In a series of videos uploaded to TikTok and
“This is one of the craziest things I’ve seen this year,” one X user wrote.
The song was the fourth single from the Grammy-winning rock band’s album of the same name, which reportedly showed a “more thoughtful, measured side” to the group. Released on June 8, 1999, the album was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ most successful release, selling over 15 million copies worldwide. To date, the hit has more than 1.4 billion streams on Spotify.
In the years since the song was released, fans have speculated about the meaning of the lyrics, attempting to connect it to contemporary world events. In a lyric video first uploaded to YouTube in 2012, commentators—some as recently as last year—shared their awe at the anthem’s perceived relevance.
“I never paid attention to what the message really is,” one commenter wrote. “I’m surprised to see how advanced it is [the lyrics were] and how relevant in today’s world.”
“It was like they looked into the future with this one,” another fan agreed.
One viral conspiracy theory about the Red Hot Chili Peppers predicting the future inspired a slew of reaction pieces, and other creators piled on with their analysis on the song.
Some of the lyrics mentioned as predictions include: “Psychic spies from China are trying to steal the elation of your mind,” which people claim is related to a late 2022 story about the Chinese hacking program. There’s also “Pay your surgeon really well to break the spell of aging,” which internet sleuths think foreshadowed the rise of plastic surgery. Another line, “And little girls from Sweden dream of a quote on the silver screen,” is said to be a reference to Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers declined to comment on the conspiracy theory to Yahoo Entertainment.
It’s not the first time a piece of pop culture has been accused of predicting the future. The Simpsons, For example, it is thought to have predicted everything from the 9/11 terrorist attack to the election of Donald Trump as president.
While it’s common to look at predictions in pop culture, it’s not so common in the world of pop music, Nate Sloan, assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California, told Yahoo Entertainment.
Some musicians try, Sloan said, citing as an example Zager and Evans’ 1969 song “In the Year 2525,” with lyrics like “You’ll pick your son, pick your Daughter too / From the bottom of a tall glass tube” that seem to point to the rise of in vitro fertilization. The first IVF baby was born in 1978.
Sloan explained that while pop music typically focuses on “the here and now,” listeners have always tried to look for bigger, more evergreen themes.
“Fans of pop music have always read between the lines of their favorite songs to find alternative meanings,” he said. “This is certainly most common in the personal lives of artists, but it does happen [finding] deeper meanings in pop.”
Chad Smith, the drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, almost foreshadowed this conversation that would take place decades later, saying in a 1999 interview about the band’s songs: “Our music should be about your own personal experience , and if you read too much into it, something might be needed. from there.”
The Red Hot Chili Peppers are also not the first band to be considered prophetic. The Beatles were thought to have predicted future events on several of their albums, despite John Lennon admitting that many of the lyrics were nonsensical. Taylor Swift certainly hasn’t helped suppress this idea in the modern era of pop music with her “Easter Eggs” and secret messages in her songs and music videos.
Conspiracy theories about pop music have existed since the 1920s. evolving from the way early musicians had to write in code to adhere to radio and censorship standards, Robert Fink, professor of musicology at UCLA, told Yahoo Entertainment.
“[Songs] had to be cleaned up or you had to speak in code,” Fink explained. “You looked for hidden messages in the lyrics of pop music, because it was essentially counterculture.”
Although censorship rules and language have changed, Fink argues that listeners and fans still expect lyrics to have deeper meaning.
“We are individuals who recognize patterns,” says Fink. “We are perceptually primed to find patterns in obscure or random data. I think pop music has a place in people’s imaginations, where it’s a fertile field to do that.”
Sloan pointed to the way the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform and compose their songs as what could have contributed to the song’s “dark or random” feel that Fink described. Sloane called the band’s songwriting process more “free-form” than other ready-made pop songs.
“A lot of them start out as jam sessions before building into a final song,” he said. “It’s interesting to think that the band’s stream of conscious musings would be so prescient years later.”
The lyrics are vague enough to apply to various events that occur at any point in history. There is also an element of listeners trying to make sense of the news and the world, and they do this by trying to find explanations – a popular, reassuring explanation is that it was inevitable, it was predicted.
“There’s always someone trying to look and see how the current situation is foreshadowed by generally apocalyptic texts from the past,” Fink said. He argued that in the lyrics of ‘Californication’ ‘things are spiraling out of control, California represents the fact that it is the end of the world.’
“It’s a context in which this happens at some limbic level, and strikes much the same chord as the book of Revelation: how the world will end,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people – young people – the pandemic has scarred them, and we now find ourselves in a war in the Middle East. This kind of thing doesn’t surprise me [song analysis] happens, instead of trying to figure out, which guy is Taylor Swift talking about?
