Looking Into The "Cracked Rear View", 30 Years On

Post grunge, were we that uncool, or were we being intentionally uncool?

I asked myself as I was listening recently to "Cracked Rear View", the album that might have signaled the true shift from grunge to whatever we want to call the period afterward. Hootie & The Blowfish were an odd choice to become the biggest band in the country, and yet fifteen million copies of the record meant they were the biggest new thing since Nirvana destroyed an entire decade in one fell swoop.

If you want to get angry, think about this; "Cracked Rear View" is actually a bigger record than "Nevermind".

I told you it would make you angry.

Seeing the band failing to catch passes from Dan Marino in a music video, while wearing the horrid fashion of the day, is quite the interesting look back. I was not old enough when the album came out to understand just how utterly lame Hootie was, so I heard the singles come along and ate them up. Not only has "Cracked Rear View" sat on my shelf for thirty years, but I even own a copy of "Musical Chairs". If you're wondering how or why I don't have "Fairweather Johnson", I can't explain it.

Here's thing thing about Hootie; they're great at being the stupid fun we often say we want music to be. If we were trying to insult them, we could slander them as being just a 'bar band', but is that really such an insult? Those bands draw crowds, and they make people happy, even if they do nothing special we will remember as fine art. There's a place for meat-and-potatoes music, and that's what Hootie specialized in.

I think the key was Darius Rucker's baritone, which set them apart from bands like Gin Blossoms, who were very much in the same mold. Jangly guitars and sing-along melodies came to define that period of time, which I will admit I do miss quite a bit, and perhaps Darius' move into country music has given us a distorted view of what Hootie always was. There were elements of the South, and of country to their sound, but they were merely the latest band following the line from Dylan and Tom Petty, telling stories about America in that uniquely American way.

It makes sense to me that Hootie became so popular, because we were coming out of a time when angst and depression had taken over rock music. While grunge had its charm, there is only so much emotional turmoil the general audience is going to put up with. We were ready to move on to better things, happier thoughts, and I have a feeling grunge was going to fade away even if Kurt Cobain had lived.

Hootie was the band that told us it was ok to have fun with music again, that we could turn it into a party atmosphere, not a pity party. Even on "Let Her Cry", the tempo picks up just enough toward the end to make it into a bit of a jaunt, and not drag things down into the sad story Darius is singing us. We were in a decade of seemingly peace and prosperity, and our music was going to reflect that. It's no wonder that only a few short years later we had the rush of manufactured, sugar-high pop that only made sense when there weren't pressing social issues demanding our attention.

That also explains why Hootie is able to get together and tour regularly, since we need that kind of escape from the endless onslaught the world presents us today. Hootie not just reminds us of a simpler time when we weren't so invested in trying to maintain our own sanity, they are a reminder that dark times eventually end, and something better will come along. I don't know when that will be, or what form it will take, but listening to "Cracked Rear View" is a trip back to feelings that have been absent for far too long.

So as we look at the album on its anniversary, perhaps we need to remember that some albums are classics for the artistic statements they make, and others are classics for the zeitgeist they captured. That is what "Cracked Rear View" is. I doubt many will ever call it a paragon of songwriting genius, or call it one of the most influential albums ever made, but few records were as of their time as it was.

Being in the right place at the right time is sometimes luck, and sometimes skill. Either way, it's hard to think of the 90s without this record coming to mind. That was a simpler time, and for forty-five minutes we can head back there. I think it's worth doing that every once in a while.