The A.V. Club: How would you describe Ultra Payloaded?
Perry Farrell: The term I use is "sedimentary rock," because it was built in layers.
Let's bracket for a moment comments on Farrell's well-documented pretension and focus on the fact that this is a hilarious, even self-deprecating joke. Then let's move on to the part where we watch some Youtube together.
Typically what we remember about the early nineties (if we're 23 like I am) is Nirvana and Pearl Jam, maybe Soundgarden occasionally. These bands were great, but Jane's Addiction and Blind Melon (dummy anagram for Blind Lemon) were spearheading a revolution mainly focused on barretted hair and scratched voices. Look at Shannon Hoon in this clip from Woodstock '94:
Sad that this music didn't really engender a lasting following. Picture this perfect picture: The 80s look like they're actually dying away, sort of. People are playing guitars again. People are looking back at that time and kind of saying "Hey we looked ridic back then, but maybe there is something to looking ridic, if it isn't all self-serious and we actually put a little actual humor on top of the whole thing (and I'm not talking about hipster irony or sarcasm)." Is it just me or did Perry Farrell actually look cool with a bird's nest of scrunchies in his hair? I went to private school during this era, so maybe I missed out on the legions of teenies who copped his steez, but the bigger hunch I have is that it never even really happened, and that's why when we dig into collective memories of the 80s-90s transition we only remember that everyone parted their hair down the middle Kobain-style. Which brings me to another point about our current state of affairs.
I was at the bar last night sipping on some Manny's Pale ale and having a few smokes (I know I know I'll kick soon but it's hard when you work in the resto biz. . .) and actually got hated on because I do drugs relatively infrequently and recently have not been an uncommon drunkard. There lies in the Pacific NW and maybe in all aspiring-hip parts of the country a druggy variation on the frat-boy "drunk as hell is cool and masculine" head-trip. That is, if you aren't doing heroin or basing on the baselines, or at least trying to score some serious shit, you just aren't cool. The same applies to tattoos and body mods. Which has me going all, "Wait a minute guys these things are cool but are they fun?!" And of course the answer is difficult to tease out but from an authenticity perspective it seems like the superficial trappings of being a rad kid often overtake the beneath-the-surface coolness of people actually just having a barrell of laughs over something lame. Self-destruction is often a part of cool people's lives, but we ought to be careful to think whether it is the coolness or just sort of a correlated phenomenon. I.E: Druggies use slang and slang is cool so you gotta use drugs to say cool slang. I.E: People saying things like "I'm a writer" to you while you're at work and then you look over their shoulder when they're on break and their notepad says something like:
I get so angry sometimes.
I just want to punch something.
I am so mad at you it burns like a fire.
But they're sipping a whiskey and seven while they write this so there must be a Buke type thing going on. At least that's what I picture them thinking. There are more examples but I think you're getting the picture.
All of this inauthentic derisive awktown garbage is cased to some degree in the weird Male-Female dialectic we've had since Baudelaire. Writing is totally gay and for sissies, so you have compensation for this with drugs or sex or whatever, people trying to look mysterious and down for the cause at the same time. "I miss the comfort in being sad." We all know where the whole thing ends, too, junked-out in the corner with sore nipples that you've shown everyone because you got the cute bars through them this past weekend and maybe next time when you get your clit done something will really happen and you will be legit but in the meantime you've got some percocet so you're making it, baby, it's just around the corner and you can see it wagging its tail and when you catch it you will be a lion and no one will fuck around with you anymore.
On the other hand, the above videos are the opposite. Perry looks lame, but he's confident enough that one is even glad he looks lame and it gives one hope that maybe some utopian day we too can look totally lame but it'll be cool because we're doing it to have a good time and not to impress other people with our dark side and the steep slope of degeneracy.
It looks to the trained eye like this, Blind Mellon and Jane's Addiction, as opposed to The Killers or Interpol is the kind of 80s gay-wave we really need nowadays. Farrell and Hoon both did the dirty dance with the China but if you look at them in those videos they were rapturously in love with the music that they made. Tonally and melodically, they both sang in major keys more often than minor and they had the damned courage to actually get gay (poverty-of-relations gay not Queer Eye gay) onstage, wear some serious female hair products and put in parentheses the extent of their degeneracy so it wouldn't get in the way of the one thing that mattered: the joyous (gay) message of their sad sad songs.
Gluing fur to your neck doesn't make you a lion. In a different world Shannon Hoon would've kicked and would be alive today. There would be more scratchy voices on the radio singing longing songs of joy. But they didn't quite make it, and we've unfortunately forgotten some of the near-hippie wavecrest that came around when we were really quite young.
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