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Then What Happened?:
JIMMY EAT WORLD Brought Us A Message Of Hope And Then We Just Kind Of Forgot About Them

The Band: Jimmy Eat World

The Song: “The Middle”

I can’t speak for everyone, but when I was twelve years old, sincerity wasn’t high on my list of priorities.

Most of my decisions revolved around making it through middle school, and emotional honesty holds little value with the average group of seventh-graders.

If you don’t want to be subject to the casual terrors of grades six through eight, you do not show emotion.

You do not publicly enjoy any sort of music that might even suggest that you have emotions, or even worse, that you are “a total wuss.”

You do not, in other words, listen to a song like “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World.

And yet we did!

No one I know ever talked about the song—except maybe to make fun of it—but in the final months of 2001, “The Middle” rose to the top of the charts. A lot of people were listening to that song, and I’d wage that middle-school students made up a large part of those people. We were all just too afraid to talk about it.

As perfectly positioned as me and my peers were to receive “The Middle” at the time of its release (it’s literally called middle school), I know we weren’t the only people who liked that song. With its re-assuring, confidence boosting, “don’t worry about what other people say” lyrics, “The Middle” can bring comfort to anyone. Everyone has times when they feel left out or looked-down-on, and when that happens, it’s nice to have a band like Jimmy Eat World to tell you that everything’s going to be alright.

It all sounds pretty cheesy, and yeah, it kind of is, but the song works for one reason: it’s sincere.

There’s no sense that lead singer Jim Atkins is being ironic or calculating. He’s expressing a completely genuine human emotion, which of course meant that I had no room for him in my twelve-year-old life. Maybe I was worried that liking a song about feelings would make me seem lame or maybe I was just a cynical little jerk who thought songs with positive lyrics belonged in children’s television shows.

Either way, I didn’t really like “The Middle.” “Sweetness,” on the other hand—that was my jam.

Looking back on it now, though, I can see that “The Middle” is a great song.

The listening public knew it was great, and they embraced it with fervor. The year was 2001, the pop-punk/emo wave was just about to crest, and Jimmy Eat World was popular enough to seem like they had a long career in front of them.

So… what happened?

The obvious answer is that people stopped liking pop-punk and emo. Not me, though. I still love them both, and listening to Jimmy Eat World’s full discography has exposed me to a whole mess of awesome songs. Still, most people are not like me, and the world is surely worse off for it. 

But I don’t think Jimmy Eat World simply paid the price for sticking to a sound that fell out of public favor.

See, originally, they were a straight-up punk band with a different lead singer, but then Jim Adkins became the front man and the band recorded Clarity, which has been referred to as “the Led Zeppelin IV of emo rock.” It’s kind of a silly description, but it does indicate how musically inventive the band once was.

After “The Middle,” Jimmy Eat World settled into a groove. It’s a fine groove, one that has produced several albums full of same strong melodies and confessional lyrics that made the band successful in the first place, but it’s still a groove. However, even that doesn’t quite explain the decline that followed their sudden rise to success. So, what’s the real issue here?

Jimmy Eat World never stopped making sincere songs with big hooks, but the problem with the rest of those songs is that none of them are “The Middle.” That’s no slight against the band, but on their follow-up album, Futures, the closest they got to a “Middle”-like single was “Pain,” a song about someone who escapes emotional anguish through copious drug use. It isn’t a bad song, but it’s certainly not the emotional warm blanket of their big hit.

The fact that a band like Jimmy Eat World had a hit as big as “The Middle” is a simple matter of “right song, right time”. After years of writing similar-sounding songs, the stars just aligned, and Jimmy Eat World produced a single that took their sound and put it in a neat little package, just waiting to be enjoyed by anyone in need of a musical pick-me-up, be they a seventh grader or someone with a smidge more emotional maturity.

The track “Big Casino,” one of the band’s many great latter-day songs, contains this line: “There’s still some living left when your prime comes and goes.” John Cougar Mellencamp said it a little differently, but the point is basically the same: life goes on, and you’ve got to deal with it.

It’s a good line and it is certainly not an accident that it echoes the band’s own diminished popularity.

Still, I wonder if “Big Casino” had the same effect on older listeners that “The Middle” had on twelve-year-olds. It’s not hard to imagine someone of a certain age hearing that song and feeling the same sense of comfort and re-assurance that Jimmy Eat World first gave so many people back in 2001.

I believe—or at least hope—that my prime is still ahead of me, so I can’t say for sure. Still, it’s nice to think about.

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