Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Hildegard von Bingen, Albert Einstein, Susan Sontag, Manic Street Preachers: the smartest of our breed, humans whose brains teamed with their obsessions to create order where there was chaos, to make sense of this crazy world we live in. Add yet another notch to the totem of big-league thinkers: Jane's Addiction, who were recently deemed by British scholarly journal New Musical Express to be worthy of their esteemed “Godlike Genius Award.”

Geniuses pictured above

The band's four original members – Perry Farrell (IQ of 141 on the Weschler Scale), Eric Avery (189 IQ), Dave Navarro (82 IQ) and Stephen Perkins (212 IQ) – will reunite next Wednesday, April 23 for the first time since 1991 to perform at the El Rey and accept their award. Academics are expected to fly in from all over the world in an effort to parse meanings and analyze Jane's Addiction's lyrics; dense with layers of subtext and metaphorical gymnastics, encoded messages and complicated meter, the band's words have been the subject of countless academic conferences, dissertations and doctoral theses.

i am the killer of people

you look like a meatball

i'll throw away your toothpick

and ask for your giveness

The rumor is that in addition to performing some of the band's classic material, lead singer Perry Farrell will, near the end of the show, announce that he and Perkins have over the past decade been secretly researching the mystery of so-called “dark matter,” the hypothetical form of matter that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. (Note: I stole the definition of dark matter straight from Wikipedia; I'm no Navarro.) It's expected that, after a balls-out version of “Standing in the Shower … Thinking,” the band will transform our understanding of the very building blocks of human creation.

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Jane's Addiction Original Lineup Play LA Next Week

By Mark Mauer

For the first time since the band originally split seventeen years ago, the four original members of Jane's Addiction will play in L.A. as part of the NME Awards on April 23.

Dave Navarro posted this note on his blog about the reunion.

So, yes… As I posted a few days ago, Jane's has been honored by NME this year and we will be accepting a lifetime achievement-like honor — at the NME Awards at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on April 23. Perry, Stephen and I will attend the show as a band. Before the press and a few blog commenters start digging up old quotes, stories and opinions, let me tell you that the three of us have been speaking regularly have decided to focus on what's most important… The music. So, all the “But I thought you said”, “But so and so said”, “What about… blah, blah, blah…” is irrelevant at this point. Trust me… There is nothing anyone is going to remind us of that we don't already know. Everybody in the world has said something over the top due to an emotional charge. The bottom line is that we have been getting along great and are moving forward with our personal and musical relationships. These days, the press loves to take something great and find reason to fuck it up. That's the only way they think a story can sell. They think, “Hmmmm… This is great news and all, but it's all nice and drama free. Lemme dig up a bunch of old baggage from years ago so my editor will feature my work!” The same thinking that the news networks have had for years has found it's way into entertainment. Just watch the top stories on any channel. Anyway, we know… We lived it… No need to remind us! As it stands, we are planning on attending the awards as a unit and I really don't have anything else that is concrete to report at the moment. As soon as I do, you will be among the first ones I share it with. We are all very happy with how things are evolving!

This news has been floating around for a few days, I realize, but ot was only yesterday that Eric Avery said that he' join the group on stage.

Reuters quotes Avery: “I have always considered reunions to be a way to make a quick buck, and it sells short my own experience of it the first time around…

“The reason I started to even consider this is because it's honoring the past instead of trying to recreate it.”

It's also still worth noting if only for a chance to watch a clip or two of the band in it's prime.

Here they are at the Roxy in 1986 playing “Ocean Size”:

Though the band has sporadically recorded and toured since the release of the 1990 LP Ritual de lo Habitual, it's always been without bass player Eric Avery, who had his own band, Polarbear, and came out with a solo album just this month called Help Wanted.

And one more: “Mountain Song,” Honolulu, in the band's “last” show, Sept. 26, 91.

Dave Navarro is being modest and actually wearing clothes unlike the rest of the group.

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