I doubt it will shock anybody into next week if I provide the distinguishing motif on Stephan Jenkins that he has handled acting as an interest and form of expression, in his life. He’s clearly a person made for the limelight — good looking, well spoken, confident and even given to a proclivity for drama and redolent urgency, in his music, as it were.
Nothing too high-profile seems to have spawned from Jenkins’ stage efforts, as of yet, but a simple Internet search of “Stephan Jenkins acting” does uncover that “Jenkins has also had acting roles in ‘Rock Star’ and ‘Art of Revenge’” [1]. On one website, Celebrity Talent International, he’s even listed as “an American singer-songwriter, record producer and actor.”
Acting as a primary force in Jenkins’ lyrics will uncover itself as a highly significant mechanism in the case of “Jumper”; the final single from the band’s 1997 self-titled debut album. To Jenkins’ and the band’s credit, “Jumper” is a continued success, playable and hummable in grocery stores and parties alike, and commendable, as regards the lyrics, for adhering almost religiously to its content subject, as topic, not unlike the art form of writing a cohesive paragraph in a collegiate English class. The genuineness is then bolstered by a killer set of “Yah-yah-yah”’s placed during what’s ostensibly the guitar solo, of sorts, at the exact moment when Kevin Cadogan’s volume builds on guitar, accentuating that killer riff.
Now, you might say, this song is so classic, everybody loves it, he’s “yah-yah-yah”-ing… how can that be acting? That nonsensical exclamation seems to earmark the very ideal of genuineness, if only for the fact that no lyricist would offer that as a stab at profundity. And is it important that there’s a component of embellishment and exaggeration in this song and in Jenkins’ delivery?
After all, music is a full-band process, which is part of what bothers me so much about what I think was a recent trend in music criticism of focusing on what a song is “about.” There are certain songs out there whose lyrical subject matter greatly adds to the overall potency of the music, no doubt — especially in Golden Era hip-hop and gangster rap. But take Phish’s “Prince Caspian”; on the other hand. The lyrics are basically meaningless gibberish with no earnestness required and it’s nonetheless an undeniable hippie anthem and feel-good summer rocker.
“Jumper” probably falls somewhere in between. Its brisk pace, its proud, stalwart major-chord progressions and its operation-room-clean production give it the quality of sanguineness, making it universally enjoyable. It is, though, at the same time, supposed to make you slow down and think a little bit, to consider the plight of those dealing with mental illness or suicidal thoughts, and to perhaps tend to the concept of how you’d treat a person like this, or how you’d feel in their shoes. Perhaps it’s this balance of hard-won earnestness and what you might classify as “rock and roll swagger” that makes Third Eye Blind great. The same sort of dynamic is at work in “Semi-Charmed Life”; truly, wherein Jenkins’ tongue-in-cheek statement of “I want something else / To get me through this semi-charmed kind of life” probably has the potential to either whet our appetite for Dionysian rock Narcissism, or scare us a little bit, depending on our moods, circumstances and Zodiac positioning.
Anyway, some in-depth scrutinizing of “Jumper”’s backstory will yield the results that, per an interview with Jenkins on grunge.com, “‘It was about a friend who jumped off the Coronado Bridge because he was gay, and getting bullied…’” So the person he’s singing to is actually already deceased, as it turns out. Obviously, he conceals this fact well, and his narrative is fully believable, in the original recording, by way of what’s again that sort of “swagger,” for lack of a better term, and a kind of virile, alpha male element integral to his vocal delivery, here, and elsewhere, which helps to make all of his romantic exploits believable, as well (whether or not those even are, for that matter).
The obvious, problematic aspect at work here, then, has to do with the confluence of the facts that “Jumper” isn’t even an ingenuous narrative, based as it is on the fantasy of its subject still being alive, when he’s not, and likewise that the song in an undeniably beloved and timeless anthem of alternative rock, still, to this day, able to spawn singalongs, and, if you’re like me, some air guitar during that magnificent mid-song riff from Kevin Cadogan.
In my previous chapter, I handle the discourse of the “impetus for disaster,” like an “if it bleeds it leads” type of approach to song construction. And I posit, implicitly, that a large, sociocultural force is at work which facilitates people’s abilities to connect with songs that are frustrated and that perhaps even accentuate malady or degraded human qualities of some sort, and that, in a wayward sort of way, this would help to mollify Jenkins’ unscrupulous monetary practices in his band, or at least find some of the general compunction theoretically deterred from that specific exploit to what might be a larger, anthropological malaise cloaking Americans in the 1990s. When in Rome, do as the Romans, in other words. Jenkins’ mischievous act of embezzling band money behind his cohorts’ backs is rendered par for the course, in a sense, in a society so readily able to connect with dark visionaries like Trent Reznor and Eminem and their proclivities for highlighting relatively malevolent human developments and intentions in their music.
So on “Jumper”; then, we find Jenkins’ ability to, more or less, step into a fictional character, one who’s singing to this individual who’s phenomenologically still alive, rather than the actually deceased figure on which the song would focus, in the case of manifest earnestness governing the performance. The idea of embellishing, or attempting to magnify, the emotions involved in a song’s creation and its performance, goes hand in hand with the sort of fabricated perspective active in “Jumper.” And, eerily, in this way, by crafting an artificial set of circumstances from which to dispatch his vocal disposition, Jenkins is issuing a “model of emotion,” of sorts, rather than a bona fide swatch of real, authentic feeling, per se. Furthermore, what’s particularly disconcerting and even haunting is that he PULLS IT OFF, and the song continues to possess the gravity and synergy of, say, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’”; if not quite “Wind beneath My Wings”; perhaps, ad hoc.
Here, again, we see almost a complete obliteration of our typical, overarching ideas of what kinds of things necessarily feed the arts we love and with which we surround ourselves. We talk about authenticity. We talk about meaning. Theoretically, these things are compromised by such storyline liberties as Jenkins has taken with “Jumper.”
Is “Jumper” a piece of music that’s “inspired”? I don’t think there’s any question.
Is it arbitrary that Jenkins chose to sing to a party still living, rather than the deceased figure truly beholden to the song’s matter?
I mean, sure… the song’s still great and everything.
Here, it might be helpful to offer a definition of “pop” music, which Third Eye Blind’s no doubt aptly encompasses, included as they are on our local radio station which features George Michael and Paula Abdul, as well, on their playlist. “Rock and roll” and “pop” have been partially overlapping terms since The Beatles’ commercial groundswell. Conversely, rock and roll can exist without pop, and vice versa. The instances, anyway, of the two being successfully fused together into one amalgamated musical force, provide ideal platforms for exorbitant commercial success: R.E.M., U2, Nirvana, Hootie & the Blowfish, Alanis Morissette, LIVE, Third Eye Blind. For how much Ace of Base you hear on the radio, still, that is, you certainly don’t get much wind about their album, in any regard, let alone stories of it going 10-times platinum or receiving 20-year-anniversary augmentation treatment, or anything like that.
Third Eye Blind conquered the world by playing rock and roll, then, and incorporating elements of pop into the same unique, sonically precocious stew [2]. The elements of “rock and roll” in “Jumper” are obvious to anyone: the endless guitar riffing and soloing, the guitar/vox intro and the snare-heavy mix.
So what are the POP elements this song unfurls? The answer to this might be a little trickier, in fact.
I’m going to start really small-picture, I think, and mention the song title. You might think this is a peculiar thing to mention and you might find my reasoning even more senile. But I actually think “Jumper” is a kitschy title for this song — it’s almost like a swatch of noir humor, giving this suicidal character this catchy nickname, as if phenomenologically relegating or simplifying him, the same way an obtuse rocker like “Stranglehold” by Ted Nugent would be relegated to a four-minute format, given some coercion into the “pop” world.
Then, there’s the issue of the narrative’s shift in subject, from authentic (deceased), to fictional (still living). How would this tie into the songs “rock” and “pop” aspects? Well, let’s imagine that Jenkins wrote a song to somebody who is indeed already dead, by way of a tragic suicidal act. The idea is hardly very rare — you’ve got “One More Suicide” by Marcy Playground and “Queen of the Air” by Everclear, to name a few, both even within Third Eye Blind’s own zeitgeist of late-’90s alternative rock. Pearl Jam’s “Light Years” comes to mind, too, as an ode to somebody who’s, if not explicitly dead, has at least disappeared, leaving a somber, melancholy emotional landscape suitable for that thoughtful midtempo rocker.
Now, you’ll notice, despite the fact that all of these songs are really pretty good, none of them were released as singles, let alone achieving the kind of stratospheric success of the satellite-radio-subsuming “Jumper.” There’s something about the tinge, the artistic fabric, of pop music, that discourages earnestness, or, perhaps, the sort of heavy emotion which would accompany a full-fledged tragedy. If a singer is singing to somebody who’s still “on the ledge,” that is, the subject matter is lightened, and the song’s ability to pervade radio, to play in any sort of setting (bedroom, bar, grocery store) is potentiated. In this way, it’s Stephan Jenkins’ skill in and inclination toward acting that facilitated his ability to be a “pop star” within a “rock band,” and, hence, cater to an ideal rubric for immense commercial success and universal, broadly reaching appeal.
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[1] This item of “acting role” in something called “Rock Star” is tickling to me, in a way, for its sheerly identical nature to his primary vocation as Third Eye Blind singer: be a rock star and do a lot of acting. He was a shoe-in for the role.
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[2] For this, again, we have Kevin Cadogan to thank, on the band’s first two albums, a guitarist capable of nerding out on effects pedals, amps and alternate tunings like probably nobody else I’ve ever heard this side of The Edge or Jimmy Page.