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After Agreeing to Cut Lyrics
from "Slow Motion", Stephan Jenkins
Say Band Plans to Release Unaltered
Version Next Year.
By: Gil Kaufman.
Third Eye Blind singer/songwriter Stephan Jenkins said
he chooses
to view the label-mandated removal of the lyrics to his
controversial
song "Slow Motion" as a blessing
in disguise.
"To me it worked out really well," Jenkins said, speaking
from a
curbside Miami restaurant last week. "It's all for the
best, because
now we get to put more music out there."
Elektra Records chairwoman Sylvia Rhone had asked the
band to cut
lyrics to "Slow Motion" for its second album, Blue, due
Tuesday. The
song now will appear on the as a mostly instrumental
version. But
Jenkins said the band will release the original version
of the song,
plus six other new tracks, on an EP early next year.
The EP, tentatively titled Black, will be released on
the band's as-
yet-unnamed label. It will consist of songs that didn't
make it onto
the San Francisco rock band's upcoming album and possibly
some new
tunes, Jenkins said.
Far from having their voices squelched, Jenkins said the
decision to
alter "Slow Motion" has given bandmembers the rare chance
to give
fans even more music. By putting out the EP only a few
months after
Blue, they will circumvent the standard two- to three-year
wait
between rock releases.
"Slow Motion," an anti-violence song Jenkins said he wrote
nearly
four years agofor the band's 1997 eponymous, multiplatinum
debut,
features the lyrics: "Miss Jones taught me English, but
I think I
just shot her son/ 'Cause he owed me money, with a bullet
in the
chest/ With a bullet in the chest he cannot run/ Now
he's bleeding in
a vacant lot."
"I was surprised at the amount of static that it caused,"
Jenkins
said Thursday. "[Rhone's] feeling was that in the context
of today's
repetitive Columbine headlines, the message of the song
could be
misconstrued. As you know, I'm not a particularly preachy
lyricist,
and I'm not didactic in my delivery ... their feeling
was the whole
focus of this album could be skewed toward this one song"
Jenkins said the label took issue with the song after
a first listen
earlier this year. Throughout the past four months, he
said, the band
had been fighting to have it appear as is on the album.
On Nov. 15, Nina Crowley, the director of Mass Mic, a
Massachusetts
anti-censorship group, called the removal of the lyrics
part of the
"whitewashing" of American culture in the wake of the
deadly April
school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton,
Colo.
"This is self-censorship, and people are running scared
- it's
hysteria," Crowley said.
Rhone was not available for comment on the removal of
the song's
lyrics and its inclusion on the planned EP, according
to an Elektra
representative, who requested anonymity. The source said
the
chairwoman's comments last week to online magazine RollingStone.com
-
that the song didn't work in the context of the album
and the current
social climate - still stood as the label's official
word on the
controversy.
Some of the group's fans said they supported Jenkins'
right to speak
his mind, although not everyone might agree with what
the singer was
saying.
"I think any band, any individual has the right to say
and write
whatever they feel, so I'm not saying Stephan is wrong
for writing
the song," 17-year-old New York fan Nicole Prokop wrote
in an e-mail.
Prokop, who hadn't heard the song but saw some of the
lyrics, said that
while some people might get the wrong idea from the provocative
lyrics, the band's fans would understand Jenkins' point.
"Third Eye Blind is not the kind of band that would promote
violence," Prokop, the webmaster of the unofficial Third
Eye Blind
page Fraudulent Zodiac, said. "They're just trying to
get a message
across, and it's been done before, so I don't see what
the big deal
is."
Jenkins pointed to the song's final verse as proof that
he meant the
lyrics as a criticism of selling violence in movies and
television.
"Hollywood glamorized my wrath/ I'm a young urban psychopath,"
the
lyrics read, continuing, "I incite murder for your entertainment/
'Cause I needed the money, what's your excuse?/ The joke's
on you."
Third Eye Blind spawned a number of power-pop-style radio
staples.
The lyrics to the band's breakthrough hit, "Semi-Charmed
Life" dealt
frankly with oral sex and drug addiction, while Jenkins
said "Jumper"
was the story of a gay friend's suicide.
While the first, hard-driving pop single from Blue, "Anything",
doesn't deal with the kind of taboo subjects that squelched
"Slow
Motion," Jenkins said other songs on the album tackle
similarly
difficult topics.
He described "10 Days Late" as a song that's "ambiguous
about
abortion" and "Walking With the Wounded" as a chronicle
of a friend's
sexual assault.
"If we didn't have children opening fire on each other
in mass
numbers, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Jenkins
said.
"Third Eye Blind have always spoken about what's right
in front of us
and what's unspeakable. Sexual assault is right there,
and it's
unspeakable. I think music is a place where you can address
gun
violence, and you don't need to do it in a way that underestimates
the intelligence of your listeners, and you can do it
in a way that
you are not defanged".