People

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Otherside

Otherside" is a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, released in 2000. It was the third single from the album Californication, and confronts the battles ex-junkies have with their prior addictions. It was the band's fourth #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. It was the second highest-charting single from the Californication album, reaching #14 in the US.

The video was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris in a black-and-white/monochrome Gothic style similar to Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all influenced by German Expressionist art. Elements of Cubism and work by the graphic artist M. C. Escher are also seen in the video.

A cartoonish story line is juxtaposed upon the song; that of a young man's dream sequence. The band members appear dressed in black in unusual locations, with props intented to appear as surreal instruments. Throughout the video Anthony Kiedis with his short, platinum hair is seen in a castle tower. His stage persona is different and quite dark when compared to his more energetic performances in other videos. John Frusciante plays a rope down a long corridor as if a guitar, although reluctant wanting just to play his guitar normally. Flea is hanging on telephone wires and playing them as if they were a bass guitar, and Chad Smith is up on a tower with a rotating medieval clock that serves as his drum kit.

Jonathan Dayton: "We did look at Caligari, and we looked at a lot of German Expressionist film. But it was also very important to avoid 'Caligari.' It was both inspiration and something to work around, because it has such a strong, specific style, and there have been other videos that have completely ripped it off."

Valerie Faris: "We didn't look at 'Calagari' all that much, really. We did, but then we just left it. We did look at a lot of the works of the futurist artists from the '30s, and the illustrations of the surrealists and from cubism. We were inspired more by paintings than by films..."