Crystal Myth:

Considering “Semi-Charmed Life” On the Anniversary of Nothing

Like the death of JFK to a Boomer, the first listen of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” is to Millennials an occasion of emotional reckoning. Mine was in the backseat of my Mom’s car, thanks no doubt to those unapologetic taxidermists of the early aughts, the local DJ’s of DC 101. I remember going about my regular car activities, perhaps crushing a forgotten Rold Gold into the grout of the seat, when all of a sudden the Lexapro’d yodel of Eddie Vedder was replaced by an electrical torrent of such unabashed merriment that The Divine itself seemed to lean down and whisper into the shallow of my nine-year-old ear: “This Bop is 4 you”.

Relentlessly bright, lascivious, rival to none except “Mr. Bright Side” for striking sudden bonds of optimism and unity among an otherwise divided crowd of people, “Semi-Charmed Life” is the real deal passing ostentatiously as a dupe. Most people have at least guessed at the dichotomy lurking just beneath the song’s rippling surface, but tell me, dear reader, have you gazed down its Marianas Trench?

What does “Semi-Charmed Life” sound like? Driving drunk down a sloping road in late summer with your best friends as the golden hour glazes you in the last orgasmic haze of its vespertine light. You round a turn and the milky day moon swoops down out of the heavens to kiss you on the mouth, leaving you with the taste of Sunny D and a feeling of false invincibility only crypto-currency holders enjoy. What’s the song actually about? A crushing addiction to crystal meth with a few Dickensian descriptions of ragged blow jobs tossed in for scenery. Imbued with the power to chair-lift even the darkest, most cataclysmic of moods into the green with its uncharted psychic abilities, “Semi Charmed Life” clandestinely packs all of the physical and emotional degradation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen into the packaging of a Barbie Jeep.

“Semi Charmed Life” clandestinely packs all of the physical and emotional degradation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen into the packaging of a Barbie Jeep.”

It always amazed me that on my public high school’s ‘Casual Fridays’ when students were allowed coveted DJ privileges in the low-ceilinged cafeteria, “Semi-Charmed Life” consistently slipped past the nets of teachers who guarded the aux chord with such hawkish zeal that I hardly believe so much as a limp and whispered “dang” went unnoticed. But there we would sit, a horde of fifteen year-olds savaging our Uncrustables and watching in bland disbelief as the cafeteria monitors absentmindedly stroked their authority lanyards and nodded along to lines like, “how do I get back to / the place where I fell asleep inside you?”. It seemed an inconceivable blind spot. Blink-182? Black-listed. Ke$ha? Unthinkable. What’s more, this was no mere exaltation of sexual promiscuity nor an oral illustration of fleekness, such as in Flo Rida’s “Low” (long ago were shawty’s Apple Bottom jeans banned from these halls). This was a lyric about being so intimate, or rather, so ravaged by amphetamines, that you actually passed out with your genitals inside someone else’s genitals. It’s amazing that steam did not issue from the cafeteria’s agéd Peaveys.

A small allowance must be made for the furious pace at which the song’s lyrics are delivered. I know that I am not alone in making half-baked attempts to keep up at the bridge before slipping into a dumb blizzard of the phrases I do know: “sand between my…red panties…face down on the mattress…ONE”. Whether in the natural course of songwriting or in a flourish of devilish irony, the lyrics that are most digestible and audible are those that are the softest and most angelic. Very clearly, at the beginning of the bridge, we hear “And the four right chords can make me cry / when I’m with you I feel like I could die, and that would be alright”. To the unscorched ear, this seemingly pure outpouring of sentiment is arguably directed towards a friend or significant other, perhaps the woman “priestess” in the song (see: Dickensian sexual favors). However, once one broadens their telescopic understanding of this diddle’s drug-driven content, it seems obvious that the “you” so tenderly addressed in the lyrical contract of the plain-spoken bridge is not a drinking buddy nor a red-gartered priestess but, yes, Watson! Crystal meth!

Still, it strikes me that what has allowed “Semi-Charmed Life” to pull the wool over so many eyes, making Bird Box memes of the authoritarian and naïve alike, is not just the disjunction between its unerringly positive instrumental and sharply sour lyrics, but the blending of the two. In a quote pulled from the Wikipedia page for the single, songwriter and front man Stephan Jenkins describes the song’s maddening duplicity:

“[it’s] bright and shiny on the surface, and then it just pulls you down in this lockjawed mess…The music that I wrote for it is not intended to be bright and shiny for bright and shiny’s sake. It’s intended to be what the seductiveness of speed is like, represented in music.”

The average person (read: me) is unlikely to associate the flowered masque of “seduction” with methamphetamine in any or all of its forms, and yet I would be lying if I said the poetics of the song don’t work a strange and convincing magic with each consecutive listen. When I consider a lyric like the one that begins the second verse, “The sky was gold, it was rose, / I was taking sips of it through my nose,” I, not unlike the speaker in the song, am touched by the inalienable beauty of these lines. Not only do they perform the task of enforcing a weak but socially virtuous ‘hindsight is 20/20’ message that “drugs are fun but bad”, but they offer up those elements that make real and heartbreaking art out of the terrible and the ordinary; a synesthetic dive into that effusive rush of twin sadness and rubied ecstasy, a glancing blow at the metaphysical, a phantasmagorical killing joke.

Even the song title itself sinks upon me with a Titanic impression. Semi Charmed Life. There’s something ancient about the oxymoronic doubling of sprightly confidence and utter lucklessness, this from a band whose name makes pointed fun of the New Age trend of co-opting Eastern religious themes by rejecting the promise of ‘enlightenment’ in preference for the street-level vision of troubled mortals. In their stomping ground of mid-90’s San Francisco, Third Eye Blind laid fingers on a pulse that you can still feel today, beating out a melt of Cheshire-grinned vitality and crisis through the red, porch-lit blur of their debut album. They remain the harbingers of closing time at a thousand American bars, the lazy spin of distracted DJ’s and benignly misquoted by Google lyrics, which slyly claims that the second verse of “Semi-Charmed” contains the lyric, “doing crystal myth will lift you up / until you break”. It’s meth, not myth. Did you hear it wrong? Or perhaps you just couldn’t see.