It opened onto nothing more that its own fleeting moment. The band’s breakthrough song, “Semi-Charmed Life,” was seemingly designed to keep “Two Princes” and “One Week” company in future documentaries about Beanie Babies, Super Soakers, and other ‘90s trends. Teenagers couldn’t chase Third Eye Blind’s sound backward into a hip demimonde and attendant identity that said something about the world and a kid’s place in it. No one ever wanted to be Stephan Jenkins he could never quite ingratiate himself with a scene of ostensible outcasts. By contrast, the band Stephan Jenkins built had to live and die by songcraft alone, and in a way that has made their songs all the more enduring. The landscape shifted, the culture morphed. For all their bluster about being rejects and creeps, Billie Joe Armstrong and Kurt Cobain emerged from punk microcosms in which they were already stars, and they rode into popular consciousness as kings of an undiscovered country that the rest of the world would soon try to invade. Third Eye Blind were huge, but they were never credited with being exactly “important.” Sales of the band’s self-titled 1997 debut might have put them in the same tax bracket as Green Day and Nirvana, but unlike those twin towers of ‘90s alt-rock, Third Eye Blind were profoundly uncool.
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