Red Hot Chili Peppers released “Give It Away” as a single in Australia on October 7, 1991. Taken from their fifth studio album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the Rick Rubin production put Anthony Kiedis’ repeated command over a bass line that kept moving beneath him. The words had their roots in a lesson he learned years before entering the studio.
In his memoir Scar Tissue, Kiedis recalled admiring a jacket belonging to German singer Nina Hagen. She offered it to him, surprising him with her willingness to give away something she treasured. As Rolling Stone recounted, Hagen encouraged him to think about generosity as something that made life larger. Keeping everything for himself meant missing the pleasure of sharing it. That idea stayed with Kiedis and eventually found its way into the song.
The phrase was already among his writing ideas when the music gave him somewhere to use it. Hearing Flea’s bass part during rehearsal prompted Kiedis to approach the microphone with his notebook. The movement of the riff made the words fit, connecting something he had been thinking about privately with the band’s playing. Its central message became a chant that could be repeated without stopping the momentum of the track.
The recording sessions gave the musicians room to develop that interaction. Working in a rented Laurel Canyon mansion, they arranged themselves facing one another in the living room, with the recording console nearby and their amplifiers miked in the basement. Kiedis recorded vocals in his bedroom. In an October 1991 Guitar Player interview, John Frusciante described a routine in which living and recording happened in the same place, without the usual separation between home and studio.
Flea was also reconsidering how much he needed to play. “I consciously avoided anything busy or fancy,” he told Guitar Player. He wanted the bass to serve the song instead of becoming a demonstration of his technique. The sessions proceeded without a click track, leaving the musicians to establish their timing together. On “Give It Away,” that approach left plenty of activity in the rhythm section without requiring every instrument to compete for attention.
Frusciante found another way to change the track’s character. His recorded guitar solo was reversed, creating a passage with a different shape and movement from the clipped rhythm playing around it. AllMusic’s Steve Huey singled out that backward solo as a contrast to Kiedis’ restless vocal performance. The arrangement could briefly loosen its grip before returning to the refrain, keeping the song from depending entirely on repetition.
Stéphane Sednaoui’s video gave that physical performance an equally distinctive setting. The director filmed the band in the desert, their bodies covered in silver paint. With the musicians moving against an open landscape, the clip concentrated on their gestures and the energy between them. MTV exposure helped put those images in front of a wider audience alongside the recording.
The song’s success also established a new milestone for the band. At the 1993 Grammy Awards, “Give It Away” won Best Hard Rock Performance With Vocal, their first Grammy. Accepting the award, Kiedis thanked Mother Nature for music.
