Well, you hit the nail RIGHT on the head. That explanation was absolutely perfect, from the timing to the distressed white baseball cap.
I graduated in 1993, and lived in the earliest days of that era. My freshman year, Rusted Root was playing at laughable protests by this local nut-job named Vince Irene. They recorded their first big album my senior year. Frankly, they were a hell of a lot better when they were just a little local Pittsburgh sensation. A lot of what was great about them gets lost in recorded music or large venues.
Are you kidding? “Head Like a Hole” was absolutely guaranteed to get every chick onto the dance floor.
101.9 WXRP isn’t bad these days. Not smooth jazz anymore, decent rock. Even caught some Elvis Costello on it the other day. Nothing newer than 1999, sadly, but hey. They even had Matt Pinfield as a DJ till… well, today, when he announced he was going into rehab.
Holy shit, are you a sociologist? I was going to post this more or less exactly. Except I was going to mention Stussy caps and Yaga shirts. Here in Texas, frat daddies who were “core” (think Delts and KAs) were into country. But certainly, if you were from the 'burbs, or moved to Texas from Jersey, or spent a few years at boarding school… you were into Big Head Todd or Hootie. The thing is, I actually liked those bands until I heard them being played badly by every aspiring guitarist in the dorm. Then it was like, shut the fuck up!
True story. I was a member of a group responsible for managing the Texas longhorn mascot, Bevo. Every year, we put on a concert for charity. Typically, we’d bring in Jerry Jeff Walker or Alabama - something along those lines. This one year, a couple of Sammies and Fijis got together to propose an alternative. They wanted to bring in a band nobody had ever heard of (at considerably lower price), but the major issue was that they had no name recognition and they weren’t country. So that proposal died.
The band? You guessed it, Dave Matthews Band. We had Shenandoah, and I drove them around town that day. Nice guys, though I can’t fade country (except Garth and Little Texas!).
I saw DMB at Fenway Park (let me explain - a friend was going with the president of the DMB from Seattle, but he got caught on the West Coast and the ticket was going to go to waste otherwise). My buddy couldn’t scalp it, and his wife refused to go. I went for the cultural experience, and truth be told, I do like a song or two of his.
For met the highlight was Sheryl Crow, who was the opening act. I love SC and have seen her about six times in concert. We had fourth row seats and the show rocked.
I saw precisely one other Black person at the show besides myself. I actually said “Hi!” to her because I felt she, like me, had never felt Blacker in her entire life. And I’m pretty sure the band were looking out and saying, “Hey, look! A brother!”
Just noticed that virtually all of the bands ** msmith537** mentioned - The Grateful Dead, Phish, Rusted Root, O.A.R., Widespread Panic, Counting Crows, and Train - make me violent at the very sound of them. But I love me some Wallflowers. Go figure…
I also want to third or fourth msmith537’s apt description. I was in college from '93-'98, and went through a jam band and DMB stint myself. In fact DMB played at a frat party at my school like right before they got big (at WVU), although I wasn’t at that particular party. DMB started in my home state at UVA, so they were really big around here. I saw them in concert once, and it was good, although DMB isn’t really my style of music anymore. But hearing it does bring me back to my college days…
I am in Richmond VA and I used to see Dave Matthews play at a place called the Flood Zone every Wednesday night for $5. Sometimes there were 30 people there. Between sets him and the band would drink at the bar and generally shoot the shit.
I am a HUUUUGE Dave fan. I find his music spiritual and joyful. I was never in a frat. I listen to all of his stuff all the time. Don’t be hatin’!
So I’d managed to make it through life without ever being exposed to the Dave Matthews Band. But out of morbid curiosity upon reading this thread, I went over to Youtube and attempted to watch a few DMB videos.
I wasn’t able to make it to the 1-minute mark on any of them before clicking away in disgust. That stuff is some major pablum; are DMB fans really that afraid of being challenged musically?
What do you consider “being challenged musically”? In other words, what genre of music have you decided is the be-all end-all of musical taste?
To a certain extend, the answer is “yes”. In my observation, the stereotypical DMB fans are not particularly interested in being challenged musically or culturally. This is what DMB fans look like. These aren’t metal heads or punks or guido club kids or angsty indie goths for the most part. If anything, they can be defined by how blandly inoffensive they are. They would tend to view those other people as immature, low class, scary, or simply just oddly different.
DM is the lousiest, lamest, most nasal-sounding and accountant looking piece of crap in the music industry next to Phish. Shit, he makes Jimmy Buffet look cool. I thought part of graduating college is to forget Phish and DMB. When we find out he’s really gay, Dallas will change their mind. Hang in there!
I don’t think guys only play DMB when girls are around. I know a lot of guys who genuinely like the band. Like I said, they do have some genuinely good songs. When they first came out, they had a really unique sound. They were certainly unlike anything else on the pop radio, with elaborate horn riffs, saxophone solos, violins, and world-music influenced beats. Under the Table and Dreaming is a pretty solid album, and so is Before These Crowded Streets. There is genuine musical talent there, no doubt.
Everything after that, though, pretty much blew. Everything from after 2000, I think, just was really mediocre and lame. It was really the rest of the band that made the music interesting, not Dave himself. When Dave Matthews started putting more focus on himself as an “artist” that’s when it went downhill, IMO.
Oh, and, bro! Dude, like brah. Bro-dog, I’ll get you a beer, bro. Dog, you hear Dave is coming here? Yeah man, Dave is my breh. Bru, he’s like, the man, dog. Dave is totally chill.
I loved Under the Table and Dreaming when it first came out. I still have it and I still like listening to it, especially the violin parts. What I can’t stand are DMB fans for all the reasons in this thread. I can’t stand listening to any live DMB because those assholes keep “singing” along.
So is this morose collection of weird and eclectic music what the kids are listening to these days?
DMB was light and fun music we would throw on our fraternity party room stereo while we played Beruit and chatted up our girlfriends. It’s ok to listen to some pop-radio fluff every now and then.
It sounds like the biggest reason people don’t like DMB is because a lot of douchey guys listen to it.
+1…I never thought I’d be defending DMB, but here I really have to. Those other bands are just…not fun to listen to, by and large. DMB is, for all intents and purposes, enjoyable music to listen to.
I think most DMB-haters really just hate the fans of the band. But there is definitely musical talent there. If you were to just listen to the music by yourself, you would be able to appreciate it more, I think.
Well, it depends on how you define “fun”. Some people want music that’s a soundtrack for holding their Bud Light up in one hand and going “Woooo!” a lot; others want to find themselves stumbling out of the club in a solitary daze, hanging on to walls, because they’ve been, like, channeling the forces of the universe or something. And I’ll readily admit that bands that cater to the former are going to be more popular than the latter; I’ve definitely been at shows where there were more people on stage than in the audience. It’s another instance of the old “does ‘popular’ = ‘good’; multiple factors of quality” argument. OTOH, I also think it’s clear which type of artist does more to advance the artform.
Incidentally, this is also the reason for the “early fans no longer like the band after they become popular” syndrome; often, bands that make it big really do change their sound to cater to the tastes of the larger audience.
Oh, granted the performers are skilled musicians; no argument on that point. However, I was trying to listen to the music by myself. Different strokes, I suppose.
Dave Matthews makes music for people who want to like music, or at least be seen as liking music, but who don’t actually like music. That’s why a terrible vocalist yodling over hold music jazz is perfect. The guys jamming out on Citibank’s customer service line have some serious musical chops too, but it’s pablum. There’s nothing challenging or interesting about it. It’s taking Paul Simon and killing the talent aspect in favor of the non-offensiveness of it. I’d rather eat a DMB CD than have to listen to one.
Interestingly, I’ve been to a bunch of Willie Nelson shows, and at virtually all of them, I noticed a significant number of black people. I remember one in Tuscaloosa, AL, where he flirted outrageously with a group of about 20 or 30 middle aged black women, who loved every second of it.
The demographics of music appreciation can be complex and fascinating.