He lost his relationship and felt estranged from the rest of the Chili Peppers. He had pushed everyone who supported him in his life away. However, just because he was clean did not mean that he was happy. He was rehabilitated in 1989 and was clean during the release of the album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The song takes place during Kiedis’ recovery. Kiedis’ persuasiveness through emotional connection with the audience shows his ability to use Pathos giving actual details of his life to engage the audience. While Kiedis does not use positive ethical values in the song, he does use emotion, and extremely effectively, to get his point across to the audience. Kiedis is deterring his audience away from a life of drugs by using his own troubled past as a warning, and to do this he takes away his own ethical appeal. This reversal works perfectly with the main argument of the song, however. Instead of the central figure of the song being someone worthy of respect, someone who the audience wants to root for, Kiedis intentionally portrays himself as a screw-up who deserves what he got. He is painted as a man who forced everything good away, and he suffered the fate of isolation because of this. The lyrics take away all credibility that Kiedis has. Through these words, the song actually uses the opposite of Ethos to appeal to its listeners. Under the bridge downtown, I gave my life away.” Under the bridge downtown forgot about my love. Under the bridge downtown, I could not get enough. “Under the bridge downtown, is where I drew some blood. Kiedis explains this in the lyrics of “Under the Bridge”:

His drug problem got him kicked out of the band for a brief period, pushed away Ione Skye, his girlfriend at the time, and destroyed his life by making everything, even music, less important than getting a fix. It does this through explaining how unethical and destructive Anthony Kiedis’ life was on drugs, appealing to the audience’s emotions by showing how alone and distant Kiedis had grown from his friends, family, and band mates, and how, despite the isolation he felt during his recovery, his life on drugs would always be his lowest point.Īnthony Kiedis’s addiction to Cocaine and Heroin took priority over everything in his life. “Under the Bridge” makes the argument to a modern audience that addiction to drugs will ruin the user’s life. When I first heard it, in 2008, it quickly became one of my favorite songs. Millions had heard its lyrics, its emotional, heartbreaking story of a man whose life had been torn apart by drugs and was trying to repair it by himself.

I was twelve when I first heard “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Kiedis book