Aging & Wisdom Quote by Chad Smith

It lands like a tossed-off aside, but it’s actually Chad Smith doing quiet myth-management for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Flea and Anthony” names the band’s two most identifiable forces: Flea’s muscle-memory bass and Anthony Kiedis’ persona-driven frontman energy. By singling them out, Smith frames the group’s “funk” not as a vague vibe but as a shared obsession rooted in specific listening habits. The casual “and stuff like that” is doing cultural work: it signals crate-digger authenticity without turning the moment into a lecture.

The nod to “old school Meters” is the key credential. The Meters are a musicians’ band - New Orleans pocket, economy, groove as discipline. Invoking them plants the Chili Peppers’ funk in lineage rather than novelty, pushing back against the idea that the band’s early sound was just hyperactive punk-kids-goofing-around energy. Smith is saying: this comes from somewhere, and it comes from players who understood restraint.

There’s also a subtle division of labor embedded in the sentence. Smith isn’t asserting his own taste; he’s describing theirs, like a drummer acknowledging what the rhythm section and singer are chasing so he can lock in behind it. In an era where rock often mythologizes inspiration as pure spontaneity, this quote insists on homework - the kind you do on vinyl, in rehearsal rooms, turning “funk” from costume into craft.