This is embarrassing, especially for a goth, but I have spent the past week listening to the entire catalogue of the Dave Matthews Band. I recently went through something that riled me up a bit, and my dirty little secret is that while others may turn to drugs or booze for comfort, I tend to hole up and listen to albums by artists like DMB or Ani DiFranco.
This music reminds me of friends I used to have, in the small town where I grew up, before my life became intractably complicated by the various mundane pressures and responsibilities of adulthood. And, it should be noted, these albums are from a time before the country was engulfed in the increasingly silly culture war that drones in the background of most people’s lives like the horny cicadas outside my window. As I have previously shared, until the age of six I lived in a red county that espoused the virtues of freedom, faith, and all the rest. This idyll ended the day we moved to an academic town in an icy blue enclave because my mother had gotten a job at that institution’s library. The culture there was insufferably snobbish and meritocratic — professors making puffed-up claims about their latest publication and teenagers being encouraged to grub one more point on their SATs by any means possible come to mind — but underneath that dominant culture lurked another, more savory one.
Leftists. And I don’t mean the critical theory ideologues or woke corporatists of today, with their shrieking demands. I mean hippies. Dirty, grungy hippies, that smoked weed, swam naked in the creek and wore hemp necklaces. These were my people, and they were chill as fuck. I am inclined to neurosis, and this cohort set me at ease.
I’m talking about people who wore crystal deodorant. Or a friend’s mother, who worked at the tiny health food store selling root vegetables before it billowed into a Whole Foods-esque glossy status symbol with a Prius-full lot. Or my fifth grade teacher, who wore paisley skirts and had hairy armpits and farted in front of the class because it was “natural.” I miss these fucking people.
I miss the friends I skipped school with when 9/11 happened. I remember how we drove to my friend Emily’s house and held each other in her bedroom, with its painted purple walls and hammock hanging from the ceiling, knowing that something grave had begun. These were the same friends I watched the start of the Iraq war with. I miss the leftists who are against war and against intervention — who know it’s not ok to send working class Americans to die in pointless conflict. I don’t know what has happened to these people, but I know they’re still out there. Some of them are on the right now.
These were people who, when Bernie ran, finally felt like they had a viable candidate to vote for after a lifetime of being bludgeoned into voting for the likes of Hillary. People who had always been skeptical of giving kids drugs like Ritalin or adults antidepressants that blunted their emotions and sexuality. These were people I felt at home with, who didn’t care if I was a freak and didn’t give a rat’s ass about getting into Harvard or Yale like the rest of the bootlickers in our town.
Were they naive? Yes, perhaps. Were they also privileged white people? Yup. Does Dave Matthews’ voice sound like a “cow in heat?” Yes, it does.
But history will say that this contingent got certain things right. Universal health care is a good thing. I remember when a sex worker I follow posted on Instagram that her economics had been shaped by watching her mother lose her teeth, a statement that echoed Matthew Sitman’s haunting essay about leaving the conservative movement.
Tevas and Birkenstocks experienced a high-fashion resurgence several years ago. And perhaps it would be to our benefit to reanimate certain aspects of the hippie spirit as well. Although they weren’t the types to fly Old Glory in the days after the fall of the Twin Towers, there was an optimism in my leftie friends that seemed to me inherently American. Something about the “it’s all good, brah” mentality radiates a peaceful live-and-let-liveism that we desperately need to recover. And to this tortured emo chick, that kind of equanimous license to chill meant the world.
