Well, folks, the proof’s in the pudding, so to speak. Third Eye Blind’s music speaks for itself, evident, for one, in the uproarious sing-along of “How’s it Going to Be” I just heard last weekend in the bar where I work. The songs hold up, the melodies are still rich and fibrous, and the whole thing still rings true, despite the stridently unscrupulous monetary tactics of lead singer Stephan Jenkins, from the band’s genesis through, apparently, today.
Our typical moral paradigm has been breached, hence bespeaking, perhaps, some inherent flaws therein. Jenkins, throughout the Third Eye Blind saga, has thrown shade at various seemingly unimpeachable entities, such as London, such as a romantic relationship with a rich, hot girl, and, sometimes, such even as existence itself (“Semi-Charmed Life”). Still, you would think, the elephant in the room had to be his askance view of the world of capitalism and the job front. Jenkins seemed preternaturally deterred from this realm, apparent from his willingness to, even after college, and even after being valedictorian, be a “starving rapper wannabe,” as SF Gate so tersely put it. This would of course make the diction in “Graduate” quite ironic, but given all of the counter-intuitive nuances we’ve encountered throughout this story, did you really expect anything else but to gain more questions than answers?
I put this work together, anyway, this series of semi-arbitrary, folklore-and-youth-infused essays as these alt-rock demigods, because I want to still enjoy them, in light of all the lurid back-story details, and I want for the whole world to still be able to enjoy them. If ignorance is bliss, then we might have a problem on our hands, here, with these guys.
So short of saying, ya know, “Music sucks,” or “Life sucks,” or some other hasty, puerile induction, we might simply conclude that life, particularly in modern times, has the potential to be laced with a significant amount of phenomenological convolutions, things which would necessitate taking the good with the bad. This would make sense, already, I guess, with the basic knowledge that most meals in part require the killing of a live animal, for establishment.
My economics teacher in high school had this phrase he loved to repeat: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The quest for larger meaning latent in something like ubiquitous, magnanimously popular radio rock music is only natural. Does that mean we demand purity? And what is the malady if Third Eye Blind’s music can be taken as morally paradigmatic? Maybe it’s that the everyday lives of all of us are already so fundamentally flawed, involving, as they do, the somewhat superficial and arbitrary exchange of time for money, that the antidotes we seek to absolve our psyches should entail some sort of idealization of an expedited path to success. Hip-hop is borne, in part, from verbal “battles,” and MTV, you might say, with its regular showcasing of people in swim wear at “summer vacation,” would as well serve as semantics against “guilelessness” and “purity” as legitimate progenitors of bona fide alternative rock music.