My zine wasn’t what I thought I wanted it to be. Music is an important part of my art, but so is being a woman so I wanted to combine the two. I originally wanted to portray the yearning to not live in a male dominated world from the perspective of female musicians, but after some consideration I restarted and instead decided to focus on the Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Return of the Dream Canteen, specifically the aspects of psychedelic funk from the 60s and 70s. I’ve loved the Chili Peppers forever. I remember the first time I went out of my way to search up one of their songs was at the beginning of my sophomore year of highschool when my best friend’s older sister played Hey Oh (Snow) for us as she took us home. After that day, I went on a deep dive of their albums and fell in love with their perfect blend of funk and rock. In my new time as a fan I had realized that the band was on a hiatus and hadn’t released music since 2017 when they still had a replacement guitarist. Lucky for me, in the year 2023 they released two double length albums: Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen. These two albums broke the band down to their essential inspirations, rock and funk. For my zine, I wanted to visualize the pictures painted in my head by Return of the Dream Canteen while making a tribute to my favorite band that’s been the foundation of some of my strongest relationships. In order to create this zine I selected twelve songs from the seventeen song long album. Some of the songs were more straightforward than others, such as using pictures of Eddie van Halen for the song Eddie, but some songs required a deeper reading of them. For example, the song Bella is an upbeat funk song about a girl moving to Los Angeles to experience all the joys of it, but instead can’t help but find herself in the melancholy of the city. In order to portray this, I referenced a frame from the movie, Belladonna of Sadness, a movie that also carries the same melancholy of the song. I still kept this piece upbeat by including the traditional retro blues, pink, yellows, and oranges from the 70s. Overall, I really enjoyed transcribing my own individual interpretations of this album directly into art.
Related Posts
