“SHINE” - Collective Soul: And The Ballad of a Gen z doomer
By O. Jacobs
SONG of the day | THE FRIDAY FREAK!
In the Summer of 2021 I was stacking away inside of a Beer Warehouse in York, PA - 22 years old, cruising about halfway through my second year of nightshift grind, my new normal. After the Covid-19 Lockdowns rearranged the employee roles within the company I worked for, I was hammering out 9pm-6am gigs every day, Sun-Thurs - and gradually losing steam. As a single man, it was nice at first - grocery shopping at 8am with no care in the world for what was going on the rest of the morning - then the cabin fever sets in at about 365 days of missed connections, and doom-scroll filled night-owling.
Day after day - closing your eyes to sunlight - waking to find yourself in the dark clutches of the evening dusk, an eerie feeling in your stomach - eyes beginning to twitch before even getting out of bed, knowing you’ll be on foot against the concrete in less than two hours. [It really helped the shitty single-guy meals go down well, as I scarfed them up leaning over the kitchen sink in silence]. If I listened hard enough, I could almost hear my 11th grade english teacher laughing at me.
When you drive a forklift for 8+ hours straight, on and off, up and down, skid after skid, [pick-up / put-down] product over and over - by the time the 4am post “Lunch” drowsiness comes around, you’re delirious enough to visually manifest the entire Lynyrd Skynyrd band in front of you just by listening to the Classic Vinyl station on SiriusXM [playing at full volume from your cell phone that sits beside your forklift seat because you don’t own a bluetooth speaker, nor do you have the enthusiasm to go fucking get one, because fuck it and fuck me].
The experience of standing at the Walmart electronics counter in full warehouse garb, buying a bluetooth speaker at 7:38am, making eye contact with another suredly miserable face - was a joy I happily declined taking part in.
It was in this drunken industrial-fulfillment, blue-collar bullshit, manic-depressive, acid trip stuper that I realized something extremely obvious about myself, [but no earlier than that perfect moment was I more aware of it] - that I thoroughly enjoyed the simple, the delicious, the guiltiest of pleasures - the perfect ear-worm, redundant-lyric-laced pandemonium side of nineties music that slinked away relatively unscathed from the back of our minds, and free from most criticism. Attached to Dealership Commercials, Starbucks Playlists, Hotel Lobbies, and DMV Waiting Rooms - the largely one-hit wonders that contributed to the decade’s less serious side of its personality.
Smash Mouth - Astro Lounge (1999)
I found myself particularly fond of Smashmouth and their sophomore album Astro Lounge (1999). A record filled to the brim with an otherworldly prescription of easy-to-consume pop-punk riffs, ska influences, boy-chases-girl oodalolly - all expressed through short, tight, edible tracks that don’t ever ask to be over-analyzed or examined deeply. [I mean just look at that god forsaken album cover]. Once the flood gates open, and your brain realizes it requires no degree of effort to have fun with music of this caliber and artistic integrity, it’s hard to stay away from the buffet of options Spotify [or your preferred streaming service] may recommend to you thereafter.
Next thing you know, you’re towing the line between goofy and self-righteous. Sitting somewhere beautifully perched between Creed and Oasis is a space in which exists the B-Team - the guys we send to battle, the middle-class workers of ‘90s music pop culture. Goo Goo Dolls, Cake, Matchbox Twenty, Everclear, Silverchair, Butthole Surfers - [Just to name a few]. These were the bands you can still hear today, through the lense of the one (maybe two) songs the radio Gods have enslaved and cursed their respective bands to forever play round and round again on contemporary airwaves, local rock stations, and Uncle Patrick’s cookout playlist. There is no escaping the dumbification of the mind when Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” Kool-Aid Man’s itself into the room.
Chumbawumba - What in the SHIT is this album cover?!
I was always interested in the heart of the nineties Dad-Rock town square. The communal love of [Seattle Grunge Titans] Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana - the timeless Big 4 of stoned-riffage, bluesy chug-a-longs, and Sabbath-esque bleakness - via a new style and format. Metallica’s Southern Rock / Shock-Art - reinvention era with Load (1996) and Reload (1997) particularly [Thanks Dad]. Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Pantera were consistent weight room staples throughout my football tenure.
Examples of what existed beneath the overhead were the likes of Faith No More’s “Epic”, Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom”, Meat Puppets’ “Backwater” among many others - singles that communicated so much oomf and clarity to who EXACTLY those bands were, and the sounds they were about - but you had to dig a little deeper, the radio wasn’t going to provide you what else loomed around the corner of their front running chart monsters. Rubberneck (1994) from Toadies was life changing my Junior year of high school. Suddenly a meticulous catalog dive was an exercise that might just yield something great, and it toppled the next wall within my mental music library. It encouraged me to go lower into the bowels of a generation’s music I wasn’t even alive to experience when it first arrived.
Toadies - Rubberneck (1994)
Years later, after amassing countless discovered albums from classic mid-nineties bands - sitting on that piece of warehouse machinery, I heard again [God knows how many times] the dreamy and achey [and honest feeling] “If You Could Only See” by Tonic come slinking into the atmosphere from a stereo boombox - what seemed like a mile away from inside the building. It sparked a nerve, I searched up the record [Lemon Parade (1996)] and the rest is history. I was soon ripping “Casual Affair” and “Mountain” on repeat. That album put some sort of life in me that I hadn’t felt in a long, long while. My biggest takeaway was deciding “Mr. Golden Deal” was one of the greatest tunes i’d ever heard, and my experience in hearing it all come bittersweetly crashing down at the end with the devastating “My Old Man” final track, was some kind of internalized silently-suffered level of melancholy I may never live through again. [At least unassumingly in the presence of coworkers].
Tonic - Lemon Parade (1996)
This sonic revelation pushed my soft side for Coldplay, Keane, Radiohead - and the likes of UK based “cry-alone while you drive, pop songs about your girlfriend or wanting to run away” into a mindset of imagining my family falling apart, nursing a substance addiction back to manageable, and smoking cigarettes outside of a dungy roadhouse with no quarters for a payphone. The pre-internet aesthetic of pessimism and depression in young twenty-somethings, introduced 30 years ago - and I had now adopted that hallucination full-bore eating a string cheese while removing a skid of Budweiser from a two-tier metal rack [that probably wouldn’t pass a thorough Osha inspection].
I remember laying in bed in the early evening of a weekday, seeing a targeted ad on Instagram for the usual nineties collaborative tour promo consisting of a few [remember when we talked about the B-Team] at-batters who brought a handful of solid radio tunes with them in their arsenal. In this case, it was Collective Soul, joined by friends in Better Than Ezra and Tonic - coming to Atlantic City, New Jersey in October of 2021. I stopped to consider if I really wanted to pay for a ticket to see Tonic if I meant I was walking into an unsure setlist of mostly unheard bops from the other two acts. I scratched my chin and pulled up the streaming services to recall the handful of BTE and Collective Soul songs I was aware of. “Good” and “Desperately Wanting” were catchy BTE goodies I had heard in passing, but while examining C-Soul’s highest ranking streamed tracks, I quickly wrapped my head around just how much I already knew.
Collective Soul - Collective Soul (1995)
“December”, “World I Know”, and “Gel” from their 1995 self-titled album protruded immediatly, as every contemporary rock station in America still kept those licks in regular play. I quickly familiarized myself with Dosage (1999) and almost had an aneurysm - with the effortless joy I was able to uptake, in its perfect delivery of pop-rock / pro-tools built ballads and [again] bite-sized bits of feel-good music - But it was “Shine”, track one from their 1993 debut album that reignited a cue for happiness in my brain more than any other. Distorted guitars, staccato chorus riffs, and despite its mellow atmosphere, acted as a candle atop the typical murky grunge waters literally “shining” out the phrase “Heaven let your light shine down”. Good enough for Dolly Parton to perform a cover of, become Billboard’s “Top Rock Track”, and later rank number 42 on VH1’s list of the “Top 100 Greatest Songs of the ‘90s.”
Collective Soul - Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid (1993)
In the weeks leading up to the show, I was fully encompassed by my new friend, a spiritual fix alongside a brand new apartment, feeling good - things were looking up. The nights went a little quicker, I [quite literally] slept a bit better, and I was smiling more [cringe?]. I don’t even care how delusional this sounds, it’s the truth.
I was now allotting time to actually sit in my living room with a beer [instead of sleeping] and watch old clips of Collective Soul’s documented shows, Jakarta (2013), Woodstock ‘99 - etc. Playing Xbox for hours with a playlist of undiscovered albums and songs that felt like pulling a comically long unified rope of hankerchiefs from a magician’s box [practically giggling while doing so]. I felt unworthy of this sudden swath of guilty-goodness I was keeping all to myself, but “shining” [had to do it] to others in my everyday life.
Soon it was the Collective Soul show, not the Tonic show [not that they lost any steam in my listening habits] but it was clear now what this dominating force was doing to me. I clung to this new outlet for self medicating like I was Gollum on the street corner rocking back and forth holding a vinyl record, and it wasn’t long before I was singing the band’s praises to others and in online forums. Dosage became the backbone of my self-encouragement, positivity, and outlook on life. It superceded being a fantastically accessible happy album, into one of my instant-classic ALL-TIME favorites - I could see the writing on the wall with every playback of “Compliment” - and “Crown” with its “She Said” secret track.
Collective Soul - Dosage (1999)
I can remember Tonic coming out to the intro of Led Zeppelin’s haunting, moog-laced “In The Light” and feeling every hair on my body stand on end. Better Than Ezra even played their entire set in full-body, skeleton-clad stretch suits since it was only one day before Halloween - but when Ed Roland gently piano-waltzed through the addictive main verse riff of “Shine”, letting us all know the band was about the launch into their golden boy single, I knew I would be a fan for life. Something genetically changed in me that day at the cellular level forever, and I think I may have tacked on a few more gray hairs to that “Old Soul” image my mom’s been telling me I have since I was a teen. My shoes got whiter, my shorts got higher, and I was yearning to cut my lawn [Kidding].
“Shine” isn’t just the foundation in which Collective Soul built its entire existence ontop of, its an underdog of ‘90’s grunge in that it commands you to shake off the weight of the times, and choose happiness. It’s Rocky Balboa taking shots from Ivan Drago, unphased to if it may be his last day alive. “Shine” doesn’t just walk the opposite way of musical pop culture’s down-mood, it puts their listeners on its back - and takes the lot with it. Its circular ensnarement of thankfulness and hope is absolutely inescapable - And I challenge you to find a room of five or more who won’t chant “Yeah!” at the cue, like it’s a pavlovian mark deep within the recesses of our brains reminding you to reset, and remember why life CAN be good, and is a gift provided by something no one really understands, [but nonetheless… Must be a privilege].
I was once a boy, and then I became a man. I was once angry, and tired, and beaten down, and I found faith. I was once a gatekeeper of good and bad, right and wrong, and then I found freedom in the capacity in which an artist can have fun with their art to the degree of unseriousness Collective Soul does.
I was once a Gen Z, knuckle-headed, down-and-out doomer - who looked at the world and asked Why? How? What? Who? Throwing my hands up in discouragement and resentment - fractured from my own identity, my community, and my world.
And then I chose to Shine.
