I wound up in some Dave Matthews rabbit hole a few months ago and came away with the impression that he's just a decent dude. Also, if youtube randos are to be believed, a surprisingly skilled guitarist.
Was he the guy who dumped poop in the Chicago River?
Bob Marley has the biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base.
Redemption Song, Corner Stone, No Water- how did these become frathouse/sushi shanty background music?
which famous person has the biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base?
I continue to really enjoy Rick and Morty but became horribly embarrassed by the fandom after the McDonald's Szechuan sauce incident. Dan Harmon's vibe is well-tuned to attract Bad Fans.
For the other way around most deadheads I've met are very nice people.
he's just a decent dude
The profile mostly emphasizes (a) his decency, and (b) that he's had a surprising number of people close to him die young (writing those two things together suggests that he might be a serial killer, but that wasn't what I was trying to convey).
I wound up in some Dave Matthews rabbit hole a few months ago
I hadn't thought about him except as a radio presence in the 90s until reading this
Not to belabor this, but, this arc, on its own, is staggering when you think about it: He left apartheid-era South Africa, and wound up in Charlotttesville, Virginia, which in 2017 was the site of a white-supremacist rally that became one of the uglier moments in recent American history. And there, in Charlottesville, in 1991, he formed the most outlandishly successful multiracial rock band of his generation. At least. You make nearly half a billion dollars touring in one decade, and you're in the all-time conversation.
I'm adding it to the list of Incredibly Successful Bands None Of Whose Music I Recognise. I tried listening to Taylor Swift's ten most successful songs at the weekend, as an experiment, and I didn't recognise a single one of them.
Keep listening to them until you can.
which famous person has the biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base?
John M. Browning, Eugene Stoner, Kurt Tank, Hugo Schmeisser...
Keep listening to them until you can.
They all sound kind of unmemorable and a bit whiny.
It might take longer until you develop better taste.
Hawaii is extremely Swiftie, and so I've become decently familiar with the canon. I would not say I have become a Swiftie myself, though.
which famous person has the biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base?
I love this question, it's like "If 'never read the comments' applied to people instead of blogs, who would be Youtube?" My vote is Ferdinand Porsche.
Most of the time, though, if someone tells you they don't like Dave Matthews, they're really voicing a deep tribal aversion to the type of person they picture when they picture a Dave Matthews fan
This reminds me of the period in my youth when people would ask "what kind of music do you like?" less as a way to find out about your taste in music than as a way to get a shortcut to characterizing you. I think that period overlapped with the height of Dave Mathews popularity. Coincidence?
Was he the guy who dumped poop in the Chicago River?
I think the problem was the poop that didn't land in the river.
If 'never read the comments' applied to people
Eric Gill, bka Gill Sans' creator. Different kind of horrible to Porsche
I'm an environmentalist, not a boater.
Was he the guy who dumped poop in the Chicago River?
At the Aug. 25 press conference to reveal the videotape, Mayor Richard Daley called the dumping "absolutely unacceptable," but also noted that he considered Matthews' "a very good band."
"Other than that, how was the boat tour?"
I am having a vivid memory of being on a tour of some sort, and the guide sheepishly acknowledges that this is the place that Dave Matthews Poop Incident occurred, and goes on for a bit about how the band was very apologetic and went to great lengths to rectify the situation.
Only I can't figure out how this can actually have occurred. I've gone on a boat tour in Philadelphia in the past decade or so, but I don't think I've gone on any tour in Chicago. Did I dream this?!
The Philadelphia incident was a Dave Matthew's cover band.
Wait. I think I actually went on a boat tour in Pittsburgh. Is there another cover band available?
"Everyone says we're a one-hit wonder, but here comes number two."
If it was the duck boat tour, my neighbor used to be the driver. We don't have any bridges with grate flooring that I'm aware of.
15: YouTube has fixed comments!
I forget where I read it, but some guy who was part of the YouTube comments team said that they put large amounts of money and engineering brainpower, and they have drained the proverbial cesspool. (On topic because of the aforementioned incident.) He lamented that they weren't getting enough (any?) public credit for it.
Sure enough, the parts of YouTube that I frequent -- celestial jukebox for people in my age bracket -- are wonderfully wholesome. Check it out!
26: Perfect.
One of my very old friends was the very first guy working on YouTube comment spam. Went from just him to like a dozen people before he moved on to another job.
28: I think that was theophite on blooskie.
and goes on for a bit about how the band was very apologetic and went to great lengths to rectify the situation
After it was pinned on them - they seem to have denied it for like a year. (The bus driver acted very forthcoming, showing the tank was actually full, etc., but it was specifically Boyd Tinsley's bus, a different one.)
Ferdinand Porsche built crap tanks, though.
18: Gill was horrible but it isn't so much "horrible people who did good work" as "people who did good work but whose work is admired by horrible people".
Wagner?
Did anyone famous puke off a bridge in Pittsburgh? What am I remembering?
34: It's never been proven that he killed Natalie Wood.
In the 90s my friends all thought DMB was the worst most mockable garbage ever, so I was always too embarrassed to admit that ... I kinda liked them? I can't really call myself a fan, since I only know the songs that got a lot of Top 40 radio play, but I could probably be fairly described as spiritually incurious and basic. I may or may not have attended a midnight screening of Inland Empire at some point in my life.
39: I have kind of the same relationship to DMB. I've never bought an album, but I don't change the channel when it comes on the radio and I like the eight or nine songs that I know. Probably helps that it isn't as ambiently omnipresent as it was a decade ago.
35: Well, they did pay a ton of money after they admitted it so I could see someone describing that way retrospectively.
biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base
[Jesus has entered the chat]
This is bringing back memories. I was living in Boston in the mid-late 90s, and would regularly drive to see friends in New York, and I think I exclusively played Dave Matthews on those drives. Looking at the albums now, I must have owned them all, because I remember songs from several albums. I've never listened to them since, and haven't even had a nostalgia trip on Spotify, but I sure loved them at the time.
Far be it from me to compete.
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"A depiction of the fall of Constantinople"...with the Hagia Sophia already bedecked with minarets?
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42: nah, his work wasn't up to much either.
I don't think I've ever knowingly heard a Dave Matthews song. I don't think he had any penetration in the UK at all. I have read lots of articles about him in the music press/blogosphere but I had pictured some kind of earnest but good-natured folk rock without ever hearing him.
[clicks on "Ants Marching"]
Nope. Definitely not for me in any way shape or form.
And there, in Charlottesville, in 1991, he formed the most outlandishly successful multiracial rock band of his generation.
The most successful multiracial rock band of the previous generation was of course Queen.
51: Dave Matthews is the Susan Sontag of Kris Kristoffersons.
"Don't drink the water" does not seem to go along with frat-boy fan base. A lot of his songs are about anticipating death, as well as sex and love. I think he has more than one good song.
In the tradition of the internet, I have yet to read the link. He had a tour in the 90s, I think, with just him and Tim Reynolds doing a acoustic set in smaller venues. I like him, but have not seen him live since the 30th anniversary of Woodstock. He kept on introducing "Along the watchtower" by saying that he was not up to his predecessors on that song. I did buy a CD, Stand Up, in the 00s. My impression is that he tries to make his concerts a party.
re: 53
I quite like Kristofferson, it has to be said.
There's a documentary about him (Kristofferson) from the 90s or early 2000s in which Joan Baez is so patronising about him that it annoys me to this day. She does this impression of him as if he's a dumb uneducated hick that's borderline offensive. That's Oxford B.Phil Rhodes scholar Kristofferson who we've already heard talk eloquently about politics elsewhere in the same documentary, the same Kristofferson who's written at least three bona fide classic "songbook" level songs.
55: so do I!
The snobbery is probably based on insecurity. Baez's family were establishment, highly academic on her father's side and aristocratic pretensions on her mother's, but she herself didn't go to university.
Kristofferson's an army brat from nowhere in Texas but he had an absolutely blazing academic career (and a fairly impressive military one; flight school, ranger school, asked to instruct at West Point) before he dropped it all to go into music.
The comparison with Matthews is that they both seem to be pretty decent guys. (And the Susan Sontag ref is from the conversation last year about "who is the writer you've read most about without ever reading anything they wrote").
Heavan's Gate is my favorite movie after Airplane.
re: 57
Aah, I sort of semi- got the Kristofferson reference, but not the Sontag one.
FWIW, I have read Sontag and didn't really rate either of the books by her I read, although I did write about her book on Illness in my thesis.
I won't stand for this Hootie and the Blowfish erasure.
And the Susan Sontag ref is from the conversation last year about "who is the writer you've read most about without ever reading anything they wrote"
I'm pretty sure that was me and that was probably closer to 5 years ago than last year. Although we might have the same conversation again more recently except since then I have read some Sontag. It was a collection of her early essays including her famous, "Notes on Camp". "Famous"? I think it was when it first came out and a while afterwards, anyway. It all struck me as very much of its time, part of an argument/conversation that was going on between New York intellectuals at the time, and so, to truly understand it, you would have to immerse yourself in that milieu.
writer you've read most about without ever reading anything they wrote"
Jordan Peterson.
The Alex Cross books were pretty good.
58: Lone Star is great, and Kristofferson is great in it.
https://x.com/travisakers/status/1724147468927922546?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
that was probably closer to 5 years ago than last year
I regard the period 2020-22 as a single, very long, year.
To this whole thread, while I'm unconvinced that morally monstrous behavior in an artist is orthogonal to how to regard their art, which often comes up with your Polanskis etc., I feel more certain that someone being a Very Good Person has little effect on their art as compared to the average plodder.
Building on 68, there's an occasional fascinating thing where you suspect that the artist themself does not quite get the brilliance of what they've done.
67: I actually found the thread! Four years ago! http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_17039.html#2054698
Am I the biggest DMB fan here? While I'm somewhat sheepish about admitting so, I listened to them quite a bit in my teens and twenties, own all of the CDs, and have seen them in concert 3 times. (The last DMB concert I attended was at The Gorge in Washington state, truly an incredible venue.)
I don't listen to the band much anymore, other than "Christmas Song" in the appropriate season, but that's mostly because I don't want to feel that emotionally connected to my teens and twenties.
Remarkably, I did not do drugs at any of those three concerts. AFAICT, I was probably the only person at The Gorge date who could truthfully say so.
Gill Sans has been one of 2 typefaces I've used for my business since it started 18 years ago, and now I'm feeling very trepidatious about going to look up Gill.
49: The Fall of Constantinople was an inside job.
Anyway, AB graduated UVA in 1991, so DMB was just this band she remembered from parties, although, more precisely, Boyd Tinsley's band was what she really loved (and she's still a sucker for violin breaks in songs that are otherwise more rock-y). Speaking of people whose personal decency is orthogonal to their music.
I was fine with them when they came out, but was kind of mystified by the whole scene that developed around them. Every once in awhile he'll have a new song that I kind of like, like "Gravedigger", but he's not part of my musical universe. I don't think AB has paid him any mind since ~2004.
Last thing: I thoroughly enjoyed this live version of Neil Young's Cortez, the Killer, from a few years back20 years ago Jesus. It's mostly about Warren Haynes' really superb playing, but it's also a tight band that's played together for a decade and knows how to jam on a song that rewards it.
I used to tease AB that DMB sounds like Kermit the Frog; maybe that's why J, Robot loves him!
I used to tease AB that DMB sounds like Kermit the Frog
That's in the article:
He thinks he's a better singer today than he used to be, but when he hears his eccentric nasal timbre on old recordings, he says, "I'm like, 'Oh--I sound like Kermit the Frog with a sinus infection.' "
