Blind Melon - No Rain

Bring Your Umbrella Anyway

For John, who’s just as weird

If you want to understand why No Rain by Blind Melon is the unofficial anthem of people who don’t really know what they want but are convinced they’re missing it, you have to start with the video. The Bee Girl, tap-dancing through a world that doesn’t get her, is the most accurate depiction of my adolescence that’s ever been broadcast on basic cable. I graduated high school in 1998, which means I’m old enough to remember a time when music videos could actually make you feel something besides the urge to buy sneakers. The Bee Girl was a meme before memes existed, which is to say: she was a symbol for people who felt like symbols but didn’t know what they were supposed to symbolize.

But No Rain isn’t really about the Bee Girl. It’s about the feeling you get when you realize that being sad is sometimes the most interesting thing about you. The lyrics are essentially a treatise on boredom, depression, and the hope that maybe, just maybe, someone out there is as weird as you are. This is not a complicated idea, but it’s a universal one. The chorus — “All I can say is that my life is pretty plain” — is the kind of thing you can only admit in a song, because if you say it out loud at a party, people will think you’re either fishing for compliments or about to start a podcast.

Here’s the thing about coming of age in the late ’90s: we were the last generation to believe that being misunderstood was a personality trait. This was before social media turned alienation into a competitive sport. Back then, you could listen to a song like No Rain and feel like you were part of a secret club, even if the only membership requirement was owning a Discman and feeling vaguely disappointed by everything.

Blind Melon was never a cool band. They were the band you listened to when you were tired of pretending to like Mudhoney. Their music was too cheerful to be grunge, too grungy to be pop, and too pop to be taken seriously by anyone who owned a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. No Rain was a hit anyway, mostly because it sounded like the musical equivalent of shrugging your shoulders and staring out the window. It’s a song about wanting to be happy, but not really knowing what that means. It’s about wanting the rain to stop, but also kind of liking the way it sounds on the roof.

Now, in 2025, I find myself listening to No Rain on while doomscrolling through the news. There’s a particular kind of existential dread that comes from realizing that the world is both more connected and more fragmented than ever before. In the ’90s, we thought the future would be a place where everyone finally understood each other. Instead, it’s a place where everyone is yelling at each other in the comments section.

Maybe that’s why No Rain still resonates. It’s a song about the desire to escape — not from the world, but from the relentless pressure to have an opinion about everything. The Bee Girl doesn’t want to change the world; she just wants to find people who clap when she dances. That’s not a political statement. It’s not even an emotional one. It’s just human.

I sometimes wonder if the reason I keep returning to songs like No Rain is because it reminds me of a time when it was possible to be happy without having to prove it. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia for a world where the biggest problem was not having anything to do on a Saturday afternoon. Either way, the rain keeps falling, and I keep listening, hoping that somewhere out there, the Bee Girl found her people. I’m lucky. I found mine, and a good umbrella too.