Music

You Need to Listen to This Song Right Now #49

Heavy Rotation — Pets, Porno for Pyros (Porno for Pyros, 1993)

Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that, one way or another, got incessant airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotations that a particular record was given on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales — good for record companies and artists alike.

Today, some people still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, just in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.

For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that I come back to from time to time, and still feels just as good. This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.

My aim is to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?

I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read this than the song itself. To that end, I put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I stick a live clip on at the end.

What song is in your head right now? Here’s the one that won’t leave mine today:

#49 — Pets, Porno for Pyros (Porno for Pyros, 1993)

Jane’s Addiction was massive in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Two albums, Nothing’s Shocking (1988) and Ritual de lo Habitual (1990), put them at the top of the Alternative Music heap, or as it was referred to at the time, “College Rock.”

In the days before “alternative” exploded with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, Jane’s was found on the back pages of Rolling Stone and Spin magazines. Their sound, with others such as the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, and the Replacements, provided a welcome respite from the steady diet that fans of guitar-driven music were fed on mainstream rock radio and daytime MTV.

There was something else to listen to besides Bryan Adams, Van Halen, and Motley Crue. You just had to know where to look. Or, more to the point, you had to know that there was something to look for.

But just as alternative music was exploding in the early part of the last decade of the century and Jane’s Addiction was ready to go stratospheric, the band played one last tour — Lollapalooza in 1991, the counterculture one-day festival brainchild of the band’s vocalist and songwriter, Perry Farrell.

And then that was it for Jane’s Addiction. For a while, anyway.

I was in that watershed summer between high school and college and had returned from a family trip to Europe in late August, and was told by two friends that we were going down to Seattle for this Lollapalooza event that I’d never heard of.

We were just kids. We didn’t know what we were getting into.

Violent Femmes, Ice-T and Body Count, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Rollins Band, and Living Color filled out the day and the evening, but everyone was there for Jane’s Addiction. And what a show they put on. I still remember it clearly in its mind-boggling glory thirty-plus years later.

What also stuck with me was the crowd. I’d been to a few shows by this point, but I’d never seen anything like this. For a white kid from suburban Vancouver, this was an eye-opening moment. A perfect prelude to my entry into university and the introduction to all the different kinds of people and ideas that would be assembled there.

This live music festival extravaganza blazed forward in the 90s and still continues in one form or another today. Though that was the temporary end of Jane’s Addiction, it was the beginning of Perry Farrell’s next musical project: Porno for Pyros.

The band's name was inspired by the many fires that spread across LA during the riots of 1992 after the verdict on the Rodney King beating by members of the LAPD. Farrell thought what he was witnessing in his hometown was pornography for pyromaniacs, which informed at least the first of the two albums that Porno for Pyros made in 1993.

“Pets,” The song in focus here, is a perfectly simple pop song to me. Its vibe is the summer of 1993, for me anyway, and provided the perfect antidote to the constant minor key grinding of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains that we were being fed then.

The message in the lyrics is equally simple, and I’ll say far enough ahead of its time that they still make perfect — if not even more — sense today.

A laid-back and sweet-sounding melody, in contrast to the theatrical and epic bombast of a lot of what Jane’s was about, keeps the short song pushing forward in an uncomplicated way.

“Children are innocent

A teenager’s fucked up in the head

Adults are even more fucked up

And elderlies, are like children”

Ah….In the circle of life, we all end up back where we came from. Children don’t know any better. Teenagers despair at the world they are born into. Adults are screwing the place up because they don’t know what else to do, and old people ride off into the sunset.

Is this thirty years ago, or is it now?

What are we doing? Where are we going? What are the consequences of the mess we are making of the only place that we can live? What would aliens think if they ever made contact? “Maybe Martians could do better than we’ve done.”

If they do, then “we’ll make great pets.” But will we even get that far? “My friend says we’re like / the dinosaurs / and here we are/ doing ourselves in / much faster than they ever did.” The difference is that dinosaurs had no idea what was happening. We do. And yet, on we go, hurtling to our collective doom through our collective actions and inactions, possibly going the way of the dinosaurs.

And that’s it. That’s the whole song. It fades out into a glistening, twinkling summer evening. A friendly reminder, bordering on a warning.

Are we careening to this fate faster than we could ever have imagined? If we replaced Farrell’s thoughts about being made pets by aliens with the same consideration of what Artificial Intelligence and the technology being produced surrounding it could reduce humans to, was he really that far off?

Here they are live at the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock in 1994.

If you have made it this far, it will occur to you that if this is #49 in this series, then there must be 48 previous ones. This is a correct assumption, and here I will link #48. At the bottom of it, you will find a link to #47, and at the bottom of that, you can — if you so choose — be taken to #46. This ingenious system that I thought up all by myself continues all the way to #1.

I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month, and if you use the link below, then I get a slice of that. We’ll make great pets.