jane's addiction | "then she did" | ritual de lo habitual | 1990
my junior year in high school wasn’t all hippie love and frivolity. the teenage angst was still heavy. the cure and morrissey, bauhaus and black flag still remained in my rotation. oddly, i had never heard of jane’s addiction before 1990. it was instant love when natalie cain convinced me to do something i never did – buy a tape without hearing it first. (peer pressure!) i still generally don’t do that. but this risk paid off.
my experimentation with crossing genre lines (no, cory, not gender lines) wasn’t indiscriminate, of course. to this day i absolutely loathe the heavy metal hair bands of the late 80s. i wasn’t a huge fan of “grunge”, but i will forever bless it’s dysfunctional little spirit for killing off the likes of poison, motley crue, ratt, etc. [shudder.] it wasn’t until i was in college that i realized how similar jane’s sound is to, oh, say, guns ‘n’ roses. doh! there’s enough difference there, though. really. there is. i promise.
i guess this song is an ode to perry farrell’s mother who left him exposed to the hard world while still a child when she committed suicide. he compares her to vincent van gogh. i used to ball listening to this song knowing that.
