Flea took to X to stand up for ‘dumb’ music.
“My least favorite thing in music is ‘clever,'” the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist wrote in his tweet. A fan asked him in the comments, “Can you name an example?”
Flea replied, “Just any music where people arent getting the fuk down to their hearts blood. I love great arrangements and supreme virtuosity and harmonic knowledge, but the main thing is the get down. It comes dumb and it comes intellectual, but ‘clever’ is different.”
In a 2022 interview with Bass Player, Flea talked about his approach to playing bass, explaining, “I think about playing bass – particularly as it relates to the Red Hot Chili Peppers – as like a river. With the basslines and the way I want to play them, I want to live my life in a way that allows me to open myself up enough for this cosmic, spiritual river to flow through me.”
He also reflected on he practices much, saying, “I practice, I do my scales. I do my stuff. I study. I love music. I love the bass. I get more joy picking up my bass and holding it in my hands than I ever have in my life, you know. I love to play the thing. I’ve got my ’61 Fender Jazz and I love the lightness of it, the smoothness of the neck. I hold it in my hands and all is right in the world.”
The interviewer also wanted to know when he stopped focusing on showing off his bass skills and started playing differently as he grew in his career. Flea responded, “I don’t know that I ever really had that desire, consciously anyways, to be a show-off. Of course, I loved Jaco and Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller and all these great bass players, but I was more about having my own sound and my own style that sounded like me.”
On the other hand, Gene Simmons said in October to Guitar World that he’s not a fan of Flea’s bass style. He finds it more about showing off than creating memorable songs. He prefers simple riffs and doesn’t like slap bass sounds.
