The words glare there like smoldering embers of our own spiritual shortcomings as a species: “With the lights out / It’s less dangerous / Here we are now / Entertain us”. These lyrics, of course, were delivered in full shrieking howl, long, blond hair in face, guitar swinging and long-sleeve shirt inducing excessive sweat, by Kurt Cobain, the frontman of another West Coast alternative rock act from the 1990s, Nirvana.
From there, it seemed, in the ’90s, the race was on: who can push this thing the farthest? Who can paint the darkest spiritual landscape on our existence, be the readiest to throw away and chastise all of our former morality and drive to paint ourselves in a positive light? Gangsta rap, for all its force and cultural relevancy, certainly did nothing to thwart this process.
But, then, rock and roll, itself, at its genesis, is formed on atrocity. As writes Louis Menand in the New Yorker article “The Elvic Oracle”: “Rock and roll is usually explained as rhythm-and-blues music–that is, music performed by black listeners–repurposed by mostly white artists for a mostly white audience.” And blacks in America at this time were obviously the fringe contributors: maligned, relatively, in socioeconomic spheres, and owning a history of subjection to copious persecution, hardship and disadvantage. A state of revolt, in a sense, in other words, would have been poised to spawn this genre of music, like a discontent with the status quo and even with society as it’s known to its relatable active constituents. Stephan Jenkins, for his own part, as I mention before, even began his music career in a rap group, Puck & Natty, together in the same genre that brought us Public Enemy’s famous album title “It takes a nation to hold us back.”
The cultural guns were drawn from an early point, that is. And sure, we can probably loosely trace all of Stephan Jenkins’ personality problems and functional degradations as a person to this troubling, widespread sense that the powers that be are all bullshit and everything should be reconfigured, perhaps even to the point of anarchy. Maybe fair distribution of band funding, to Jenkins, in his own convoluted brain, represented “the system,” something to be subverted and discarded as anachronistic or the reductive work of “The Man” [1]. Of course, this thought process would be utterly nonsensical, seeing as his bandmates all had good intentions in mind and deserved compensation for their ingenuous work. The relegation of them to “The Man” status would theoretically have been the work of, perhaps, psychedelic drugs which would induce abnormal psychology, which, in light of Jenkins’ denizenship of the early-’90s Bay Area music scene, probably isn’t too inconceivable, in his case.
Anyway, another thing Stephan Jenkins had in common with Kurt Cobain at his popular apex, along with the troubling tendency toward treating bandmates not so well (Cobain would fire drummers like they were 7/11 clerks and once got into a physical altercation with his bassist because the latter wouldn’t take him to get heroin), is a staunch fear of poverty. Carrie Montgomery, a one-time girlfriend of Mudhoney singer Mark Arm, is quoted in Everett True’s Nirvana: the Biography as saying Cobain “‘always had this insane fear of being poor.’” Pertaining, then, to Jenkins, a story in SF Gate remits that, when said met eventual Third Eye Blind manager Eric Gotland, Jenkins “was a starving rapper wannabe.” Tales abound, around this brand of lore, of Jenkins living in people’s closets and stealing their Ramen noodles.
At some point, then, apparently, scruple turns into desperation (actually this one press release listed in True’s Nirvana account cites Kurt Cobain as listing “desperation” as one of the band’s main influences, along with the Melvins, the Beatles and Aerosmith). The adherence to prevailing notions of “right” and “wrong” erodes and the lowbrow, capitalistic quest for success takes the throne. My dad always hated Oasis for being a bunch of assholes. I liked their music and so I was willing to discard their moral backstory (as flimsy as it perhaps is, to be sure) and embrace them artistically, separating the man from the artist. This is exactly what I do with Third Eye Blind, as well, when I put their music on and enjoy, which I do with considerable regularity, finding this process probably even easier, with them, than with Nirvana, whose lead singer made a regular habit of bashing other bands in the press, refused to be friends with Axl Rose on pretty much just grounds of musical style, married Courtney Love and committed any number of other unconscionable atrocities.
Clearly, anyway, there comes a point where quantity and quality of artistic output takes the foreground, and basic virtue falls in line, where it belongs on the record company’s fiscal spreadsheet. And, sure, there are other x-factors involved. Third Eye Blind’s songs are GOOD. But they’re probably not as good as “Lean on Me”; “Paint it, Black” or “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”; at least in basic melodic infrastructure. They benefitted, I’d say, from excellent production, an excellent packaging scheme and shtick (the hard drugs image not discouraged by the self-titled album cover) and a singer who sounded really “cool,” for lack of a more scientific term. Another, more guileless individual, might have imagined a song that were actually artistically better — a more poignant set of chord progressions, melodies and genre-shifting dissonance — but discarded it on grounds of not being extroverted enough to transmit it to the general public, or out of fear of the limelight or general human calamity that seems to come from popularity. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
Again, I feel, it’s important to ground Third Eye Blind’s work within the overall genus of alternative rock, as particularly pertains to lyrics. The closest artistic parallel to Third Eye Blind, in its salad days, might be Everclear, a kick-ass noise-rock trio from Portland who, by the late-’90s, were writing some killer and memorable songs, and producing their own albums, as well. With Everclear, as is the case with Third Eye Blind, lies an incredible predilection for the problematic, more or less. The first two singles released from Everclear’s commercial breakthrough album So Much for the Afterglow (1997) both deal staunchly in catastrophe and discontent: “Everything to Everyone” in its scathing second-person indictment of fakery and “I Will Buy You a New Life”; an obvious paean for money as gateway to happiness.
It’s important to note, though, the comedic aspects in Everclear’s lyrics, which would be obvious, I would think, in “I Will Buy You a New Life”; and in “Everything to Everyone” manifest, in part, in that possibly off-the-cuff little rant by singer Art Alexakis of “Come on now do that stupid dance for me…” In Third Eye Blind, on the other hand, the most famous “Semi-Charmed Life” offers some tongue-in-cheek irony, whereas other important singles from the album, “How’s it Going to Be” and “Jumper”; deliver straight-faced emotion devoid of humor. The humanistic manifestos are pretty clear in both: picking up the pieces after a troublesome breakup in one case, and the vanquishing of mental demons in the other. Of course, a reference to a “semi-charmed life,” a sort of quagmire existence in which hard drugs and even existential transformations are sought as much-needed diversions, seems like the ultimate embrace of negativity, on an overarching level. Maybe we were just so used to people preying on and messing with our emotions in the ’90s that we let it slide and even embraced it, programmed as we were to lose hope and parade around in a comedic state of nihilism, as a necessary protocol to everyday life in American or postmodernist culture.
So chaos rules. The problem is the solution. This much is pretty clear from the above discussions, perhaps nowhere more hauntingly well pronounced than on “Darkness,” a track toward the end of Blue, the band’s second album. Blue, of course, gave us the relatively ubiquitous “Never Let You Go”; which seems like a rare foray into optimism and actual, bona fide RESOLUTION, within Stephan Jenkins’ overall artistic disposition.
To be honest, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the track “Darkness” is the gorgeous, singularly clear guitar sound being transmitted by Kevin Cadogan, on what, here, would be his final album with the band, before being fired. In fact, so prominent and memorable were his contributions to this music, on such an undeniable level, that it’s almost impossible to avoid thinking that maybe Jenkins could be singing to HIM on some of these high-profile tracks. “How’s it Going to Be,” of course, would be a notable candidate, as well as “Farther,” which excellently precedes “Darkness” on Blue by a couple of tracks and which likewise ushers in this seedy sort of Velvet-Underground approach to chord progression and emotionally reckless songwriting.
“Darkness” doesn’t play as a potential direct statement to his original guitarist and long-time friend, albeit. It is, however, easy to imagine Jenkins sinking into a maligned mental state as a result of what happened with Cadogan, particularly since, as I think any casual follower of the band would concur, the artistic quality of the music declined dramatically with the latter’s exit. Anyway, “Darkness” plays as pretty much a decadent indulgence in nihilism, rife with bitter lyrics of hopelessness, self-loathing (which of course is probably tongue-in-cheek, granted), imagery of darkness, of course, and a landscape of anthropological vice and attrition. (Of course, Jenkins’ dramatic proclamation of “Trust no one is the one thing that I learned” takes on an incredibly ironic skin, in light of his unorthodox pecuniary habits as bandleader.) Jenkins seems to take pride in depressing all of us and placing himself on the level of a dog with lines like “I want you to love me / Like you did before you knew me”.
Well, the song does possess a great element of gravity, force and allure, of course mucking up our erstwhile conceptions of what level of integrity it takes to derive art, and further conversing with the overall phenomenon of “Third Eye Blind Theory” with some more bona fide Jenkins love/hate garnering. And again, Cadogan’s work cannot be downplayed: I’m a particular sucker for that brief riff, that’s more like a frill, which closes every other bar in the chorus, the four notes immediately following “darkens around me” and “all surround me”. At the end of the song, Cadogan launches into this sort of coda riff, which hadn’t been introduced in any other portion of the song, and which resembles, directly, the timeless run prevalent in Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life”; rendered here on guitar, of course, instead of keyboard. What’s more amazing, as well, is that Cadogan’s guitar sounds so clear and celestial that his maneuver here actually finds a way to mimic “Walk of Life” in mood and vibe, despite that it’s being played on a totally different instrument.
Anyway, when Jenkins proclaims so adamantly that “The world darkens around me”; is he being forthright with us? And who is it actually proclaiming this? Is it Jenkins, the actual man, or some alter-ego or alternative identity residing within his skin? These questions are all too applicable, I think. Anyway, one thing’s for sure: the element of adversity provides a killer artistic vehicle for the song, warranting strong emotion and a sort of mental battle with these de facto, perhaps phantom demons, not unlike, you might say, pitting yourself at the bottom of a mountain before you go on your morning run.
This prioritization of infusing his songs with elements of misfortune, mishap and tragedy is evident right away, even, on the first two songs on their first album. “Losing a Whole Year” probably takes the Fiona Apple rule of blowing every little relationship hiccup into an apocalyptic disaster to a different level, entirely. The whole song, more or less, is posited as a gripe against this girlfriend he has. At no point, mind you, does Jenkins actually come out and say what specifically is bothering him (he gets as exact as “Always copping my truths / I kind of get the feeling like I’m being used” and “Seen you pop that check / Craning your neck at my car wreck”; if that helps any).
Why does it work? Why is he able to get away with this stuff?
Well, for one thing, his real-life girlfriend was, per report, Charlize Theron, around this time, a Hollywood actress of ample fortune, fame, glamour and magazine-cover beauty. And Hollywood actresses are typically an entity that awkward, introverted or catharsis-ready, also-ran rock music fans are fully ready to disdain (see the Foo Fighters’ famous celebrity-chafing “Stacked Actors” and Neil Young’s “Motion Pictures” in which he similarly vilifies the cinematic elite). It’s as if Jenkins is setting himself up as an “embedded journalist,” of sorts, dispatching from within a life of fame, so as to find fault in it and relay all these degraded moral tidbits lathering up in its wake. Of course, it never occurs to the average 13-year-old, which I was when I first heard this band, that, in order to do this, Jenkins has to fully embrace his own fame, and unscrupulously make his everyday life that of a sort of “big shot,” if you will, a person ready to forsake his private life for the sake of exposure to these juicy plotlines. True to form, in the music video for “Losing a Whole Year,” all of the girls pictured tend toward the posh, the upscale, the well-heeled and well-dressed, eschewing, say, the “Daria” persona or the Janeane Garofalo type image of the nerdy, more cerebral or critical young woman, which some other artists might have selected as their subject, in this case.
So in “Losing a Whole Year”; everything is the girl’s fault, Jenkins “lost a whole year” he could have otherwise spent, apparently, doing something of righteous moral stature and strident, celestial cultural progress, or so we’re led to believe, and, to borrow the phrase from an MTV game show of around this same time, the “blame game” is on, in full force.
Maybe it’s true, ultimately, that adversity feeds artistic synergy, or creative power, and that the assumption of said adversity, short of its actual, legitimate manifestation in one’s life and mind, is better than no adversity at all. Perhaps such an unconditionally maligned landscape, too, could pit Jenkins’ initial transgression, of hoarding nearly all of the band’s money, as a relatively menial tidbit, comparatively speaking. It’s as if he’s trying to say, in his lyrics, “Look at all the fucked-up shit going on in the world! You’re really giving me shit about repurposing my band’s funding which is supposed to be distributed evenly throughout?” Of course, his transgression does still sound pretty vile, in light of the incredibly financial breadth these guys were achieving, even in their early days, but perhaps not quite as egregious, given these new developing circumstances of narcolepsy, everyday, drug-addled ennui, and, of course, phantom evil prevalent in any of the seemingly innocent surrounding fauna.
But why? Why do we fall for this shit when deep down, we know it’s fake, we know it’s founded on celebrity-leaning pretense, when we know it’s all a corporate game of radio rock music?
Well, first of all, the guy was like a metaphor machine, basically, Let’s remember, he’s a graduate, valedictorian in English from Cal Berkley, typically heralded as one of the premiere universities (public or private) in the nation for the liberal arts. “Losing a Whole Year” begins as follows: “Your rich daddy left you with a parachute / Your voice sounds like money and your face is cute / But your daddy left you with no love / And you touch everything with a velvet glove”. That’s three manifest, bona fide metaphors, orchestrated and executed, lyrically, in the first four lines of the song alone: “parachute”; “velvet glove” and “like money”; which is a simile, a type of metaphor which uses a comparison instead of blatant, explicit association or assimilation. Actually, to be honest, I have a degree in English, and a lot of times, when tasked with writing, say, three eight-page papers in one week, I’d fall into a certain habit of bullshitting. And maybe many of his lyrics are just b.s.: but they provide a solid enough artistic foundation for the ebullient, showroom ready chord changes and rock sound/production so as to at least keep the ship moving, and soundtrack those glue- or coke-sniffing nights in your car as a teenager when, really, you’re just banging your head along, and not paying too close of attention to the lyrics. He could be singing about stabbing a cat and you’d still be banging along to it — be honest.
“Narcolepsy”; a song written from the point of view of Jenkins’ bandmate, Cadogan, who was reportedly for some time stricken with the disease, marks an interesting point of tension within this discussion — a convergence of Jenkins’ proclivity for the “fucked up” and for assuming an ulterior vantage point, like an actor, or “thespian” — another creative vehicle that seems to have served him well in his de facto artistic prime, in songs like this, “Jumper”; and others.
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[1] I’m not sure how active it still is but in the 20th Century “The Man” was a term commonly used to define the powers-that-be, typically antiquated, which would theoretically wield a moral authority over the average, honest, hard-working person, while in the meantime lacking a proper perspective on what was actually valuable in life and what made things truly work. Curtis Mayfield’s song “No Thing on Me” perhaps acts as the ideal reference point for defining, or at least placing, the phenomenon in its nuclear context.