The Sunday supplement: No. 66
A pair of new mixes, a surprising reconsideration of the Dave Matthews Band, secret concerts in a city near you, and your new summer book club
First off, if you’re interested in the “hungover house” mix I listened to while drafting this newsletter in the Lima, Peru airport:
So, I don’t think I would’ve imagined myself typing “a surprising reconsideration of the Dave Matthews Band” anytime soon, but Alex Pappademas’s profile this week made me… reconsider.
Regarding the loathing a lot of people express for the band:
Some of that hate has to do with aesthetics—either you’re down with DMB’s amalgamation of soul-stirring Joshua Tree anthem rock and smooth jazz and bluegrass-fiddle hoedown and hacky-sack funk or you aren’t. A lot of it has to do with Dave Matthews himself, an acquired-taste vocalist even in those moments when the words fall away and he’s keening into the mystic without losing the common-man touch of the college-town bartender he used to be, when he becomes the American Peter Gabriel, or more to the point Peter Gabriel if Peter Gabriel were also somehow Lloyd Dobler, a schlub beatified by the very ordinariness of his longing.
Regarding Matthews’ view on the United States as an immigrant from South Africa:
It’s strange to say this about him, but Dave Matthews still talks about America like an immigrant. “I definitely felt—and I still in a weird way feel—like I have an outside perspective,” he says. When he settled in the US in early adulthood, he says, it was the racial divide that surprised him—in part because omnipresent racism wasn’t part of the story America told the world about itself back then. “I grew up in South Africa, where it’s in your face,” he says. “It’s everywhere. And then I came back to America, and I was stunned that it was everywhere…because I expected it not to be.”
I wish Pappademas had had more time with the star/band, but for the time he got, he got a good amount.
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