E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The opening - rousing - chorus on the new, much-hyped double album from RHCP is "California Rest In Peace / Simultaneous Release" - and this just about sums it all up. It seems that, with the recent voracious rise of a China that has zero tolerance for Kyoto Protocols the world is suddenly in a boomtime, with an economic bubble that sees the value of everything rising at once - copper, gold, oil, property. It is a heady counterintuitive moment - at once, the 00s are surfing on the edge of destruction but also, well, surfing. No other artists currently alive and so nakedly ubiquitous serenade this cocksure, self-destructive, overabundant moment so well as the Red Hot Chili Peppers . By thrusting their sugar-tongued subtext so firmly into a cheek bronzed in La-la Land, by making California their own Yeatsian Byzantium at the end of things (no country for fully-dressed men without six-pack torsos), that is, a place where annihilation and fulfillment collide in a tectonic shift...