Rock’n’roll needed some re-energising back at the beginning of the 21st century. It was a new millennium – the old rules need not apply. Queens Of The Stone Age were just the guys, a crew of playful, charismatic mavericks from the desert determined to reshape the rock landscape in their own offbeat image. Led by growling pussycat Josh Homme, a man halfway poised between hug and headlock, they were just the tonic that 2000 required. Their second record Rated R was the bottle of gin it was mixed with.
It turns 25 next week and the breakthrough albums for one of modern rock’s most defining bands sounds as vital as it did upon arrival. The chugging psychedelia and locked-in grooves of their self-titled 1998 debut suggested Homme was heading into uncharted territory after the dissolution of Kyuss, the stoner-rock trailblazers he co-founded in Palm Desert, but Rated R hammered home the point. An exhilarating meld of hard-rock riffs, melodious hooks, twisted deviations, pounding rhythms, explosive dynamics, it was a record thrillingly at odds with itself, where the heavy sounded light and the light punched you in the face when you weren’t expecting it.
For Homme, the group’s ringleader and provocateur-in-chief, this was the chance to truly make his mark. “I really wanted to ween our audience onto the idea that we were going to play everything,” he told XFM’s Matt Everitt. “After the first record, it was establishing a new sound for myself and the second record was about fanning out the music and introducing the strange. I wanted to add a weird quirk, like, ‘Come touch the weird’. It was an interesting time cos we felt very free, it was like you feel under the radar, even to your own label.”
Having signed to Interscope, it was QOTSA’s first record on a major label but rather than feel like he needed to craft a more mainstream sound, Homme felt like he’d been given a green light to head out into the wild. “I wanted to be on Interscope because they had all these bands where I wasn’t necessarily in love with their albums but they were strange bands and they seemed to accept them,” he explained. “I always felt like Primus were a strange band and they were one of the first rock bands on Interscope. I felt like if they were excited about Primus then they’d be really excited about me and I’m not singing about nacho cheese or something, I’m singing about LSD. They’re very close. They both make you feel bad at the end.”
As fully-formed an album as Rated R is, there were two huge songs from it that felt like QOTSA landmarks. Between them, they summed up everything that made the band so exciting. The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret was an alt-rock anthem with a neon-lit pop chorus bulldozing through the middle of it, and Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, a punky stomp throwing a strop around a list of recreational drugs and booze, perfectly framed their cheeky devilish side. The lyrics – “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol… c-c-c-c-c-cocaine!” – naturally caused a bit of a stir.
“I knew that I thought it was really funny,” Homme recalled. “One of the most important features of the lyric is that it doesn’t say yes or no, it just lists drugs. At the time, I was into toying with censorship, which is why the album is called Rated R. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s needs to censor the words without thinking about their intent. Feel Good… you take it how where you’re at in your life.”
Elaborating on the idea behind the song in an interview with NME’s Ted Kessler, Homme said the track was a “social experiment”. “Some people will cheer and some people's moms will be upset,” he shrugged. “And some people may realise that someone may be sticking a knife in some genre... like stoner rock, as an example. I don't feel, though, like we have an obligation to be positive or negative for kids. It's really just a list, isn't it? There's no censurable material involved."
The song is also notable for featuring a backing vocal from a metal icon in the form of Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. The guest spot occurred when Halford happened to be recording in the same studio. “He said, ‘Will you write the lyrics down?’ and he hadn’t heard the song, he agreed to do it without even knowing what it was,” Homme said. “On a piece of paper I wrote, “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, alcohol, and cocaine” really big in capitals. I pushed this paper to him and he looked at it and goes, ‘Rock’n’roll cocktail – I think I invented that’. We got on great, he’s such a lovely guy.”
The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret, meanwhile, was Rated R’s not-so-secret weapon. With its indelible hook and shimmying chords, it was the song which would march QOTSA onto the airwaves. It was the sound of Homme putting his Kyuss days six feet under, being so bold as to welcome sunny melodic pop into his sound. “It’s the first introduction of pop sensibility to our fans at that point because it’s the first time venturing into places where before I think I would’ve been afraid to go because I’m out of Kyuss not too long ago,” he said a few years after its release. “I think I subscribed to the “they” theory – ‘What will they say, what will they do, what will they think?’. This was like, ‘I like hooks and I like dark pop music and I like it when it sounds like this’. It was my first shot at taking that pop song structure that I’d always been trying to destroy and using it as a way to make it a little more perverted.”
“Dark pop” was how he described the more immediate songs on Rated R, a description that might well be applied across the best moments of QOTSA’s career. “Dark and heavy pop, that's our bread and butter,” he declared. “Hooks but darkness. We've all had those moments where we feel cool. Where, 'We're ready, let's go! Who wants some!?' 'Some' isn't anything in particular, it's, 'Whatever, I'm ready!' That's the vibe we want. We're all cool. This is the clique away from the rest of the cliques. Some of you metalheads, some of you punks, some of you druggers, some of you sober people, some of you sex-fiends, some of you virgins. Not all of you, some of you. You come to our clique. You join the Queens."
"Rock'n'roll is a volatile, fucked-up thing,” he said. “It needs to have good guys, bad guys, wild girls, calm guys, good girls... this is not an accounting office. People need to make mistakes, run around, scream, be whatever they want.”
Rated R is where Queens Of The Stone Age announced themselves as a gang you wanted to join, a celebration of the weird, the outsiders ambushing the mainstream. They never looked back.
