Crash typecast the Dave Matthews Band as the neoliberal darlings of Bill Clinton’s happy, wealthy, largely white United States, a sound perfectly suited for a second term.Ī quarter-century later, that assessment feels superficial, overlooking not only the album’s dark heart but the way the band presaged the collapsing borders between genres, between pop and everything else. Oh, and of course there was “Crash Into Me,” a once-ubiquitous precoital standard for some that doubled as an onanistic anathema for others. There were pan-African instrumental duets, velvety saxophone solos, and snarling acoustic rockers. The ballads luxuriated in deep moods, sexy or solemn. Crash, their second studio album, burrowed deeper into the idiomatic musical mélange that had made them popular and polarizing. In the spring of 1996, nearly five years to the day after their first performance, the Dave Matthews Band declared that coolness would never be their credo. “Matthews jams politely,” Robert Christgau ribbed the band’s 1994 studio debut, Under the Table and Dreaming. Matthews was just the town’s astronomically profitable punchline, a magnet for and magnate of hippies and yuppies. By 1994, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus was the cool-kid avatar exported from Charlottesville. And indie rock drifted toward wider prominence, abetted by a fawning music press and loaded major labels. Seattle’s grunge scene spawned a web of glowering toughies, all pursuing fiscal nirvana. Hip-hop poured into the heartland from both coasts, locked in a steadily escalating duel.
But the truly big cities sounded different than the University of Virginia quad around 1992, with music that was unequivocally defiant or unabashedly snotty.
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