In the end they fit just fine, an anomaly striking more for its normalcy than its eccentricity. Which is how they made 1995 their own party. An interfacial band that made only passing mention of their racial identity, they became the most popular rock group in America, shaping the musical year in their image. In a year of intense racial polarization, highlighted by the Million Man March and the response to the O.J. verdict, their catchy, pedestrian songs and videos made just getting along feel dauntingly commonplace.
Ever since a young Elvis Presley first crossed over the tracks in Memphis and returned a national hero, Americans have played out our racial anxieties and hopes in our popular music. Though prone to dopey utopianism, pop music is a canny barometer of the national soul. In 1950s America, Elvis promised a world infinitely richer and more dynamic without the color barrier. A decade later, amid the turbulence of the civil-rights movement, the play of black and white aspirations in the shimmer of Motown, the heavy soul of James Brown or Aretha Franklin, and the blues explorations of Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones all spoke to the racial tensions and fantasies of the day.
Hootie and the Blowfish arrive in a different world. The ’90s so far have swung not to the integrationist fantasies that buoyed the Supremes or even Madonna, but to their opposite. Years ahead of the Million Man March, what has moved the masses, ironically, has been the sound of polarization. As the crossover dreams of Michael Jackson and Madonna ebbed, the dominant new voices belonged to gangsta rap, grunge and country-all fortresses of ethnic sectarianism. Instead of exploring and expanding racial identities, the music codified them. Gangsta rap constructed an undiluted black identity–“real niggaz,” in the words of the group N.W.A–that was antithetical not only to mainstream white culture but to mainstream black culture as well. That it played very successfully in the white suburbs only shows how effectively our anxieties cross neighborhood lines. While the gangstas strutted, the decidedly unfunky grunge and alternative music scenes championed a parallel tribalism for white fans, made pure in part by its rejection of languid rhythm-and-blues bounce. Country music, in turn, organized itself around the homey homogeneity of the past. The musicians and fans weren’t necessarily separatist. But in each case the music tapped the fears and fantasies generated by a rising sense of tribe.
This year, though, marked a break. While William Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker lambasted Time Warner for its rap holdings-and the conglomerate eventually sold its stake in the controversial Interscope label- gangsta rap was sagging under its own weight. Though you might not have known it from the papers, gangsta largely disappeared from the charts this year. Country and alternative, similarly, ceased throwing faces in your face. What opened up instead were tentative sounds of racial amelioration. Besides Hootie, there were breakthroughs by Mariah Carey, Des’ree, Seal, Dionne Farris–multitextured musicians for whom black and white are points of departure, not fixed destinations.
The triumph of Hootie, and the dream, is that they make race invisible. Playing to a mostly white, but certainly mixed audience, the musicians never made ethnicity an issue. Darius Rucker, the group’s African-American singer, rarely rose to questions about race, except to say that yes, he did sometimes get called nigger. Instead, the group simply saw the world as its oyster; on their album “Cracked Rear View;” they quote a Dylan lyric as handily as the gospel standard “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Theirs is a middle-class synthesis, nurtured on integrated college campuses where cultural fluency means being able to speak Tarantino and “Yo! MTV Raps.” When the band sold that synthesis right back to campuses, it was enacting a dream of polyglot richness on its home turf.
The critic Benjamin DeMott wrote this year that Hollywood’s boom in mixed-race buddy movies helps “the comfortable majority [tell] itself a fatuous untruth” by removing the “large and complex dilemmas of race from the public sphere” and reducing them to issues of friendship. Hootie and the Blowfish nm this risk. In the real world, race is often not invisible, nor a simple matter of negotiating one’s CD collection for the right mix of flavors. But popular music works better as a barometer than a panacea. And in 1995, Hootie and the Blowfish–four extraordinarily ordinary guys who happen to be of different races-presided over a welcome low-pressure zone.
