Dave Matthews Band : Name Your Reasons Why They Are So Bad & Hated.

The Rhino Frat Rock box set is much better than any DMB I've ever heard.

What I liked about the song: Well, first of all, these guys are a real band - ie., they can play their instruments, they get a groove going, they are tasteful. The song had a nice loose-limbed, live feeling despite being a studio recording. Unlike a lot of the studio confections on the rock charts, it doesn't have that grisly Dr. Frankenstein after-taste of being patched together in Pro Tools and then zapped into life. (Not to say that there isn't a place for studio confectionery, but it's refreshing to hear alternatives to it.) No doubt these guys can also play their songs well in a live setting, which is a definite plus if you like live music (which I do).

What I didn't like: I mentioned being tasteful as a good thing in the previous paragraph, and to a certain extent it is, but it can also be a bad thing, I think, when it shows that the band is reluctant to take chances. My favorite type of music to see in a live setting is jazz, and there are some similarities between this music and certain types of jazz: the celebration of musicianship, the emphasis on rhythm, soloing over a repeated chord progression. However, none of the solos I heard (and again this is only based on one song, so take this with a grain of salt) really excited me. The soloists seemed reluctant to stretch out and take center stage, so to speak. As a result, the music ended up seeming kind of faceless. You don't hear the individual personalities of the musicians coming through. Perhaps this is an intentional decision to give the group jam priority over the individual expression, but if you're not going to have interesting solos, what exactly is the purpose of repeating a fairly uninteresting chord progression so many times? I think the answer is probably is that this is a form of dance music - because this is a structure that you often find in dance music. The purpose of the long repetitive passages is to give people the opportunity to dance. Which is fine, I guess, if you like to dance, but it can get a bit dull when listening just for the sake of listening. Anyway, that's my take on the music. As for the singing, well, I must admit that Dave Matthew's singing style is a bit mannered for my taste. He is a member of the Eddie Vedder school of masculine emoting through tasteful bellows and groans, except that he occasionally throws in a yodel, which is just odd. The lyrics also do little for me. The central conceit of this song is that he is asking a bartender for the drink of the wine that brought Jesus back to life. There's one nagging flaw with this conceit: namely that nowhere in the legend of Jesus is anything mentioned about any drinks of wine bringing him back to life. So the symbolism doesn't really go anywhere.

Because the first rules and the others do not. Or rather, the first puts me to gentle sleep with a smile on my face, the second puts me to sleep, period, and the third makes me think, "Can't I just listen to some In the Nursery instead?"

Wrong. LISTEN TO MAYER'S VOCALS!!!!! It has nothing to do with the guitar.

-- katie41414442222

Clearly not someone who regularly reads ILM.

Divide and conquer...

Come to think of it, everything else about them kind of fits that sound as well.

AGH! Ohmigod this is so so true. I'm appalled that these things are so common. I had a very hard time finding an acoustic guitar that had an electric pick-up that *wasn't* one of these shitty-sounding models with the plastic body and the little sliders on top. The sound is indeed godawful - really thin and useless. I don't understand why people don't stick with decent wood acoustics and just use good contact mics.

Dan to thread!

At least it's not as bad as Gwen 'n' Moby though.

Further to your question about Dave Matthew’s Band I will attempt to explain why people generally don’t like them and also why these people do not tend to like people who like DMB.

The normal complaint that is levelled at DMB is that they are boring. In this context boring means that they conform (and this is an important word), and their music conforms, to ordinary well worn structures (personally: gruff male archetypes, drummer, bassist, guitarist, singer – normal band structure; musically: verse chorus verse, like say ordinary, eg, Meatloaf songs of the 1970s – dirge is a word which comes up often) made with well worn sounds (over-emoting, brillo-pad vocals, which is to say it sounds like he has nodules on his vocal cords and so sounds a bit rough, like his voice has been sand-papered – trad is another word which comes up). People conflate these two conceptions of ‘ordinary’ (sounds and structures) found in the band’s music with the band’s image to help them paint the band as super-ordinary. Essentially, they are aggressively normal.

(I guess one of the reasons people dislike people who like DMB is for this subscription to aggressive normalness: they perceive that they DMB fans haven’t made a conscious choice because they perceive that they aren’t questioning and that they are automatons.)

Also, Mrs Sinker, a large deal of the antipathy towards DMB fans is brought along to the table by the fact that the people who, statistically, turn out to be DMB fans are also of a group that ‘us’ people don’t like: jocks. So again there is a conflation of images. We end up merging jocks and DMB fans, attributing DMB fans with jock characteristics and vice versa and obviously this bleeds into our perception of the band because at some point or other people forget how to dissociate band from fan. And it doesn’t really help when DM looks like a fan of DMB.

A part of the anger is frustration that music which is similar but slightly ‘better’ (ie different, newer guitar music which isn’t re-tracing old routes, bands with silly names like Man or Astroman? Oxes [note: not Oxen, and no definite article], Shellac) doesn’t get the audience – this is fed by a belief that the DMB fans haven’t listened to our bands and that if they did they would like them. It’s a sort of distrust because we think that they’ve heard DMB liked them alright and thought we don’t need any more music in our life so stopped there. If this is true then it would display a value that we do not know how to handle as of yet: (1) there is an endpoint to music absorption and (2) there is an endpoint to a questing attitude.

Now, I know your son is fond of ‘have fun starting arguments’ which is in direct quarrel with number (2) there so if he can verify that that is part of the distrust and if he’s willing to say it is valid distrust then we might have nailed DMB fans a little, but of course we can’t cast them all into this giant great swirling vortex. Also, it would still leave the problem of finding reasons to hate the band.

I hope this clears some of the trouble you were experiencing up Mrs Sinker. Please pass my regards onto your son.

Yours sincerely,

Dh.

I believe that "The Maker" is Daniel Lanois' song, sometimes called "Eyes of the Maker." The Jerry Garcia Band used to do a lovely version of it.

i also have no time for any of DMB, SR, or GYBE!, which puts me in the same league as Ned. why waste yer time on crap?

Oh. In that case the DMB suck ass and you're all justified in hating them.