Sikamikanico - Lyrics and Meaning

Lyrics and Meaning

Kiedis wrote much of the song's lyrics during a period when he felt distraught and emotionally drained. He had maintained sobriety for roughly three years and felt that this had distanced him from his bandmates. While the group worked on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Frusciante and Flea often smoked marijuana together, decisively ignoring and disregarding Kiedis. Because of this, Kiedis felt that Frusciante was "no longer in world." Driving home after rehearsal in April 1991, Kiedis felt a profound sense of loss; his best friends, Flea and Frusciante, in some form resented him. The depressed state of mind he subsequently entered reminded him of his heroin and cocaine addiction during the relationship he had with former girlfriend Ione Skye. The dejection he was experiencing, coupled with memories of Skye and prior drug use, led to emotional distress: "the loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I'd had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge."

Kiedis' feelings of alienation from his bandmates led him to believe that the city of Los Angeles was his only companion: "I felt an unspoken bond between me and my city. I'd spent so much time wandering through the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me." The line "Sometimes I feel like/My only friend/Is the city I live in/The City of Angels/Lonely as I am/Together we cry" shows a direct link to Kiedis' isolation and sense of susceptibility. Despite these emotions, Kiedis believed his life was better without drug addictions, telling Rolling Stone that "no matter how sad or lonely I got, things were a million percent better than they were two years earlier when I was using drugs all the time. There was no comparison." The optimistic ideology gave birth to the chorus of the song: "I don't ever want to feel/Like I did that day/Take me to the place I love;" the place he loves being his band mates, friends and family.

One of the most notable verses in the song discuss the harsh effects of drugs, their role in destroying many of Kiedis' past relationships, and impact on his happiness. Based on one of Kiedis's experiences, the verse of "Under the Bridge" illustrates his efforts to enter a gang territory under a bridge to purchase drugs. Kiedis was forced to pretend that a sister of one of the gang members was his fiancée to be permitted inside. Although he successfully acquired the drugs, Kiedis considers this moment to be one of the worst of his life as it demonstrated the level to which he was willing to sink in order to feed his addiction. Because of this, the singer refuses to acknowledge the location of the bridge, though he notes that it is in downtown Los Angeles. Using clues provided by Kiedis in previous interviews and in his autobiography Scar Tissue, writer Mark Haskell Smith concluded that the bridge that inspired the song was located in the city's MacArthur Park.