The Alternative Number Ones: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Soul To Squeeze”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

This is the one where he's like, "Diddle doodle dingle zingle dog bone, bading badam basummadrumma kong gone bad." It's the serious and heartfelt addiction song where he's like, "Diddle doodle dingle zingle dog bone, bading badam basummadrumma kong gone bad." If you really need to put a serious and heartfelt addiction song on the Coneheads soundtrack, then maybe it should be the serious and heartfelt addiction song where the guy can't stop himself from launching into the goofy-gibberish scat zone. But here's the thing that nobody considered in 1993: Maybe the Coneheads soundtrack didn't need a serious and heartfelt addiction song. Maybe the Coneheads soundtrack, and the movie attached, didn't need to exist at all.

I sometimes wonder about the effects of a childhood spent singing along, blissfully unaware, to radio hits that were all about the euphoric and destructive embrace of heroin. In the early '90s, so many of the big, generational alt-rock hits were all about heroin. Sometimes, the silly throwaway soundtrack songs that became random hits were also about heroin. What did that do to us? How did it affect us? Is it any different from my son, who's about the same age now that I was in summer 1993, singing along to rap songs about Xanax comas? Maybe every generation is full of musicians sneaking drug references onto the airwaves, parents pretending they don't notice, and kids who actually don't notice. Maybe that's the natural order of popular music.