TS: Jane's Addiction vs Faith No More

In the 90s: FNM>>>Jane's

"Fuck you Ill skate to the Beach...and Ill look better getting there".

Addiction was better for looking down on the Epic loving jocks though.

2004
FNM > Jane's

I can't listen to Jane's Addiction any more and I used to worship this band. Maybe because they're all bad rock stars. BAD I SAY, BAD! Maybe if Eric A. had rejoined the band I would have had some faith but after seeing Flea take a bass solo in the middle of "Stop" and completely fuck the song up I threw in the towel. I mean look at them now? Can they be bigger douche bags? Maybe I'm just mad I don't have my own reality show. Maybe if I were (stil?) a goth kid still holding on to my youth and the glory days of when The Cure were still good and talking about seeing members of Bauhaus out at the clubs. There's too many maybe's going on. Jane's sucks now! PERIOD.

On the other hand, I put on 'Angel Dust' the other day and enjoyed it all the way through. Anything and everything post 'Epic' blows the Jane's stuff out of the water. It was so far ahead of it's time. Plus Patton is aging like a fine fucking wine. Fantomas? Lovage? His label Ipecac? Dillinger EP? God bless him for making and putting out some of the best music of the 2k's.

-weenis

Sacrilege!

FNM by a long shot.

oh and dave navarro is and will always be, a cock-smoker. dude should join audioslave

x-post

FNM = they were pretty good.

Mr. Bungle = I now tell you a tale. Written up some years ago for a small mailing list that Brian aka donut bitch and I were both on (his comments appear as occasional parantheticals, like this one). Please enjoy:

---

Right. The year is 1992 -- a nation trembles, etc. The hazy glow of the Clinton era vaguely is sensed on the horizon, Perot stalks the landscape like a great big stalking thing, Eddie Vedder is anointed King of the World to everyone's utter disdain and Dr. Dre thinks, "Hm, a solo album named after weed, lemme see..."

Down in the sweet balm of Orange County, at the long-gone and unlamented Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, a ye olde theatre-in-the-round, Mr. Bungle announces a show, to considerable excitement in certain sectors. The lingering KNAC crowd is especially drawn to this, due to the Faith No More connection, which is about all most people have actually heard (those wondering about KNAC need know only this, that it was a station which nowadays in its online only format pretends it was all Metallica back in 1987 when in fact Ratt and Poison and so forth were its bread and butter more so than our favorite Napster-lovin' combo -- but I digress). In the meantime, feckless young innocents as myself and dear Brian, though we did not know each other at the time, who actually had heard the album and loved it, considered this a Distinct Blessing, as FNM were about to fire up the Angel Dust tour and Bungle would have to disappear for a while. Off we all went.

As friend Steve and I fended our way past the leathery-faced 35-and-up permatan David Coverdale rock dude and dudette types, as well as the more understandable young semi-proto grunge/whatever crowd, we concluded that this was perhaps going to be a strange evening. (BRIAN -- don't forget the Red Hot Chili Peppers/Fishbone dorks..) Grotus was the opening band, so we settled on in as they Did Their Thing, and it was a fairly fine thing at that, industrial rock hoohah of a gone sort. Viva, etc., off they go, the Young Gods' TV Sky plays on the monitors, and the next band sets up.

Said band are them glorious Melvins, who are on a separate tour of their own. Turns out they were going to be in the area that night anyway, so the fellow Bay Area folk in Bungle ask them to join the bill. Some time earlier that day, they also apparently swore a pact, which we found out about later from friends with connections to the groups. The pact went something like this -- most people in the crowd weren't going to know who the Melvins were anyway (the Kurt connection was still only vaguely incipient in the public consciousness, a year away from the Atlantic signing, etc.), and it was possible their unique way around things would not be highly appreciated. Thus, it was agreed upon: should the crowd welcome the Melvins to their hearts, Bungle would come on stage and give the crowd what it wanted, a kick-ass straight up play the 'hits' show. If the crowd trashed the Melvins, though, Bungle would seek to do nothing else other than completely and totally fuck with them.

The Melvins do their thing. As time passes, the crowd turns ugly, as cheerful cries of "You suck!" increase in volume. The Melvins mostly laugh their asses off and keep doing what they do, finally leaving to the general crowd's delight. (BRIAN -- Joe Preston didn't seem to care, Buzzo tried to make the songs slower and more grueling, AND AND AND Dale Crover went up to the mike after their set and said to the crowd "Mr. Bungle says fuck you") Myself, I was new to them and didn't know entirely what to think, but I thought most folks were being way too harsh.

As it happened, Bungle very clearly agreed with me.

Bungle take the stage, dressed entirely in combinations of wrestling masks, Aztec outfits and other oddities -- no surprise there, per se. The crowd is cheering, pumped, the pit is ready, bring it on. The band acknowledge noone and nothing, finish setting up and launch into...

...a twenty-minute low-key jazz noodle (BRIAN -- eeh wouldn't say that... it was more of a Melvins/Earth type guitar buzz except even more minimal and grueling). Patton wanders around the stage, apparently speaking in tongues to himself. The band (BRIAN, then) play the closest thing to a cover version of Spinal Tap's "Jazz Odyssey" there is, only without the energy and pace. It's...interesting, true. The crowd vaguely quiets down, then starts to get more and more impatient. Bungle, of course, ignore their feelings entirely. It gets to the point where the pit starts crowd-surfing even when there is *no* music remotely approaching pit/mosh/surf levels, which apparently increases the band's utter contempt for the crowd.

After that, for the next thirty minutes or so, Bungle proceed to play one of the most fucked-up sets I've heard in a while. Ignoring their album entirely, they proceed to amuse themselves with some indescribable nonsense, interspersed with equally indescribable cover versions. Thus, we are entertained at points by a cover of Tom Jones' Bond theme "Thunderball," sung by Patton in a strangled roar, and that one Alan Parsons Project song that goes, "Time...keeps flowing like a river...to the sea...," except Bungle turned up the amps and Patton practically yells out, "TIME...KEEPS FLOWING LIKE A RIVERRRRR...TO *THE SEA!!!*"... (BRIAN -- they also did a song without any instruments, just this Negativland-ish sample loopy thing.)

(BRIAN -- at this point, this is when they did songs from the first record.. the
"We will rock you" thing happened in the middle of one of those songs)

Somewhere in all this the drummer busts out the Queen "We Will Rock You" beat or its equivalent and Patton gets the crowd going with claps and shouts, leading to this priceless exchange:

Patton: "All right everyone, REPEAT AFTER ME! (in time to the beat:) BUD-WEI-SER!"
Crowd: "BUD-WEI-SER!"
Patton: "MICH-EL-OB!"
Crowd: "MICH-EL-OB!"
(continues in this vein for a bit)
Patton: "All right, now! I LOVE THE MEL-VINS!"
Crowd: "I LOVE The mel..." (fading rapidly as they realize what they're saying)
Patton: *bending back, in full madman voice* "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!" *turns away and ignores crowd*

Towards the end they did in fact start doing a couple of album cuts, but only that -- "Travolta," "Love is a Fist," "My Ass is On Fire." They abandon the stage. To my semi-surprise, there's enough cheering and callbacks for an encore, as many others have been booing lustily and complaining loudly. So the band come back for an encore...logically, it's another weird-ass crazy jam of something nobody recognizes.

And then this happens:

As one, the rest of the band stop what they're doing and turn to the drummer. Initially he looks confused, as far as anyone can tell with his mask on. The others then start singing, enjoyably, "Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to..." etc.

The drummer stands up, a look of fear showing through his mask. He immediately throws his sticks down and runs off. Remember that this is a theatre in the round, with the band set up center, playing to one half of the venue, the other half roped off and empty. So the drummer charges up one of the empty aisles as fast as he can.

The other band members are displeased with this. They therefore drop *their* instruments and charge after him. To Steve's and my utter amazement, we see them catch up with the drummer and completely beat the living shit out of him!

And that was it. No 'good night,' no final announcement, nothing. Shortly thereafter the lights go up, so we all leave.

Steve and I were utterly, totally amazed, we had clearly seen one of the best shows of our lives, something Brian agreed with me on when we compared notes much later. All around us the leathery types and moshpit morons and others were bitching and complaining and saying what shit it was -- we realized that they had completely and utterly missed the joke on them. It was conceptual art terrorism of a high degree, and I've never seen anything like it since.

As a postscript, Brian saw their show last fall -- it was a stunning affair by all accounts, and apparently they played more of that first album at *that* show than they did at this show I've just detailed. (BRIAN -- keeping in mind that they don't really regard the first album as anything good anymore... heh heh) ;-)

Sorry, I shoulda made myself clearer. I agree 100% with you! What I meant was that funk/funkiness is a non-issue, given that both bands weren't TRYING to be funky, and only made a few half-hearted stabs in that direction. Chris pulled the Red Hot Chili Peppers out of nowhere, and I figured it wouldn't take long before someone lumped all three bands together as part of some nonexistent funk/metal/whatever "scene". I just hoped to stop it before it started. (Next time, I'll be more specific!)

All Alan Parsons Project songs are about a midlife crisis.

xpost :: Agreeed re: California's superiority

wrong

FNM blows Jane's out of the water...

Also: Incubus should be hung as THIEVES...

FNM blows Jane's out of the water...

not true either. both were great

Also: Incubus should be hung as THIEVES...

or just hung

I like jane's, but this really isn't a fair fight.

FNM = godzilla.

jane's = a chihuahua.

then how come it was only metal nerds with FNM posters on their wall, but everybody had jane's paraphernalia?

it's weird to compare these bands, i feel like they are very dissimilar - there was almost nothing sexual about FNM for instance

xp maybe where you lived...not round my way. FNM were much bigger. jane's were more of a cult thing.

in any case, I was speaking aesthetically, not in terms of inter-tribe cultural impact.

of what i know (which is admittedly very little of FNM), Jane's wins this handily.

there was almost nothing sexual about FNM for instance\

There was a lot of sexuality on The Real Thing: From Out of Nowhere, the title track (maybe), Underwater Love, Edge of the World (disturbing, icky sex), Surprise, You're Dead (it's a vampire song at least, which is probably sexy for some).

Introduce Yourself had some moments too: Chinese Arithmetic is pretty sexy.

I don't know the other albums as well.

Speaking of Chuck Mosely, from his wikipedia page:

Chuck's new LP "Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food" will be released in June of 2009 on Reversed Image Unlimited.

Genuine LOLs

there was almost nothing sexual about FNM for instance

I swallow, I swallow, I swallow, I SWALLOW!

Should be a poll.

I would have went with Jane's if you asked me in the '90s.

But Faith No More's sui generis aggro-metal holds up WAY better than the overblown Zep-meets-college rock of Jane's

Jane's but I like both.

Always thought of these bands as going with each other. (Sort of King's X too, at the time. And Living Colour. But mostly these two.) Appreciate and cringe at them about equally, but guess I'd go with Jane's by a hair for, uh, doing the fake-funk art-metal thing with more feeling and maybe more groove.

funk was such a small part of what FNM did that I always find it weird that that's how they're defined/remembered. their big hit single is a bit of a millstone, reputation-wise.

much as I like jane's, I can't listen to any of their albums all the way through - to say nothing of 'strays', which manages just one good song. for me, every single one of FNM's albums is at least 90% solid (yes, even the first and last). and their range was far, far wider than jane's, who could never have pulled off anything like jizzlobber, RV, malpractice, woodpecker, just a man, stripsearch, pristina, etc... but I guess versatility makes a band's character harder to grasp. FNM reached extremes of viciousness, invention and beauty that jane's just wouldn't/couldn't.

thinking about it, moseley-era FNM is far closer to jane's in terms of emphasis on groove, 'idiosyncratic' and potentially off-putting (but still ace) vocals, breadth of artistic focus, etc.

Well, I'm probably stretching the definition of "funk" (but then so did both of these bands) -- basically, I think they both put emphasis on having a groove (sometimes, if not all the time) in ways lots of other art-rock bands inspired by metal (esp post-'80s) never did. (That Jane's, in a usually failed way, took some of their rhythmic ideas from Zeppelin doesn't negate this, either.) Anyway, as I said, I'm not committed to choosing either one. Do think FNM's "range" generally made me hear them as scattered and disjunct, and therefore emotionally detached, in ways Jane's maybe wasn't quite as much, as ridiculous and irritating a fuck as Farrell could be. Don't doubt that FNM may have experimented more; just not sure the experiments worked all that often.

the reason these bands go together has nothing to do with musical signifiers or sounds and everything to do with the fact that at their height they were both really into the idea of offending people

and I hate to agree with chuck about anything funky but Jane's "swings", FNM does not.

in the end I think I tilt more towards Jane's for a lot of the reasons chuck mentioned in that Farrell seemed to really invest a lot more genuine feeling into his stuff, his approach to songwriting was like fusing all this mystical-archetypal mumbo jumbo into a personal narrative about how transgressive and exciting it was to be, like, in a multi-racial junkie artist relationship. I'm really only familiar with Patton-era FNM and while Angel Dust is a great, great album from start to finish it seems much more clinical and cold in its execution, as if the songs were constructed via venn diagrams.

xp In Stairway To Hell, fwiw, I rank the one FNM LP I included a couple hundred places higher than the one Jane's album I included. Distinguish in the intro between a "conceptualist faction" of turn-of-the-'90s art-metal (Queensryche, Savatage, Riot, Metallica) and a more irony-minded "eclectic faction" (King's X, Jane's, FNM, 24-7 Spyz), with bands like Voivod (the only one of these groups I unconditionally love) and Living Colour straddling both camps. Probably utter horseshit, but I'm sure it was a fun theory to come up with at the time.

Also, Roddy Bottum can blow Jane's addiction drummer without even trying

― Charlie Howard, Thursday, April 16, 2009 11:07 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

??

^^^yeah that's ridiculous

the best thing about FNM was Patton, the best thing about Jane's was all of them together (individually their annoying traits are brought to the fore - but together they were somehow more than the sum of their parts)

roddy bottum's keyboards blow away stephen perkin's drumming?

(imperial teen was fabo!)

luv fnm, never got into jane's

fnm was funny and mean, jane's was some fucking hippie bullshit

singing about fucking mountains

singing about coming down the fucking mountain

10-minute songs, incense

makeup, fucking kaftans and shawls

three way sex and mountains made out of drugs

though i will say, the intro to "mountain song" is one of my go-to soundcheck bass riffs, second only to the riff from the last part of "the chain" by fleetwood mac.

^ fucking hippie

you should rock out "horse with no name" next time, hombre

oh wait your band broke up

(just teasing, <3 you)

i can never think about ftm without thinking of mr. bungle, and i can never think about mr. bungle without thinking about how i assume all of their songs are about poop. so ftm=poop.

frankly, i suspect my soundcheck was the best part of the set

should i dress up like this guy for my next "gig"?
http://pro.corbis.com/images/AAEF001509.jpg?size=67&uid=%7BF647638A-711E-417E-836D-D8338578E879%7D

he was like the hot chip of his time

Do think FNM's "range" generally made me hear them as scattered and disjunct, and therefore emotionally detached, in ways Jane's maybe wasn't quite as much, as ridiculous and irritating a fuck as Farrell could be. Don't doubt that FNM may have experimented more; just not sure the experiments worked all that often.

this is a pretty accurate assessment (apart from I'd take issue with the experiment hit rate). jane's were certainly a more emotion/spirit/feel-led band, but while this approach could yield greatness, it also ran far greater risks of being massively cringeworthy. or, indeed, fucking hippie bullshit.

it's a common criticism of FNM that when they did 'emotional', say, 'just a man', 'she loves me not', 'this guy's in love with you', they always had the escape route of pleading irony if needs be. but I feel their approach to more emotionally vulnerable music was always deliberately ambiguous, rather than sneeringly ironic. and I likes me some obfuscation and ambiguity.

Easy Like Sunday Morning cover = ironic or not?

as with this guy. spanish eyes, I started a joke, I reckon it can be taken either way, and is probably a bit of both.

it's overly simplistic to say that the ballads, etc were just the band pissing around. the only trueblood metalhead in the band was jim martin. roddy and patton certainly had genuine affection for softer, easy listening stuff.

it's fair to say that they were purposely trying to wrongfoot the heavy crowd, but not that they weren't into lionel/burt/the bee gees themselves. except jim. who was fired for his metalness, lest we forget.

regardless of the intention, easy was certainly received as ironic by the metal fans. but that's just a self-defence mechanism, innit?

lolz never heard the Bee Gees cover!

it was a bside. I have the cd single

they also performed it on The Word.

they were supposed to play Easy but they went into this instead

incase you ever forget what a wanker Terry Christian is

"bill martin" lol

All I know is that I owned Nothing's Shocking for like a year, and listened to it numerous times, and the only things on the disc I found were worth my time were "Jane Says" and the first thirty seconds of "Mountain Song", whereas I overheard the Album of the Year during the soundcheck at my buddy's band's last gig, and thought it was pretty terrific...so that's where I'm coming from...

I love both these bands, but FNM's versatility puts them over the top. Regardless of my mood, there is a song that fits. These days, when I'm in the mood for Jane's Addiction, I put on Judas Priest's "Victim Of Changes"; Jane's entire career is various rips from parts of this song, which is kind of why I love them. Sad Wings Of Destiny FTW!

Just got word that "Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food" is available online. Can't check song samples because I'm at work, but will definitely be looking into this tonight.