly layered, overdubbed and basically injected with steroids. The maturity that the resurrected band learned and exercised before wasn’t ignored, but rather, was channeled into a work where the self-imposed chains had come off.

The 28 tracks are divided onto two discs: 1 (Jupiter) and 2 (Mars). Jupiter contains most of the singles and most of the more immediate tracks. Left to its own devices, this first disc would be a fine album in its own right, maybe my personal favorite single disc of music they have done. “Dani California” was the rip-roaring introduction, “Snow (Hey Oh)” was the fleet-fingered and soothing number, while “Charlie” was delightful weirdness, rivaled in funkiness by “Hump de Bump” and “Warlocks.” Keep an ear out for Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (The Mars Volta, At The Drive-In) with a guitar solo on “Especially In Michigan.” Things get a little stripped down and acoustic on “Slow Cheetah” and “Hey” is a quieter song that closes out the collection nearly perfectly.

Mars contains one of the album’s biggest singles and more immediate songs, “Tell Me Baby.” While it also contains another of my other favorite songs from the band’s catalog, “Make You Feel Better,” it is certainly the more challenging disc. It doesn’t operate as successfully on its own as the first disc does and the flow is odd. After repeat listens, other songs begin to emerge through the fog. “Desecration Smile” is a perfect way to signal that this will be different from the bombast and theatrics of the previous fourteen songs. “Hard To Concentrate” is a flat-out gorgeous love song, while “21st Century” is a bass workout for the ages.

At the end of the day, Stadium Arcadium is probably too much for many of the band’s casual fans. Almost every multi-disc album that has ever come out has had people declare that it would be perfect, or at least significantly better, if it was cut down to the best single disc worth of tunes. A lazy way to remedy this case would be to plug “Tell Me Baby” and maybe two or three of the Mars tracks somewhere into Jupiter and push the collection to the very brink of an 80-minute CD’s capacity. In the 2016 world of cherry-picking MP3s and hitting the shuffle button, format length seems like a quaint concept, but one must think about this in terms of the realities of 2006. Taking this approach would have made the album easier to digest, but it would have deprived the world of so many good songs that, in hindsight, would be a shame to have shelved.

The urge to comment about every track is very difficult to resist. All 28 songs have at least something noteworthy even if it’s a chorus, a bass part, a guitar solo, something vocally that the band stumbles upon; there is so much that could resonate with you because it’s all over the map and it’s all played so skillfully. Maybe certain tracks just plain won’t click with you at all. That’s okay, too.

What strikes me most about this collection of songs and this era of the band is that all of the parties involved seemed to be at the height of their individual abilities while also being onto something special as a whole, which, it turns out, isn’t a mutually exclusive concept. This album encapsulates so much about what we have come to know and love about Red Hot Chili Peppers over the years while also pushing them forward to new creative heights.

As controversial a choice as it might be, all of that is why, if I were stranded on a desert island and was allowed only one RHCP album (what an odd thing to impose on someone), without hesitation, I would choose Stadium Arcadium.

Quality and quantity, baby.

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ninth studio album, ‘Stadium Arcadium,’ was released on this day in 2006.

J.J. Ellis
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