Been Caught Pandering

Jane’s Addiction: manufacturing the impression that we care if they go away

JANE’S ADDICTION | A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (RHINO)

By Jessica Hopper

April 30, 2009

Jane’s was my first. They weren’t the first band I loved, but they were the first punk band I bought a tape of with my own money, at the Sam Goody in a Cleveland mall while visiting my aunt; it was 1991 and I had just turned 15. I stayed up all night listening to Jane’s Addiction on repeat—it was thrilling and intimidating. The band’s music is woven into most every memory I have of the following two years, and Perry Farrell, in his infinite opportunism, has managed to sustain a multidecade career by trading on similar relationships with millions of former fans.

On the backs of those fans, Jane’s have returned, with a box set that dredges their early career, an imminent nationwide tour with Nine Inch Nails, and a headlining slot in August at the multimillion-dollar festival they helped build nearly two decades ago. The totemic position that Jane’s Addiction occupy in the story of the 90s—at least for those of us at a certain age—is largely due to their defining relationship with Lollapalooza, whose ’91 inauguration was also the band’s first farewell. They came to us and became our emblem, unifying one Alternative Nation under a slap-bass groove, but the idea that this was merely by happenstance is a case of history being written by the winners—or at least by musicians who’ve stayed stationed on the periphery of our awareness via hideous all-star side projects, well-intentioned globalist raves, the occasional partial reunion, and Dave Navarro’s perpetual dishabille.

They’ve lingered for 15 years, creating the appearance that we must for some reason want them not to disappear—as though they’ve done anything to renew their cultural capital since “Been Caught Stealing.” But in fact they’ve been reintroduced again and again not to satiate a public clamoring for their presence but rather at the whim of multinational institutions: major labels, megalithic festivals, VH1. Farrell is now the doyen of a rarefied group of rock heroes who survived the 90s and are now stringing along once-devoted fans with reunions, reissues, embarrassing entrepreneurialism, and next-level Corgan-esque Internet batshitness. (Trent Reznor is probably the lone exception to the law of diminishing returns.)

Rather than gird the Jane’s Addiction legacy, A Cabinet of Curiosities degrades it, spreading a paucity of ideas thinly across three CDs and a DVD. In its selection of demos, live material, rehearsal versions, videos, remixes, and covers there are 14 repeated songs, seven of which appear three times. This isn’t a new strategy either: their first album was a heavily doctored live disc, many of whose tunes would surface again on their proper studio albums. Here we get it all again . . . again. The epics—“Mountain Song,” “Ocean Size,” “Summertime Rolls”—are still grand, but nothing in the box set surpasses the original versions. The band’s multiple re-formations and the postmortem expansion of their discography seem intended to convey their importance, but all this recycling just underscores that Jane’s are not our Led Zeppelin but rather our Doors.

The best CD is the third, but it probably won’t register that way. If you listen in order, the wow that disc one sparks—the rush of “Oh man, I loved this song!” and then the flood of memories—lifts your brain halfway out of the music, and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and you’re woozily stepping out of the Tardis, wondering about that antiracist skinhead you briefly dated who traded you a Soul Asylum shirt for your “This Is Not a Fugazi T-shirt” shirt and then never called you again. But by hour two the charm of the flashback wears off. Memory lane becomes a desolate highway, even if you know all the words to every song. By the time you reach the Hollywood Palladium show on disc three, you don’t care how good it is. You’re ready for the trip to end.

The live material is all from 1990, which is significant. As the Palladium set list makes plain, every good or great song they were ever to write was already birthed and articulated by that point—19 years ago. This box exists for no other reason than to exaggerate the significance of Jane’s Addiction and thus substantiate their headlining slot at Lollapalooza. It’s not a genuine artifact; it’s the emperor’s new corpse.

To believe that Jane’s Addiction headlining Lollapalooza again is somehow historic, to be psyched about this recurrence, is like masturbating to the memory of losing your virginity. Sure, it was meaningful when it happened, but 20 years down the line, it’s a pity if this is what’s getting you off. If what was our pinnacle then is still our pinnacle now, it reflects pretty poorly on how we’ve been spending our time.

What Jane’s Addiction is trading on in 2009 is not music, it’s nostalgia. In fact, nostalgia has been part and parcel of their career from the beginning, as innovative as their punk-metal fusion may have seemed at first. In the early 80s, California punks were shaking off the hippie hangover, that bad Manson juju that hung over SoCal like ancient smog; they rejected it with spitting inhumanity and nihilism. But Jane’s arose a half generation after Black Flag and the Germs, on the cusp of the college-rock revolution, when R.E.M. was putting legs on the idea that you could maybe make this a career. Jane’s were cooled-out surfers, a hedonist cabal born of Hollywood, where every day is the Day of the Locust, and while they rejected punk’s abject denial of glamour and pleasure they kept the velocity and aggression. Their true genius is that they played both sides. Perry Farrell leaned hard on the hippies’ sensualist legacy: stay high, love free, fuck the government. With different music, “Pigs in Zen” could’ve been a Country Joe & the Fish song. Low-rent hippie ideals can pass for punk if you shriek them.

That’s not to say Jane’s Addiction weren’t fair stewards of the turning of our innocent years. They bequeathed us a loose pagan permissiveness, injecting junkie patois into eager corn-fed hearts during that twilight time before heroin started killing people you knew and fell back out of fashion, back when slap bass was not yet wholly offensive—you know, the good ol’ bad ol’ days, when wearing an outfit consisting of nothing but a panty girdle, a rosary, and combat boots (as Farrell did) was a good way to show everyone who the real freak was.

They were the perfect band for boys who wanted to be bad and free and girls who wanted to mean something to someone. For me they were the soundtrack for the summer when my primary concern went from when my braces were coming off to whether there would be any lasting effect from doing acid every other day. They had songs about being on drugs, shoplifting, fucking, and being a freak in a straight world; they mirrored our existence eloquently. They had mosh parts and ballads. They met all our teenage needs—and they haven’t forgotten it.

Why this campaign for our sclerotic hearts and minds? Perhaps it’s because we’re the last generation to come up thinking of music as something we’re supposed to pay money for, and they figure they’d better milk us till we can give no more.

But we’re not exactly the passive victims of this scam. To believe, to attend, to spend is to be complicit in manufacturing the sentiment that reunions like this depend on. To be nostalgic for a time is to assert that it’s worth remembering—that our generation mattered. And we’re happy to allow our sense of our own importance to be used against us as a marketing tool.   

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