Why I don't like Dave Matthews Band
And I didn't even mention the poop cruise
A new album by the Dave Matthews Band has dropped, and with it comes the same promotional cycle we’ve come to expect. The sold-out tours at summer sheds. The long, loving profiles of Matthews, highlighting his tragic upbringing in South Africa, focusing on his philanthropy, and concluding with what a good guy he is. And, of course, the meme-like questions: why do people hate him so much? Matthews’ status as a critical pariah has become so accepted that entertainment writers mention it in the ledes to their articles and Marc Maron has joked about it in his standup shows.
You would probably take one look at me—with my vintage dresses and T-strap Mary Janes, my modest vinyl collection and my BA in English—and guess that I was not a fan of Dave Matthews, that perhaps I even disliked his music. And you would be right. Though my disinterest in his music isn’t my entire personality, I’ve had at least two decades to answer the question of why he’s anathema to the kind of music fan he seems to want in his audience.
For a band I semi-actively dislike, I hadn’t started out having much of an opinion of the man or the band. I worked in the flagship store of a music retailer in my senior year of high school, the kind of place that had a wall of TVs blaring a continuous stream of music videos throughout the day. At some point in early 1995, “What Would You Say” was included on one of the multi-hour VHS tapes of videos that corporate sent us. It wasn’t my favorite song on the compilation, but it wasn’t my least favorite, either; it mostly served as a Pavlovian cue that one of the keyholders would be coming up to count my till and send me on dinner break.
DMB managed to stay under my radar for a second month in a row, when the slightly more pleasant “Satellite” was featured on the following month’s VHS tape. Only in early spring of that year did it hit me that they were going to be huge; when I got to work on the first of the month, two dudes from the main office had taken down the eight-foot-tall foam-mounted photo of Veruca Salt and were replacing it with a photo of DMB. Since I’d been working in a corporate-owned record store for almost a year at that point, I knew how bands got their posters hung behind the first-floor registers, and it wasn’t because anyone on staff had an opinion either way. Someone’s throwing a lot of money at this band, I thought to myself as I punched in for my shift. The placement worked—we moved a lot of copies of that album, and the students at the prep school around the corner voted for “Satellite” as their prom song—but I still couldn’t bring myself to care about DMB either way.
I graduated from high school and left music retail for a mandatory gap year that spring, and—despite their growing ubiquity—I continued to be indifferent towards DMB. My opinion shifted one humid afternoon a few years later, when I heard “Crash Into Me” for the first time while waiting in line at a CVS. I’d gone in to buy a beverage and a packet of batteries for my Discman and was thirsty enough to have opened the 12-ounce bottle of Cherry Coke while in the queue, only to narrowly avoid spraying the person in front of me when Matthews sang that line1. The band dropped to a hush whenever he began singing and his enunciation became clearer as his lyrics got more explicit. The combination of his ugly voice, the very clear singing style, the anatomical specificity of the lyrics, and the way the arrangement dropped out to put the focus on his words left me with a cold, clammy feeling, as though I’d accepted an obscene prank call while waiting to make my purchases.
The song “Crash Into Me” combines the most and least appealing aspects of DMB and of Matthews as a songwriter and lyricist. He writes pleasant, rangy melodies and arranges his songs to highlight his band’s talents, both individually and as a unit. The 1996 DMB lineup was made up of talented musicians who played well together. The production has an understated quality that keeps the emphasis on the band and gives the recording an appealing, timeless quality. On the strength of the instrumental stretches of the songs, I could appreciate what DMB was doing, even if it wasn’t for me.
And then Matthews opened his mouth to sing.
Based on what little I know about how DMB formed, I can guess that Matthews developed his vocal style by shouting over dive bar crowds at last call. He has a hoarse, back-of-the-throat singing style with a shrill upper register that immediately pulls focus from whatever his band is doing. If you’re a male singer with this kind of ugly voice, you have four options: you can be a generational, world-class songwriting talent; you can develop a more restrained vocal style; or you can really lean in to what makes your voice unappealing.
Matthews instead goes for the fourth option, which is to sing as though you don’t know how ugly your voice is. Well, sort of. He’s spoken with self-deprecation about his singing voice, but when he gets behind a mic he lapses into one of two vocal options: a shout-lilt that’s a shorthand for emotional urgency, or a close-miced whisper that aims for sexy and falls somewhere around prank caller. Once you know what he’s doing, his vocal style seems lazy and less like an aesthetic choice.
Matthews’s limited sense of self-awareness also informs the other aspect of his music that turns off potential fans, which is the sheer unbridled horniness of his lyrics. He writes about sex with a combination of unnerving anatomical frankness, juvenile free-association, and the kind of overwrought imagery that college freshmen edit from their English 101 essays. Unlike other artists who write with this kind of excitability about the life-changing power of good sex, Matthews doesn’t try to hide his boner with clever arrangements or production that buries his vocal; instead, he puts his voice right at the center of the mix and sings slowly and clearly, so you can understand every last syllable. If you’re indifferent towards his music, these long, loving descriptions of his sexual fantasies can sound like the kind of poetry a Nice Guy scrawls on a napkin and gives to his favorite barista before being banned from the coffee shop and complaining online that women only want to date bad boys.
I’m reluctant to say that Matthews completely lacks self-awareness, at least with his lyrics. His attempts at humor come off as smug; you can practically see him raising his eyebrows up and down and making a can you believe we’re getting away with this smirk as he peels off one of his embarrassing one-liners or tells a reporter from GQ that he “feels special” because his favorite barista draws dicks in the foam art of his lattes. Hell, you don’t even have to imagine it; just look at his unctuous facial expression on his first Spin cover.
Based on his commercial reach, Matthews was obviously going to influence his peers and the songwriters who followed him. Instead of clearing a lane for a band with an unusual lead instrument or nudging his jam band peers into a greater focus on melody, however, he inspired a cohort of male singer/songwriters to write about sex in the kind of frank terms that make internet wags speculate about whether they’re serial killers. In the early 2000s, you couldn’t turn on an adult album alternative radio station without tripping over a line like “two candy lips and your bubblegum tongue”; similarly, music supervisors frequently threw Matthews-lite ditties about dudes rubbing one out during a phone sex session over the closing credits for soapy medical dramas. It felt like getting an unsolicited dick pic every time you turned on the radio. Matthews’ influence can be felt to this day; you don’t get to the bedsheets line in Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” without “Crash Into Me” setting an unfortunate precedent in oversharing.
If Matthews’ oleganeous self-satisfaction is the most immediately unpleasant aspect of his public image, his gee-whiz gracious nice guy persona might be just as unpalatable in the long run. Since DMB have this status as a joke among music critics, some writers assigned to profile him feel compelled to discuss his role as a critical punchline. This would be a great opportunity for Matthews to put his self-deprecating sense of humor to good use—perhaps by joking that his music “isn’t for everyone” or saying he doesn’t read his press—but he instead takes the opportunity to lament how the audience he wishes he had sees him. He doesn’t seem to understand why his detractors dislike him; it’s not just “they saw someone they didn’t like in one of our T-shirts,” but that his voice and the way he writes about sex rub some listeners the wrong way. In the larger context of a career where his albums have gone to number one on the Billboard charts on the day of their release, where DMB have sold out multi-night engagements at summer sheds and amphitheaters, where they’ve won almost every award in the industry and many you didn’t know existed, Matthews’ thirst for critical acclaim comes off as greedy.
In any event, time may have made them respectable. “Crash Into Me” got a needle drop in the Oscar-nominated Lady Bird2, cult guitarist Ryley Walker covered an unreleased DMB album as a pandemic project, and Pitchfork commissioned their jam band correspondent to give the much-maligned Crash a positive retrospective in their Sunday Review section3. Dave Matthews and DMB don’t need my support and shouldn’t care about my derision. My only hope is that, when this album cycle kicks up the inevitable why is this band so hated discussions, he can look honestly at the reasons why people don’t enjoy his music. And maybe he’ll appreciate what he has a little more.
To be fair, Matthews has said he regrets that line. Not as much as a generation of women regrets having to hear it.
I thought this was a joke, since thinking a song about getting upskirted is “romantic” is like choosing “Every Breath You Take” as a wedding song. Sadly, Greta Gerwig is sincere about even her most unfortunate aesthetic decisions.
One of the many reasons why I dislike Grayson Haver Currin is his poor-winner tweet about writing this review, which seems like Trump’s “tired of winning” statement as rewritten by the captain of the Choate junior varsity hackysack team, class of 1996.