The dirty truth about feel-good hits

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Before we stage-dive into the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ contributions to pop music’s feel-good pantheon, a confession: Pretty much every entry in their post-”Californication” discography gives me hives. 

That wasn’t always true. To a kid raised on a steady diet of Bootsy Collins and Parliament-Funkadelic who dreamed of L.A. living, the Chili Peppers’ earliest output was funk rock magic. Somewhere in the bowels of my music collection hides 1985’s George Clinton-produced “Freaky Styley” and 1987’s “The Uplift Mofo Party Plan” on crumbling cassettes. I played 1989’s “Mother’s Milk” until the tape broke down. That led me to invest in 1991’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” on CD at a time in my life when I didn’t have much spare money to throw at anything other than McDonald’s.

Every carnival eventually ends, especially one led by guys calling themselves Ant (Anthony Kiedis) and Flea, who enjoyed flopping around stages wearing nothing but tube socks on their jalapeños. That may have been outré to a middle- and high-schooler trying to be cool, but at some point post-college, the Chili Peppers became synonymous with sweaty fools passing out in strip mall parking lots.

I’m not alone in this. A couple of years ago, comedian Jack Finnegan joked that Kiedis writes some of the most beautiful choruses in the world, only to flip into sounding like he’s experiencing a medical emergency during his verses.

That lyrical saint, Nick Cave, was more caustic — notoriously so — when he shared how he felt about these boys of California’s endless summer. "I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the f**k is this garbage?' And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers."

And yet, a few Red Hot bangers manage to endlessly caravan in and out of lives because they’re in constant rotation on Jack FM and other adult contemporary juke boxes: “Give It Away.” “Under the Bridge.” “Scar Tissue.” Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll be treated to their scorching cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.”

But if there is one Chili Peppers single that has attained divine feel-good hit status, it’s “Can’t Stop.”

A dirty little truth about “feel-good” hits, down to the catchiest ditty, is that they’re rarely a band or an artist’s best work. What they are is addictive, catchy, energizing and undeniable. Musical tastes are subjective, but the feel-good hit plows through all barriers. You may personally find some of them terrible, but most are bearable and all are virtually inevitable. If you hear them while enjoying the beach or a barbecue, you may at least nod your head along to the rhythm if not pretend, for just a few moments, to be kind of into it.

“Can’t Stop,” the second single from the band’s Grammy-winning 2002 album “By the Way,” is their longest-charting hit. Since the Netflix debut of the documentary “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel,” Forbes reports that “Can’t Stop” has been climbing the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts. It isn’t on the U.S. Billboard 200, but it now ranks among the 200 most-heard singles globally.

Regarding “Our Brother, Hillel,” the Chili Peppers released a statement clarifying that it is not an official band documentary, although it functions as a close examination of their formative years as well as a tribute to their founding member, guitarist Hillel Slovak.

Slovak died of a heroin overdose 14 years before the release of “By the Way,” in 1988 Even so, the film establishes how Slovak’s sound was and is the soul of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sound; John Frusciante, who joined the band after Slovak’s death, says in the film that his style is entirely informed by Slovak’s. That means Slovak, in his way, contributes his energy to “Can’t Stop,” helping it to embody the specific alchemy of the feel-good hit — a description culture snobs might write off as a pejorative but is actually very difficult to achieve.

“Can’t Stop” starts with an uncharacteristically spare riff by Frusciante’s standards, coupled with Chad Smith’s inerrant rhythm, we have the song’s spine. Together with Flea’s bass line, it creates a universally palatable sound that you don’t necessarily have to listen to closely to understand its positivity. This makes it a welcome passenger on lazy day trips or late-night drives, and a generally acceptable ambient addition to crowded good times.

You might even call “Can’t Stop” innocuous — although if you do, that means you’re not listening closely to the lyrics. Few of us do. That’s why so many feel-good songs don’t have to be about feeling good. Surely you recall the time “Lust for Life,” Iggy Pop’s grimly ironic heroin anthem, was licensed to sell cruises. Well, that’s like hypnotizing chickens.

“Can’t Stop,” in contrast, is adamantly positive and encouraging; the only thing Kiedis, a recovering substance abuser, says he’s addicted to is “the shindig.”  From there, his words march through a looping chain melody occasionally interrupted by a chorus pearl: “The world I love, the tears I drop/ To be part of the wave, can't stop/ Ever wonder if it's all for you?”

Listeners interpret Kiedis’ lyrics in many ways, but regardless of what he intended, the song’s message circles back to nurturing and harnessing one’s individuality into a creative fuel. Within the song’s verses, Kiedis gives shout-outs to other artists he admires, including Charlie Parker and Julia Butterfly Hill. Its accompanying video is inspired by the work of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, specifically his “One-Minute Sculptures” series.

While it’s true that, if not for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we may have never been subjected to the many audible violations of Korn or Sugar Ray or Papa Roach or Mr. Bungle, “Can’t Stop” spawned a wonderfully freaky-styly animated tribute via a 2025 episode of “Love, Death & Robots” directed by David Fincher.

Not having the song as part of your normal listening routine doesn’t get in the way of enjoying Fincher’s six minutes of magic, imagining the band and its audience at their 2003 show at Ireland’s Slane Castle as marionettes. For music fans, I should say. Hardcore “Love, Death & Robots” viewers were apparently disappointed that Fincher’s film failed to live up to any part of the title.

But the contagious nature of the band’s biggest singles has, over time, earned them a fortified respect for the legacy. In a March 2025 entry on The Red Hand Files, Cave addressed his famous burn on the Chilis, calling it uncharitable and obnoxious before going on to call Flea “a human being of an entirely different calibre, indeed, of a higher order.” They went on to collaborate on a musical track Cave describes as “becoming a slowly evolving cosmic dance, in the form of a reconciliation and an apology.”

In its way, this moment between two artists may have come about because of or despite the feeling “Can’t Stop,” may have engendered in Cave, since it was in heavy rotation in 2004, around the time he was said to have made that remark, unaware of how true that lyric calling music “the great communicator,” would turn out to be.

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A bonus recommendation from Salon Senior Writer and host of “Standing Room Only,” Amanda Marcotte:

In the face of the relentless bad news coming from D.C., fantasies of escaping to a carefree era of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s are hard to suppress. We’ll never have hair metal or “Point Break” again, but you can recapture a bit of that era with the rap duo Joey Valence & Brae. They’ve just released a deluxe version of their 2025 album “HYPERYOUTH,” and the name, like everything about these frost tips-and-Converse-loving bros, is right on the nose. 

These two may be from Pennsylvania, but their music makes me feel like I’m shotgunning brewskis on Venice Beach in 1993. Do not look to these two white boys for lyrical genius or deep emotions. But if you want to make like you’re a shirtless Anthony Kiedis riling up all the teenage dirtbags, Joey Valence & Brae are your guys. We deserve to wallow in that era when skate punk and hip-hop collided in a glorious explosion of adolescent insouciance. You should fight for your right to party — now, more than ever. So put in your hair gel and your baggy shorts and get down to the beats of Joey Valence & Brae.

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