Classic or dud : Jane's Addiction

personally I am not sure there is a "respectful" way to memorialize someone who you (allegedly) gave heroin when they were 14

publicly, anyway

It may not be my place to judge – but knowing she was only 17, and died the next year, does put the song and album cover in a somewhat different context for me.

Yeah this has been an eye opening thread fer sure

Hooking your 14-year old trust fund baby cousin on heroin is peak Robin Hood Romanticism amirite.

i didn't know until now that she was PF's cousin? also did not know she was 14-15. what i knew amounted to "xiola" + "heroin" + "died young"
i was a teenaged magazine reader and i have a feeling the music mags weren't dwelling on the inappropriate nature of that relationship very much? idk. i am embarrassed to admit that i cut pics of this band out of magazines and taped them to my wall with all the other pictures i cut out of magazines and taped to my wall.

"I was the first guy she ever did heroin with": https://youtu.be/zNR8JitAWo8?t=1609

yikes

I don't think anyone needs to feel bad or defensive or whatever, but it is interesting that for such a mythologized band, the potentially uglier angles, which I gather have never been hidden, have not often been mentioned in the press as problematic or whatever (AFAICT). speaks to some pretty specific blind spots I guess?

such was the state of music journalism in the late 80s/early 90s
no one gave a shit iirc

Yep.

This isn't an indictment of Jane's Addiction fans btw, it's just sad how this behaviour remained entrenched even in groups that partly defined themselves in opposition to the overt machismo of their predecessors.

In the same clip, he talks about discovering she was his cousin after the fact.

Well, going back to my comparison to Motley Crue, even as recently as whenever The Dirt came out, I don't recall any reactions to those sleazy tales that went beyond mundane shock and titillation. Just lots of "lol, that's Motley Crue for you." It's possible that for many years/decades, fans as well as writers viewed rock stars of all stripes as sort of exotic animals, yet somehow never made the connection that this kind of bad behavior was shockingly/typical, and that if all of these acts had all of these stories then, well, maybe they're not that unique or exotic after all, just pervasive. They were just par for the seedy, scumbag course. A feature, not a bug, as it were.

Huh, can't say I've ever been a Jane's fanatic, though I have the first three records. I had no idea about Xiola at all so, yeah, this has been an eye-opening revive.

Not to pile on – but according to this 2001 piece, the “Jane” featured in the band’s name (and most famous song?) wasn’t too thrilled with the name (“I didn't take it as a tribute at all”), and I wonder if she consented to this:

Bainter's photo appeared on the insert of the vinyl version of the first Jane's album, and on thousands of posters that appeared all over the world. "It was very hard for my family," she says.

whenever The Dirt came out

The book, or the movie? I wrote about the movie for Stereogum and had...some thoughts.

I wrote a thing about that whole era of winking at "bad rock star behavior"

https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/the-dirt-netflix-movie-motley-crue-book-adaptation.html

xpost The book. By the time the movie came out the tide had turned pretty dramatically, so that even Nikki Sixx wasn't even trying to defend their behavior, he was iirc claiming Neil Strauss made the worst of it up.

But, like, Crue, Jane's Addiction ... I'm willing to believe the worst anyone says about demonstrably gross people and their respective bad behavior.

This revive is fantastic. I'd missed it. Wow. Thank you, ILM :)

By the way, I thought I'd put this comment here, from a YouTube video of 'Summertime Rolls':

Eden Lobb
1 year ago

This song always makes me feel nostalgic for a life that I never had. It makes me feel like I am am old man reflecting on my youth, but I'm 22 and I was homeschooled and do not have memories like that]

This revive is fantastic.

You could even say it's a… great revive.

But, like, Crue, Jane's Addiction ...

you can keep doing this but it's not going to start making more sense

You know I'm not suggesting they share many sonic similarities right? Or any? They are just similarly scummy and hedonistic hard rock LA people doing the things they do, the things that can fill a salacious oral history. Makes sense to me.

Los Angeles is literally all they have in common

Don't forget tattoos! So scummy

Come on, I know you all disagree, and they're not some perfect analog, but they have at least a little more in common than that.

those two bands and Oingo Boingo

Yes. But only those three bands.

I have to put it straight out there, that I am struggling in this conversation, as someone who was raped at the age of 13, and has zero desire to condone rape culture or cape for creepy dudes.

And yet, also, as someone who had consensual sex with older people before I reached the legal age of consent, (in fact even had a song written about me by a local punk band before I turned 18, which I *did* view as a tribute) I am struggling just as hard with the way that the girls/women in consensual situations like Xiola's are treated like their agency, their desires, their active participation just doesn't matter. We're missing her voice - I wonder if any of her poetry survives - and what she thought about the relationship, if she felt she was groomed or abused, or if it was as emotionally and creatively stimulating for her as for Perry and Casey? Not that it excuses or condemns Farrell for his part - but because her consent and motivation and agency matters, in determining if the album/art is disrespectful or a tribute. It's interesting to me to read the actual Jane's actual story - you know, it's complicated, Jane's story isn't simple, because addiction and recover isn't simple. But I relate far more to the Janes and the Xiolas in these stories (and I knew women very like them, back in the 80s) than it seems like some of you think about. That stuff like this seems less cut and dried if you were more likely to have been the Xiola than Perry Farrell (or Motley Crue).

As gross as Crue's behaviour was - that they treated women like pieces of meat - there's also something weirdly puritanical and often quite swerf-y about how the men who *oppose* this treatment, also treat the female participants as non-humans in a dehumanising way. Is it possible to condemn the Crue, and problematise Farrell's actions - without turning women into victims they may not have felt like they were? ARGH. I hate this discussion, I hate the conflicted way I feel when I participate.

I know that she got cancelled for later behaviour, but Jia Tolentino's essay on Lori Maddox and David Bowie, was really great at getting at some of the intensely complicated nuance around how we talk about this stuff, without discrediting or dismissing young women and their experiences.

This is a super fraught topic for me, so I'm probably going to bow out now - because, as a rape survivor, I do not want a bunch of dudes going around saying "Branwell excuses rape!!!" when I absolutely 100% do not, and I do not want to get crucified - or completely triggered - over another misunderstanding.

https://giphy.com/gifs/dancing-shark-forum-igR5863TALcSk

xpost to Josh )

It's not even as simple as "you excuse the band because you love the music they make" - there are bands I've loved much harder than Jane's who I've dropped much faster, because it was completely 100% clear that their members (in some cases, men I idolised!) were straight up abusive or violent towards women.

It's much more, "consent matters, agency matters, the women matter". And that's complicated.

I, too, never knew much or any of the backstory of the lyrics/theme of RdlH including Xiola who was depicted on the front cover and even pictured in memoriam in the dedication of the liner notes (!!! I swear I was a fairly observant fan of music pre-internet), but I thought this exchange upthread was worth a second-look:

such was the state of music journalism in the late 80s/early 90s
no one gave a shit iirc

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:12 PM (one hour ago)

and then...

I wrote a thing about that whole era of winking at "bad rock star behavior"

https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/the-dirt-netflix-movie-motley-crue-book-adaptation.html

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:26 PM (forty-nine minutes ago)

and I quote:

Unlike Crüe, ’90s alterna-dudes were often using their spotlight for progressiveness and inclusivity. Perry Farrell brought alt-lit bookstore Amok Books on the first Lollapalooza, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain decried homophobes in the Incesticide liner notes, the Beastie Boys published a pamphlet about respecting women in the mosh pit, and Minutemen’s Mike Watt put a Kathleen Hanna answering-machine message about statutory rape on his major-label solo debut. The actual backstage behavior of the alternative era was another story, obviously, and a lot of bad behavior was justified by intellectualizing shock tactics as “transgressive.” However, the public sentiment was tonally light-years from Poison singing “I Want Action” in front of a drum riser painted like a woman’s legs.

I don't think the Crue and Farrell are cut from the same cloth, although this Xiola tragedy reveal is incredibly unsettling. Because these events transpired over 30 years ago, I did a quick usenet search of her name which revealed she was a promising mixed-media artist and was well liked by all who knew her, and she also dated Angelo Moore (Fishbone) around the same time as Perry.

Not sure where I'm going with all of this other than:
1) Xiola's story is absolutely tragic and Perry (always seemingly portrayed in media as deep/spiritual/romantic) is really indefensible
2) Josh in Chicago (who I'm a huge fan of) has a very uh... unusual take on the LA underground scene confusing it with the Rainbow/Whiskey glam universe.

consensual situations like Xiola's

Are you sure that qualifier applies here? Age of consent laws exist for a reason, don't they?

xpost Ha, I admit I'm being at least a little facetious.

Yeah, I mean, again, per that excerpt. The *tone* and *vision* and *intentions* and *presentation* of the artists were wildly different, even if you correctly don’t want to split hairs between “raping teenagers because it’s badass” and “raping teenagers because I’m a cool bohemian free spirit weirdo”

That all said, there was probably a little more Entitled California Rock & Roll Douchebag in Perry and Dave than, say, Primus and Faith No More and Fishbone

@Whiney, there's a really good oral history of early Jane's in the Spin 2003 that you probably have access to? I just started reading it and it's pretty good.

Spin, Aug 2003

see if this works, starts on p. 68:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Gxaz3RhzGKoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ads, ads everywhere. I'd forgotten what that's like.

Are you sure that qualifier applies here? Age of consent laws exist for a reason, don't they?

Even that's not cut and dry, though, insofar as these vary widely over time and between places - if Xiola were in Canada in the 80s, she would have been legally able to give consent (to sex, not heroin) even at 15, for example; so was it a non-consensual act just because they were in California? (Legally, yes.) Or were Canadian teenagers giving consent legally but not morally? (This might be an arguable yes as well but it's not clear-cut.)

And this is where we get above my pay grade so I'll note that I do like the solo on "Three Days" a lot.

It's a great solo, yeah.

Age of consent laws do vary a fair amount from context to context, no doubt about it, but for my money, 14 (more so than 15) is an exceedingly low threshold, pace Italy, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, etc. I certainly take your point, though.

(I think it was actually 14 in Canada as well pre-08.)

I don’t presume to know if Xiola did or didn’t feel like a victim, or if she might have considered the song & LP cover to in fact be awesome tributes to her short life. But knowing that Farrell began “dating” her when she was 15 (and he was 23 or 24), and that he introduced her to the drug that would soon kill her, makes her “consent” seem heavily complicated.

rolling age of consent and ripping navarro solos thread 2020

But knowing that Farrell began “dating” her when she was 15 (and he was 23 or 24), and that he introduced her to the drug that would soon kill her, makes her “consent” seem heavily complicated.

That very informative SPIN article says she was 13-14. He was 9.5 years older than her, so yeah still 23-24.

To his uh... credit (?) he didn't know she was his cousin until after she'd passed away.

Either way, extremely poor judgement. I don't care if you're from Flushing, Ann Arbor, West Hollywood or Punkeydoodles Corners.

(I think it was actually 14 in Canada as well pre-08.)

Yep, unless the adult was in a position of authority, which kinda begs the question imo.

Age of Consent guitar solo: https://youtu.be/MxH5odhoKfU