Semi-charmed life – third eye blind
It’s the most nonchalant glorification of crystal meth in pop history, not to mention being sucked off. Given, “Semi-Charmed Life” owes just as much to Pulp Fiction. The only other tune that really shared the inner nucleus of this sound/attitude/sales Venn Diagram was Sublime’s beaty “What I Got” in 1996, the ultimate nice-guy anthem before fedoras made that a curse, by a maturing ska devotee and heroin addict who was now too dead to capitalize on it. It was these guys, Jenkins and McGrath, who simultaneously launched campaigns to be famous, with these industrial-strength catchy songs that made a reasonable argument for the peak of hip-hop’s influence on alt-rock just before nü-metal ruined in many’s eyes what that could mean for rap and rock together. Beastie Boys, like Rage, were enormously popular, but never singing created some kind of ceiling in their crossover ascent, not that they really aspired to truly cross over anyway. It was the follow-up to releases on K Records, and nothing about Beck’s inscrutable delivery really screamed “fame.” Genre-splicers like Korn and 311 were rapidly building their cults, but their sounds were a bit too foreboding and loopy for actual Top 40. The absence of Cobain was both a literal and symbolic harbinger for a gulf in What Was Next, and Beck helped speed it up by getting samples and loops (and something resembling rapping) into the rock mainstream.īut even the multiple Grammy-winning Odelay in 1996 was fairly rooted in an underground of some kind. While rap had long influenced alternative rock in the ’90s (it’s insane that Rage Against The Machine’s eponymous debut arrived only one year after Nevermind), something happened around the time of Beck’s “Loser” in 1994 that made it the fulcrum for most everything to hit alt-radio after.
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It was like these expensive-haired nobodies knew they finally found their lightning in a bottle.īut the other reason was hip-hop.
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Part of it was confidence, the sheer bravado of Stephan Jenkins announcing “I’m packed and I’m holding” as the first words the public would ever hear from him, or Mark McGrath (whose turgid 1995 metal dump Lemonade And Brownies didn’t exactly make him a star) bragging “All around the world, statues crumble for me,” which might as well have been the same. While neither Sugar Ray nor Third Eye Blind - coiners of the above jingles, from “Fly” and “Semi-Charmed Life,” respectively, but you know that - ended up becoming heavy-hitters themselves, there was a cemented feel to these smashes that other one-hit-and-change wonders in the small, confused span between Kurt Cobain’s death and 1997 didn’t really have. Somehow, even though there were 3,652 days in the 1990s, two of the most insidious hooks of the decade managed to be released on the same one, both of which will ruin your entire weekend if you read beyond this colon: “IIIIIIIIiiiiIIIiiiiIIIiii just wanna fly / Put your arms around me, baby / Put your arms around me, baby” and “Doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo / Doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo.”