Third Eye Blind — "Semi-Charmed Life"

"Semi-Charmed Life" hit modern-rock radio on February 18, 1997, as the first single from Third Eye Blind's self-titled Elektra debut, and by August it had climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 while topping both the Alternative and Mainstream Top 40 airplay charts — the song of the summer by any measure. Written by frontman Stephan Jenkins and produced with Eric Valentine, its "doo doo doo" refrain deliberately nods to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," another impossibly breezy song about very unbreezy things.

Because the subject is speed. Jenkins was writing about the crystal-meth scene he'd watched chew through San Francisco: "Speed's a very bright, shiny drug, and I wanted the song to sound like that, but I also wanted the frustration in there," he told Billboard in 1997. The radio edit scrubbed the words "crystal meth" by literally reversing the audio — backmasking, not bleeping — and cut most of the song's darkest stretch, so millions of listeners (and every school dance DJ) bounced along to an addiction spiral without ever clocking it. The video, shot in the city's South of Market district, kept the sun-bleached illusion intact.

The song has since gone four-times platinum and become the definitive example of the late-90s trick of smuggling darkness inside jangle-pop — and the eternal "wait, THAT's what it's about?" revelation. It also launched one of the great debut-album runs of the decade, which is its own entry: see Third Eye Blind.