What Would You Say?

Who was the most important band of the 90's? Go!

You probably said Nirvana, doubtless one of the best and most influential groups. But can you really say that a

decade's most important band was active for less than half of that decade? Pearl Jam's not a bad answer, but everyone but the diehards will tell you they really only produced two and a half good albums during that span. (Vitology is the half, of course.)

Smashing Pumpkins was big, but clearly occupied a slot below Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Radiohead consistently released innovative rock music, and were surprisingly popular given how odd and edgy they could be, but they always had sort of a niche following, albeit a large niche. Metallica's heyday was the late 80's. Green Day might be a contender, but they went through a period of irrelevancy in the late half of the decade before experiencing a resurgence  in the early aughts.

Here's my hot take: Dave Matthews Band.

Stay with me here. I'm not saying they were my favorite band of the 90's (although I did like both the self-titled album and Crash quite a bit). I'm not saying they were the most musically innovative band of the decade (although they were incredibly talented musicians who weren't afraid to mess around with weird time signatures and unconventional instrumentation). I'm not saying they were the most influential band of the decade either (although they spawned a ton of imitators. String Cheese, O.A.R., Dispatch, etc.). But for several reasons, they were the most important:

1 - Buzz Factor

I think I can say, purely on the basis on anecdotal evidence from when I was in high school, that DMB was the most popular band of the 90's in terms of albums and concert tickets sold. During high school, I was one of very few people I knew who had never been to a DMB concert. It wasn't that I actively avoided going. I wouldn't have minded seeing them, but their shows were always so expensive and there were always others I wanted to see just a little bit more. Fans from the New York area still recall the show they played on June 11, 2001 (the summer after I graduated high school) at Giants Stadium, when the cymbal crash at the beginning of "Two Step" coincided with a huge bolt of lightning. I am not exagerrating when I say that literally everyone in my graduating class at Chatham High School claims to have been at that show - except for me. The point is that their concerts were major social events that everyone at school talked about for weeks leading up, and then weeks following. Billy Joel and Elton John may have sold more concert tickets at around the same time, but neither one was in his musical prime, and for "buzz factor," they didn't touch DMB.

2 - Cultural Influence

For better or worse, DMB launched an entire cultural movement that they almost certainly didn't intend to. I'm not sure what to call this movement - it doeesn't have a catchy name like "hippies," or "goths," or "punks" - but it was even more ubiquitous. If you came of age during the 90s, I'm sure you remember it: preppy clothing (maybe a collared shirt, or cargo pants, or the ever-popular ringed t-shirt), "bar hat" from your college of choice, worn backwards (extra points for wrapping the adjustable band in duct tape), hemp necklace, perhaps a lacrosse stick or a hackey sack as an accessory. If you wore this uniform, you might as well have been wearing sandwich board proclaiming your love for Grateful Dead, Phish, and of course, DMB. To be clear, I'm not saying I embraced this movement. In high school, I generally steered clear of neo-hippies. (Is that what we should call them?) But like it or not, it was a major cultural stylistic trend. And DMB was at its center.

3 - Musical Significance

I have a theory that 90's rock can be divided broadly into three categories.

Category 1: Grunge and All of its Descendants (also known as Alternative). The Mount Rushmore of grunge is Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice and Chains, but the category includes all hard rock bands from later in the decade, even if no one thought of them as grunge. I'll put Weezer here, for example.

Category 2: California Punk/Ska/Funk

Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sublime are at the forefront. I didn't like any of the bands in this category (except maybe No Doubt I guess...), but a lot of people apparently did. Blink-182 and other mainstream punk and ska bands go here, even if they aren't strictly from California.

Category 3: Bonaroo Rock

These are the hippy-ish rock bands in the spirit of the Grateful Dead. These are mostly jam bands, many better known for their live concerts than their studio albums. Among fans of this group, Phish might have actually been the most popular band, but they didn't have anything close to the crossover appeal of DMB.

DMB was the pillar of one of these three big divisions of rock. And by the late 90's, that was the division that all the cool kids were listening to.

4 - Actual Quality

In high school, I was alternative all the way - and yet, I still liked DMB. I owned three CD's by bands who weren't in Category 1: "One Hot Minute" by Red Hot Chili Peppers, which I didn't like and don't actually remember purchasing, and the first three Dave Matthews albums. I don't know if I would have called myself a fan exactly, but I really liked their music. It could be big and heavily orchestrated ("Ants Marching," "Tripping Billies") or surprisingly intimate ("Pay for What You Get," "Cry Freedom"). Occasionally, it could be really strange and haunting. My favorite song by DMB is "Warehouse," which begins with spooky reverberating guitars and moaning vocals, but ends in a party, complete with steel drums, and finally fades away into this ominous sounding coda. It's such an audaciously weird song. My other favorite is "Don't Drink the Water," which just sounds so menacing for a full five minutes, while being so darn catchy at the same time.

The point: If you were strictly into alternative, there was still a decent chance you liked DMB. They made a lot of people change lanes.

And yet, you probably didn't call them to mind as the decade's most important band.

At some point, the culture surrounding DMB became bigger than the band's actual music - a phenomenom that should not be blamed on the band. And since a lot of people (like me) were turned off by the kind of people who wore the bar hats and hemp necklaces, and went to a lot of Dave Matthews shows, people dismissed them. But the thing is, the music was pretty consistently good for about a decade. I kind of stopped paying attention after Everyday (2001), but even if they had retired immediately afterward, that's five solid studio albums, more than every other 90's band I can think of.

There was a time when I thought DMB was massively overrated. Now, it seems like in an effort to overcompensate, popular opinion has swung way too far in the opposite direction.

This is a bar hat. Do kids still wear these?

I'd Bet on Your Future

I'm at a resort with my family. (The Nevele, in the Catskills. Formerly a Jewish oasis. Now defunct.) I'm probably eleven or twelve. I'm obsessed with baseball. There are no smart phones or devices, because they haven't been invented yet. All I've brought to the family week is my Gameboy with Tetris and Mario Brothers, and five books about baseball.

I guess I don't have room in my backpack, because I am carrying the stack of books inside. An old man sees me in the lobby, lagging slightly behind my parents, and he scans my pile up and down.

"Are you planning to read all of those books?" he asks me.

One of the books is the 1994 Baseball Abstract, a massive encyclopedia of statistics and trivia. (Wikipedia is not yet a thing.) So honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to read all of the books. At least not cover to cover. But it seems easier just to say yes.

"Yes."

He shakes his head in amazement. "That's wonderful," he says, "I'd bet on your future, my young friend."

I'm not really sure what to say. I'm in middle school, which means I never know what to say. So I just thank him and we go our separate ways.

What an epic pronouncement, though: "I'd bet on your future." I still think about that old guy, sometimes, wherever he is. Probably he's no longer with us. And I wonder if he would have made anything off that bet.

Revised Impressions

As both a dad and a teacher, I often have the chance to revisit books that were important to me at other times in my life. I've found that some of my favorites still stand up well. I find that I almost never tire of reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to my kids. (The words are just so fun to say.) Last year, I taught Brave New World to my A.P. Lang guys, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed the book more than I had when I first read it my sophomore year of high school. I understood more now than I did twenty years ago, no doubt, and Huxley's ideas seemed incredibly prescient. (Smart phones are just our version of soma, amirite?)

Not all books hold up so well, though. This week I had to revise my impressions of two books that I used to enjoy, but was surprised to now find pretty cringe-worthy.

Tikki Tikki Tembo is a book I remember having read to me in third grade. It wasn't one of my favorites really, but I liked it well enough, and I remember every kid in class chanting the entire long name (Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo... etc.) TTT is an old Chinese folk tale (or so it wants you have you think) about two brothers. The elder has a long, elaborate name to signify that he is the more valued of the two. The younger's name is Chang, which the book claims to mean "little or nothing." (It doesn't.) One of them falls in a well. He gets rescued. Then the other one falls in the same well. He gets rescued, too. That's the whole plot. But the dumb plot is very low on the list of things about this book that are objectionable.

The main problem is the racism. Really, this book is the equivalent of a black-face minstrel show. Characters wearing the most stereotypical Chinese peasant get-ups go around saying things like "Oh, most honorable mother," and "Ah, so." The story casually conflates elements of Chinese and Japanese culture, as if to say, "Whatever. Same diff." The long and ridiculous name sounds more Japanese than Chinese, but either way, it's total gibberish. The kid's name might as well be Ching-chong Bing-bong. Needless to say, the author is a white lady.

The artwork is fine: the illustrations resemble those old silk paintings of scenes from rural China. But the book in general is hopelessly out of date. It is to children's literature what Song of the South is to Disney movies. That's the one that apparently takes place in some sort of plantation utopia, in which happy slaves spend all day singing to white children. And that movie fell out of favor years ago. Although I'm sure it was written without conscious malice, it's basically the definition of cultural appropriation.

I can happily live without Tikki Tikki Tembo in my life. My reread of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a lot more upsetting. This was a book I absolutely loved. When I read it in high school - on my own, not for a class - it spoke to me. On the basis of these fond memories, I gave it the highest possible rating on Goodreads. Last spring, I selected it as a summer reading book for a group of students. I assumed they would enjoy it as much as I did.

And I hope they did enjoy it. (I guess I'll find out on Thursday.) Sadly, it just didn't hold up for me.

To be fair, there are parts I still enjoy. The constant machine imagery still resonates, even if it's a little overwrought. Some of the minor characters (Harding, Billy Bibbit) are well drawn. And of course, McMurphy is an excellent character, deeply flawed, but deeply charismatic. His dialogue feels inspired, and his interactions with Nurse Ratched are some of the novel's highlights. The novel does gloss over his sexual misconduct, though. Dude is a statutory rapist, but the narration seems to endorse his sketchy defense that "she wanted it." I'm not arguing that he needs to be a moral paragon. In fact, I think the book would suffer if he were. But we are encouraged to think of McMurphy is an unambiguous hero, and Ratched as an insufferable villain. And indeed she is awful. But she also didn't rape anyone.

The book's casual, "boys will be boys" attitude towards rape points to its biggest problem: clear and unabashed misogyny. Every woman in this novel is either a frigid "ball-cutter" like Ratched, or a whore like Harding's wife, as well as the literal whores on the fishing trip near the end. Women seem to exist for the purpose of tormenting men, and the only way for them to reclaim their masculinity is to put them in their place. Often through sexual domination. McMurphy's victory over Ratched is marked by his symbolically raping her. (He rips her shirt open to reveal the huge breasts, which all of the patients have obsessed over for the duration of the novel.) And this is a moment we are encouraged to cheer for.

All of these elements are somewhat muted in the movie, by the way, which is one of the reasons I think the movie holds up better. For one thing, they took out the symbolic rape, which is certainly a good thing (although I think the stage version retains it).

Anyway, I'm not ready to throw this novel out entirely. I still like McMurphy in spite of myself. But it does make me uncomfortable. In the past I've entertained the idea of teaching it, but that's a hard no now - especially at a boys' school. There still might be a place for this book in the canon, but teachers shouldn't ignore its more abhorrent elements. I'll put it on the same shelf as The Taming of the Shrew, which obviously has its literary merits, but also has some social underpinnings we just as soon ignore.

My thoughts about the novel aside, nothing will ever take away from one of my favorite Simpsons' jokes. (From one of the later season, no less.)