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There are only 3 reasons you don’t like Dave Matthews Band.
The first: it’s just not your thing. That’s fine. You don’t like their sound, their songwriting, whatever. That’s a merit based disagreement that anyone is allowed to have about any subject, especially music.
There are, however, only 2 reasons you hate Dave Matthews Band.
- Who you associate their music with
- They were popular and probably overexposed
So, if you are not a 15 year-old angst filled boy (“angst filled” and “15 year old boy” being redundant of course) you should never hang your hat on hating something because it’s popular.
Hell, if you’re an adult and have the time and energy to hate a band – any band – you might consider having less time on your hands.
Imagine Dragons & Patton Oswalt
On the whole I do not enjoy Imagine Dragons. I like “Shots” and “Thunder”.
But I don’t hate them. They’re fine. No band is worth hating.
As Patton Oswalt says in this clip from Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time,
The second big warning sign for me [that I’m getting old] is that, I don’t hate any music, any more. I don’t. There’s music I don’t listen to. That’s as far as I take it. When I was 25 not only did I not listen to music, I had to fucking let you know.
25 year-old Patton:
The only reason that Nickelback does that music is for money and pussy. That’s it. Did you know that?…
45 year-old Patton:
Do you know what people do for money and pussy on this planet? They do horrific shit.
The whole bit is worth watching (linked here and above), and the entire special even moreso. Here’s another clip for fun.
I think this argument largely takes care of “people who hate Dave Matthews Band because they’re popular” crowd.
Now we’ve cleared the way to address the #1 reason people hate Dave Matthews band, and then we’ll get into why you should get over that.
But first…a brief aside for Earnestness
Yes, Dave Matthews is earnest. I was in a slam poetry collective in college, so I understand exhaustion-by-earnestness. But no earnestness? In your entire life? That’s just as obnoxious as not understanding any art that isn’t earnest. So, grow out of your 22-year old single guy buffoon shell and let Dave Matthews and A Star Is Born be that small dose of earnestness thta keeps your heart from freezing over. (No offense to 22 year olds, but when I was 22 I was intolerably “edgy”.)
High School & Adidas Slides
The #1 reason people hate Dave Matthews Band is because they were associated with the popular, Abercrombie & Fitch wearing, jock and cheerleader types at your high school or college.
In high school – and probably most of college – your identity is based as much on the things you like as the things you hate because you have nothing at your core.
You are an open ended amoeba through which pop culture and experience is beginning to flow. So at that age, hating what others like is an almost justifiable strategy to self-development.
I never had the problem of associating Dave Matthews Band with the popular crowd (more on that later). Because of this I feel well positioned to defend them.
No, I had another problem: a (somewhat) misguided disdain for any and everything suburban.
Here are all the things I considered “suburban” and therefore hated:
- certain stores at the mall
- the mall
- polo shirts
- sandals that weren’t adidas slides
- adidas slides if worn by a soccer player
- soccer players
- soccer
- umbro sweatpants
- white people who called other white people “wiggers”
- haircuts
- caring about the clothes you wore
- self-esteem
- basketball teams that passed a lot
- basketball teams that shot 3s well
- wearing khaki pants
- boy bands
- girls who liked boy bands
- white people who never lived around people of color
- the fundamentally flawed policy to provide public school funding based on the income of the zip code a school resides in
- white people who were not ashamed of being white
- a neighborhood that’s quiet at night
- properly paved roads
- senses of entitlement
- and white people who bandwagoned onto Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers but didn’t PUT IN THE WORK
Let’s just say my prejudices were coming from what I thought was a good place, one of concern for my city, and that I had a lot of stuff to work through once I got to college.
No One Listened to DMB
The peculiar thing about hating the suburbs while going to a public school is I never added “Dave Matthews Band” to “Things I Hate About the Suburbs”.
I knew so little about what suburban kids actually did that I didn’t know they liked Dave Matthews Band.
So I got to discover Dave Matthews Band through these 3 really important pathways:
- my best friends DVD of all their music videos
- a really good mixtape another friend of mine made me
- being driven to school by my close friend’s really cool older brother (aren’t all friends’ older brothers the coolest people we know when we’re kids?) who played Live at Luther College often and on repeat
So I ask you, first and foremost, to let go of the hate you had for Dave Matthews Band because you associated their music with people you didn’t like.
Pretend Dave Matthews Band was introduced to you by a cool person who’s musical taste you respect and not the people in high school you felt were superficial and popular and attractive and not friends with you.
Not that you’d want to be friend with them because of your integrity, of course. They were bandwagon hoppers and that’s an annoying thing to be but it doesn’t change the music that Dave Matthews Band made.
A Band Doesn’t Control Who Likes It
A band might just break at the exact right time for their sound.
In Dave Matthews case, the time was a mid-90s birth of an alternative rock sound filled with acoustic guitars and light-hearted, hippie undertone (see also: Counting Crows, Hootie & The Blowfish, Spin Doctors, Ani DiFranco, Blues Traveler, and the one-hit wonders Sister Hazel).
Look, white people were going through a thing in the 90s and this is what happened.
The slightly younger gen-Xers were growing up and didn’t entirely agree to make Nirvana popular.
They wanted a safe place, like a festival lawn, for which to dance terribly upon. That’s ok. It smells like patchouli but that’s ok.
Now that we’ve shed our teenage prejudices, let’s look at why Dave Matthews Band is a legitimately good band.
Why Dave Matthews Band Is Good
Musicianship
Dave Matthews was a bartender in Charlottesville, VA. As bands played at his bar, he would hand-pick the best musicians from each band. Or rather, a friend of his dared him to ask these best of Charlotesville musicians to help him record a demo.
But he still asked them himself.
He had the gall to approach musicians playing in bands, tell them he had better songs than their band was playing, and then THEY AGREED.
From “Step Into The Light“,
Beauford would later recall that, “It started out as a three-piece thing with Dave and Leroi…working on some of Dave’s songs. He only had four songs at the time..And it didn’t work out with the three of us.”[6] Matthews said, “The first time we played together…we were awful. Not just kind of bad, I mean heinously bad. We tried a couple of different songs and they were all terrible…Sometimes it amazes me that we ever had a second rehearsal.”
Now you can easily read the rest of their rise to stardom on wikipedia or the internet. But the point is, these guys are real musicians. Their drummer is a drummer’s drummer. Their bassist is a bassist’s bassist and that’s a really tough sentence to say out loud. Their saxophone player is up there with Clarence Clemons. Dave Matthews can really play guitar too. “Satellite” is not easy, “Ants Go Marching” is not a sleepwalk.
Everything about their beginnings was completely merit based.
These guys were the best at what they did and Dave Matthews impressed them with his songwriting.
Their opinion should mean something to you.
A Quick Digression Into Jam Bands
I get it. Jam bands might be the worst thing white people have done to funk music. Dave Matthews gets grouped in with Jam Bands because they breached the mainstream consciousness at the same time and because they actually jammed, as in, wove multiple solos into pre-written songs during their concerts.
I mentioned funk music because that’s what I hear bands like Phish or String Cheese Incident trying to do: start with an almost-funky bass line and add violins and banjos on top of it. The problem with “almost funky” is that “almost funky” is the same as “corny”. Bootsy Collins has the swing needed to pull off a funk bass line, unlike any jam band I’ve ever heard.
So if you’re thinking of Dave Matthews Band as a jam band, I’m just saying, listen to them with fresh ears and you’ll hear their music rarely ventured into songs that were lead by a frustrating, “almost-funk” bassline, that while coming from a good-hearted place, just doesn’t quite get the party dancing. Unless the party is on all of the acid.
In addition to not mastering the funk and singing every word as though they’re in a pronunciation contest, jam bands just tend to lack hooky melodies. Dave Matthews is good at writing hooky melodies.
Melody Before Words: Satellite
There is a version of Satellite, one of the songs you were probably forced to hear way too much of in the 90s, that gives a strong insight into Dave Matthews ability to write songs, and especially, strong melodies whose lyrics fit them both in sound and sylabic placement.
My point with pointing out “After Her” is:
1) I think “after her” is a better lyric and topic than “satellite”
2) this version is more heartbreaking, to the point, and fits the music better than a song about satellites (however strong you might argue that “satellites” is as a metaphor I think the direct lyric works better) but finally,
3) and most impotrantly, he wrote 2 songs with the same melody and both are successful as songs.
He sat down. Wrote and recorded an entire song. Then went back and thought he could improve it by changing almost all the words to that song while keeping the melody damn near identical.
The trick to melodies and phrasing are that they have to be damn near exact to have an impact. Doing that twice for an entire song is on the level of Elliott Smith (see: the early version of Miss Misery).
Most writers would probably just throw out a song rather than re-do it all if they thought it wasn’t holding up.
It’s All About The Music
You don’t have to like Dave Matthews Band, but I don’t think you should hate it because of who you associate with liking it. Whether that’s jockish bandwagoners, patchouli hippies, or just white people in general.
Dave Matthews band is made up of some of the best musicians of their generation.
Listen to Beauford’s fills – they’re over the top and self-addmittedly overplayed, but their beautiful and complex. Listen to Tinsley’s violin solos. Hell, without him “Ants Marching” isn’t a hit, which I’m sure some would be thankful for. If that’s the case with you, listen instead to his pizzicato on “Two Step”, it’s a great melody that syncopates the track perfectly.
How about the way Moore harmonizes on “Grey Street”? Sure, it’s an easy part, but he knows when to punch and when to sit back like Mayweather with a sax.
Clarence Clemons learns a song inside and out so that he only plays at the exact times that call for it. It’s actually not easy for a musician to not play for most of a song and jump in.
Listen to the bass drop in on “Stay” and then realize Stefan Lessard was 18 when he joined the band.
Dave Matthews Band is a musician’s band.
Any musician serious about the craft of learning their instrument should isolate their instrument within a Dave Matthews song and listen to how it works with the band.
And Dave, for all his songwriting abililties, does really have a heartbreaking twinge to his voice and transitions from minor key verses to major chord choruses better than almost anyone (“Warehouse“).
All that said, here is a playlist that is a good start at re-introducing a former skeptic to the band’s music. If you’ve hated them in the past, I think it’s worth re-introducing yourself to them.