Did anyone say it's easy being a poster boy/former critic's fave/spokesman for a band that's not lived up to all the hype? Flint are currently in the unenviable position of being viewed as pop poseurs by their college-age fans but not selling similar numbers to other Floridian acts - no matter the genre - who seem to be breaking records with each release.
Worse than all this is the personal backlash singer Cody Jackson is up against. Rumors of a decade of heroin use persist, speculation that he can only write a song by sleeping in his car and refusing to bathe are urban legend and a national publication recently trashed him as a "loser who rides the coattails of Britney Spears and exploits his more talented band members". Most people waiting to do interviews are more excited to hang with guitarist Juwan Pilgrim and the girls banging on the windows of their latest soundcheck are looking for studly keyboardist, Doug Cherokee.
That backlash is a shame really because Flint's album due out in stores next week is full of clever pop songs that have more in common with works like Green by R.E.M. or U2's Unforgettable Fire than the current Y2K lollipop stuff being processed and called music these days.
Flint are about to launch another summer tour and you can expect to see Cody and Flint on the cover of something at the local magazine rack. Always a favorite of rock critics, Jackson is more well-known to the public for losing his cool with journalists or flicking his tongue into the mouths of high-profile Hollywood princesses. Today, Jackson doesn't really seem interested in talking about either. Hands in his hair, Jackson answers most questions with eye contact or shrugs. He looks and smells like he's bathed but offers only "to get one of the other guys if my answers are boring".
That wasn't going to happen as I prefer to ask the songwriter what topics he is tackling. So I ask if this release 'Soggy' is more of a mainstream album than Flint's previous release 'White Trash Folklore'. "Not really," he says. "I think it's less white trash than the last one but white trash is selling now with guys like Kid Rock and Eminem. I don't really know what mainstream is. I would say no because 'Soggy' isn't really a Latin album or a bubblegum album or a wannabe-grunge album. It's just got some good songs. I'd say it's a better album."
Well, perhaps it's as mainstream as Flint can get. "It's hard to say what influences us in the studio. Juwan is still into all the acoustic guitar-driven bands and D.C. likes his ecstacy-rave-techno stuff and I don't know what I'm listening to. . . I like that new band from Scotland, Travis and also I steal the new Moby CD from D.C. a lot. I don't know how much it influences my lyrics, though."
A lot of the songs seem to be about that male-female dynamic Cody is so fond of. "I guess that is kind of a theme," he says, "That's been said a lot about the last album too. But songs like 'Stupid Rock Star' or 'In The Sewers' that we've done lately are just stories. I don't want to get into it too much but I purposely avoided writing songs that could be interpreted as. . . about certain relationships I've had with girls. . . that everyone knows. Songs like 'Wearing Bathing Suits' or 'Without My Princess' were written by me but taken from someone else's point of view. Hopefully, the songs don't suffer because of it."
I get some sense that it isn't easy being a poster boy/former critic's fave/spokesman for a band that's not lived up to all the hype. The thing is Jackson doesn't seem to care. His perspective of his band's place in popular music is dead-on but likely to change with the summer release of 'Soggy'. Unless the backlash against Jackson is taken out on Flint (and his more popular bandmates), in a few months time we might hear about some other loser riding the coattails of Cody Jackson.