Do you know why you want to be so beautiful?

If you opened the included CD booklet and read the first passage, it truly explains the exact sentiment that I have about the band, Jane's Addiction...

"Jane's Addiction was one of the truly great bands. From a decade that will be remembered musically as the one that gave us new wave and all those hair bands, Jane's was a stand-out whose records still deliver and whose shows are still talked about years later."

I cannot recall any other bands that have been labeled as creative as critics have done with Jane's Addiction. Their work has been described as:

"...soul expanding."
"...a band that needs to just be seen to feel the full impact."
"...you'd never felt as if you were treated as a dummy..."

and my personal favorite:

"...came to you on several levels at the speed of sound- hardcore, working-the-blvd.- ferocity, too hip surfer zen aloofness, drugged out stratospheric abandon, served up with an almost childlike naivete, terrifying, unifying, riot-inciting, and easily more thought-provoking than any corny 'message band' hoped to be."

And yet, in the success that the band has endured through the years, Perry Farrell has always downplayed it as something that "wasn't never meant to be..."

Finally, to get in the point of this epinion, the best compliation of Jane's Addiction mastery can be found in the album, "Kettle Whistle" (Warner Bros. Records).

What's really nice about this album is that it's not just a one-dimensional CD, containing songs that were just produced in a studio and precision-engineered to annoying perfection. It contains live songs, demos, and out-takes. There are 15 tracks on the CD, including 4 new tracks, never released before (except, maybe through widely-distributed bootlegs).

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Track Listing

1. Kettle Whistle - "What makes a kettle whistle?" Perry asks in this song. (NEW TRACK)

2. Ocean Size - (DEMO 1988)

3. My Cat's Name is Maceo - (DEMO 1987 W/ ADD'L RECORDING 1997)

4. HAD A DAD - "...had a dad, big and strong..." (This happens to be one of the funniest song I have ever heard, even if it wasn't meant to be humorous, but it was the way that Perry sang the song with his deep, whispering voice). (STUDIO OUT-TAKE 1988)

5. So What! - (NEW TRACK)

6. Jane Says - "...she only knows when somebody wants her..." (LIVE AT IRVINE MEADOWS 1991)

7. Mountain Song - (DEMO 1986)

8. Slow Divers - (LIVE AT THE ROXY 1986 W/ ADD'L RECORDING 1997)

9. Three Days - (LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM 1990)

10. Ain't No Right*
11. Up the Beach* - "Here we go now... home, home home..."
12. Stop*

* Track #10-12 performed live at the Hollywood Palladium 1990

13. Been Caught Stealing - (STUDIO OUT-TAKE 1989) This is one of the most popular Jane Addiction's songs and one of the most requested songs on most alternative radio stations.

14. Whores - (LIVE AT THE PYRAMID IN L.A. 1986)

15. City - (SOUL KISS 1988)

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The Cons

It's easy to disregard the very slight mistake the band makes when it comes to being in sync with their songs because after all, most of the songs were performed live. However, one particular distake that I have with this CD is that they put way too much emphasis on Dave Narravo's guitar playing (he is the MOST SKILLED guitarist that you have NEVER heard of, my friend) and therefore making it extremely difficult to hear Perry's voice.

On some of the songs, you can tell when they actually screw up on fade-out/incorporating different instruments and then it creates more conflicts. Again, it's not something to be rash over because it's a live album for the most part.

If I was to put the cons in a proper perspective, it could be interpreted as an effort by the band to show that while the media perceive successful musicians as super-super-humans, these guys are just as much as flawed and humans as we all are.

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For this album, the band created a promotional video that received quite a heavy airplay on MTV for a short period of time. I never was rather warm to this type of straight-forwarded music until "Kettle Whistle" was playing and I heard...

"...and why do we need to belong to someone else...?
Well, I know why...
We all want to be...
Beautiful too...
Beautiful too..."

Well, I guess that's "too hip surfer zen aloofness" for ya.