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March 01, 2005

Learning to Love Hootie and the Blowfish

Learning to Love Hootie and the Blowfish

by Ted Friedman

Presented at Assault: Radicalism in Aesthetics and Politics,
Duke University, November 1996.


At a conference about the experimental, the esoteric, and the obscure, I feel somebody ought to stand up for the mainstream. That's why I want to talk about Hootie and the Blowfish today: why I love them, and why, even if your taste runs more to Stockhausen or the Velvet Underground, you should love them too.

For those of you not familiar with Hootie and the Blowfish, they're a multi-platinum rock band almost universally reviled by critics as bland, unoriginal, and just too damn successful. "Hold Your Hand," "Let Her Cry," and "I Only Wanna Be With You" are their biggest hits, about which I'll have much to say in a little while.

The reason I want to celebrate bands like Hootie and the Blowfish is that I'm wary of a move I'm sure will be common at this conference: elevating a certain group of cultural texts to the status of "high art," while denigrating all the rest of culture as junk. Now of course, at a conference on the politics of culture, I know the terms will be different: the art we approve of will be called "subversive" or "resistant" or "radical" rather than simply "beautiful"; the stuff we don't like we'll label "hegemonic" rather than simply "lousy." But I don't think these politicized labels fundamentally change the categorization process going on. Sorting culture into little piles of "good art" and "bad art" may have other putative goals, but its primary effect is to set up two groups of audiences: the "good audience" which consumes good art, and the "bad audience" that consumes junk.

This system of distinction, as Pierre Bourdieu tells us, is the aesthetic hierarchization which naturalizes a host of other forms of elitism, most basically the class structure itself. Most of the people who listen to, say, rap music are young African-Americans. Most of the people who listen to heavy metal are young and working-class. The familiar complaint that rap music is "just noise," or that all heavy metal songs sound the same, is implicitly political. It's part of a cultural hierarchy that says that what these fans listen to isn't real music, what these fans enjoy isn't real art, that these fans' tastes don't really matter. It's the most insidious part of the hierarchy, because it's so naturalized - the music just "doesn't sound good" to the outsider listener.

The politicized language of radical aesthetics, I'd argue, doesn't escape this elitism. That, in fact, is exactly why radical art is so easily assimilated into the high culture canon - because it doesn't fundamentally challenge the existence of high art as such. In the world of music, what happens is that political claims become justification for extensive border-policing. Debates over who's in and who's out - in rock'n'roll terms, who's authentic and who's a sell-out - quickly overwhelm the ostensible ideals behind the distinctions. Fans of indie-label bands may claim that their distaste for major label artists is a political critique of hegemonic culture. But the nasty, personal tone of the way, say, a Fugazi fan mocks those saps who listen to Pearl Jam, suggests that what really going on is just another form of snobbery. Or, for a more historical example, take another look at the astonishingly ignorant and arrogant way that Adorno writes about what he thinks is "Jazz."

While being critical of this sort of avant-garde elitism, I'm not convinced that most academic attempts to celebrate the resistant qualities of mass culture escape this dynamic of distinction, either. The typical Cultural Studies approach to rethinking the politics of mass culture is to pluck out a particular artist, such as Madonna, and discover the ways in which her music, rather than simply reinscribing hegemony, is profoundly subversive. But all this does is redraw the canon one more time, now with sufficiently "subversive" mass artists on one side, and all the rest of pop culture still on the other.

Actually, what's happened is that this gesture - identifying the subversive artist within the mainstream - has recurred so many times that resistance seems to be everywhere you look, causing many to question just how resistant such ubiquitous subversion can really be. Everything can't be resistant, after all, or hegemony wouldn't have much to go on.

Or can it? I think both sides here miss the point. Resistance, I'd argue, isn't a quality of specific cultural texts: it's a subtext in any cultural text, the residue of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Crack open any piece of cultural expression, and you'll discover the subterranean dreams and desires within. No wonder you can find resistance anywhere you look; every audience demand a least a dollop of utopia to go along with its reification. It may bubble up to the surface more quickly in Madonna than in, say, Debbie Gibson, but it's in there, too.

The mistake, then, is to look for resistance piecemeal, in specific subversive texts which are then assimilated into a new canon of politically useful art. Rather, the pressing critical task is to understand and appreciate the patterns of resistance all around us - not just in the exceptional artists, but the everyday artists. Not just the Madonnas, but the Debbie Gibsons, the Hootie and the Blowfish.

This isn't just a political task. It's an aesthetic one. Because recognizing the resistance in art means recognizing what's compelling about that art. That means learning how to appreciate it; learning to enjoy it. It's when discover you love a song that you realize how much more there is to it than the rest of the world sees.

So I think the most compelling critical project of Cultural Studies isn't to sort out what counts as subversive and what doesn't - to replicate the process of distinction all over again, with an ostensibly politicized aesthetic - but rather to break down distinctions altogether. In the place of these value judgements, I want to argue for an inclusive, radically democratic aesthetic - one which recognizes that every cultural text has power for its audience, and that the critic's failure to recognize that power is the failure of the critic, not the text or the audience.

I should acknowledge how tricky this can be. Simon Frith, in his new book Performing Rites, suggests that it's impossible to escape the process of distinction; arguing over value, he insists, is at the root of the pleasure we get out of being fans. My fantasy of transcending those debates, of embracing everything, then, is just an academic pose; back in the real world, I continue to like some songs more than others, some bands more than others. I continue to sort the culture I engage into those piles of "art" and "junk."

And I have to admit, he's basically right. I can't pretend that, for example, the current radio hit "Counting Blue Cars," by Dishwalla, doesn't set my teeth on edge every time I hear it. And I'd be loathe to give up the pleasure of mocking the song every time it does come on the radio.

The simplest way out of this bind is to argue that yes, there are distinctions to be made, but only from within genres. Every genre has its own standards of excellence. Judging a specific band's ability to meet those standards, then, is not an attack on the fans of that genre, but only on that particular band's failure to do what it set out to do.

But I should admit that even this compromise leaves me uneasy. Even the bands that, by my judgement, fail to meet their genres' standards have some fans, after all. What makes their tastes invalid? I'm not proud of myself for hating Dishwalla. I'd rather learn to love Dishwalla. In fact, I have to admit, sometimes I find myself humming along distractedly to a tune in the car, and suddenly realize, hey, I've been singing along to Dishwalla! So I guess I'd like to propose, at least as a utopian goal, a world where we can all love Dishwalla, without prejudice.

With a recognition of the difficulties of this radically democratic aesthetic in mind, then, let me get back to my main point: That Cultural Studies' primary project be not to categorize art as "resistant" or "hegemonic," but rather to upend distinctions altogether - to puncture audiences' prejudices, and teach them how to enjoy new texts.

Actually, that's what the best Cultural Studies work does already. The flip side to the Madonna Studies angle is Cultural Studies' ethnographic approach to genre. Here, the prototypical strategy is to take a genre that many dismiss as shallow, lightweight, uninteresting - the romance novel, or heavy metal - and demonstrate the incredible resonance and complexity that this genre holds for its fans. To use another term from the avant-garde, it's a strategy of defamiliarization - the response is, "I thought I knew what romance novels were, but suddenly, I realize much more is going on than I'd noticed."

Now, so far I've been using examples like romance, heavy metal, and rap music to describe the virtues of a radically democratic aesthetic. There's a more obvious political justification to appreciating the complexities of these texts, because their primary audiences are subaltern. It's less simple to justify this approach to Hootie and the Blowfish, who have been mocked by critics as "the ultimate frat guy band."

The archetypal Hootie fan is an ESPN-watching, beer-drinking, backward-baseball-cap wearing straight young white man. It's claimed that Hootie's music is a trite, cheerful, unthreatening soundtrack for these frat guys' lives - they may have gone along with the more putatively "alternative" grunge trend of the early 1990s exemplified by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but are now relieved to enjoy the less challenging, familiar rock sound of Hootie.

So why bother to appreciate, and attempt to empathize, with these tastes? Well, first of all, because a democratic aesthetic means opening oneself up to all music experiences, even those of comfortable white kids. The music of comfortable white kids, in fact, can be seen as a litmus test for whether this aesthetic can really be as expansive as I want it to be. I should also point out that this stereotype of the Hootie fan is somewhat exaggerated; Hootie's music isn't quite as white - or as straight - as presumed.

And most basically, I think there's a political use to appreciating Hootie for the sake of better understanding straight white frat guys. The structures of domination which enmesh us all - patriarchy, racism, capitalism - limits the possibilities of happiness for straight white guys, too, and in their art, we likewise find resistant, utopian impulses, dreams of a way out of the straightjackets of masculinity, whiteness, and middle-class life. A radical democratic politics seeks to make common cause with all who struggle under hegemony, even frat guys. Learning to love Hootie and the Blowfish is a way to understand those dreams, a way into what I'll call the "frat guy unconscious."

Let me first describe the band's appeal on the most explicit level. Hootie appeals to frat guys with easily accessible music, the warm vocal tones of lead singer Darius Rucker, and an image that plays up the band's everyday-guyness. Their first video featured them performing in the living room of what very well could have been a frat house; a later video, after their big breakthrough, showed them acting out their fantasy of appearing on ESPN Sportscenter. In interviews, they're modest and friendly; they continue to dress in sweatshirts, jeans, and baseball caps.

Pop music songcraft is often said to be about including the telling detail, the simple image that provides a quick picture of an entire way of life. For Hootie, that image is sitting on a couch with a beer. Not one but two references to sitting show up in "Let Her Cry," my favorite Hootie song; one couplet goes, "She went to the back to get high/ I sat down on my couch and cried"; a later continues, "So I sat right down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself." In the vibrant world of rock'n'roll, I can't think of any other song as sedentary as "Let Her Cry." Given the lifestyle of a graduate student, it's no wonder I have little trouble identifying.

As the sadness in the lyrics I quoted suggests, Hootie's music isn't just about the everyday life of frat guys; it's specifically about the emotional life of frat guys, the emotional undercurrents that are the hardest for frat guys to vocalize. It's no surprise that Hootie's primary influence outside of traditional rock'n'roll is country; their songs often have a kind of "tear in my beer" sentimentalism, in which music opens up a safe space for masculinity to admit deep emotion. But actually, Hootie's songs have less bluster than most country songs; they're more dazed, befuddled. In the sweetness and vulnerability of the men in Hootie's songs, the band recalls the "sensitive doormat" songs of 1970s soul artists like the Chi-Lites. "Let Her Cry" is typical. It starts out as if were somewhat condescending to the girlfriend, in the tradition of that song that goes, "Let her cry/ Cause she's a lady/ Let her laugh/ Cause she's a child." But Hootie's show at pity turns out to just be a way to cover his own pain; by the time Rucker gets to that killer couplet I quoted before, "She went into the back to get high/ I sat down on my couch and cried," it's clear who's really doing most of the crying.

Actually, lead singer Darius Rucker claims he wrote "Let Her Cry" about a relationship in which he was the jerk, then reversed the genders. I'm not sure whether to believe him, but the gender instability in that anecdote shows in the song. The chorus goes "Let her cry/ Let her tears fall down like rain." But since it's the male singer does all of the crying in the verses of the song, the chorus seems to be about him, too, despite the female pronoun.

The gender instability of "Let Her Cry" gets closer to queer in the video for the band's subsequent single, "Only Wanna Be With You." Putatively a male-female love song, the video dramatizes its lyrics exclusively with episodes of male bonding. (This is the one where they pretend they're on SportsCenter.) The highlight is a section in which Rucker and his lead guitarist sing a few lines in duet; halfway through, the guitarist impetuously kisses Rucker on the cheek.

I guess I should mention around this point the name of Hootie's breakthrough album, Cracked Rear View, and their follup-up record, Fairweather Johnson. For such a putatively straight band, Hootie can seem awfully campy at times.

The queer subtext of Hootie's music is even more interesting given the racial composition of the band. Rucker is black; everyone else in the band is white. Most critics have commented on this mix by making nasty remarks about how Hootie proves that rock'n'roll has reached a level of racial equality where now a black man can become a star making whitebread music. But the racial composition of Hootie can't just be dismissed. First of all, it underestimates just how rare racially integrated rock bands have been. Often, a predominantly white band may include a black side musician or two - Clarence Clemons in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, for example. And in the '70s, several funk-rock bands, such as Sly and the Family Stone, included both blacks and whites. But funk is recognized as a predominantly black subgenre of rock'n'roll. Only rarely has a mainstream, middle-of-the-road rock band been led by a black man: The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the only one to ever reach Hootie's level of prominence.

Hootie's first single from their breakthrough album, "Hold My Hand," is an implicit acknowledgement of that status. It's the kind of "everybody get together/ try and love your brother right now" song that Nirvana parodied on Nevermind.But coming from a racially integrated band, it was just a little more than a cliché.

Returning now to "Only Wanna Be With You," it becomes clearer, I think, what the subtext is which gives "Hold My Hand" its resonance; the homoerotics of black and white men making music together. That kiss in "Only Wanna Be With You" has long lineage in American cultural history, from Bruce Springsteen kissing Clarence Clemons onstage to Queeqeg and Ishmael sleeping together: it's the dynamic of interracial male desire Leslie Fiedler identified in "C'mon Back to the Raft, Huck Honey."

As in the novels analysed by Fiedler, what's going on in "Only Wanna Be With You" is a fantasy of boundary-crossing - across race, across sexualities. It's the attempt to imagine a utopian national space in which everyone can hold everyone else's hand, in which each of us can fully and without reservation "try and love your brother right now." This is a compelling fantasy. It's an inspiring fantasy. It suggests that there's something in the frat guy unconscious, something at the heart of mass culture, something in Hootie and the Blowfish, worth appreciating, worth appealing to, worth loving.

Posted by tedf at March 1, 2005 12:46 AM

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