Cracked Rear View: Reassessing Hootie & the Blowfish’s breakthrough debut
The oft quoted maxim is “You can’t go home again,” but the 21st century has made it so that you can probably re-listen to the first CD you ever bought with your own money on streaming. Cooler writers have penned loving odes to cred enhancers like Heaven or Las Vegas or Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, but I grew up a poor Blerd.
Darius Rucker is plenty Blerdy but he sure isn’t poor, and the main reason why—Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View—quietly turned 30 a couple of months ago. Relistening to View won’t suddenly turn your Bluetooth speaker into a Discman, but here in the album’s future maybe the most ’90s thing about it is the monoculture that made them one-album instead of one-hit wonders. It’s hard to imagine a sonic equivalent in 2024 of Hootie that would dominate the charts as it eventually did when it first came out. It’s a front-loaded album in that the biggest singles (“Hold My Hand,” “Let Her Cry” and “Only Wanna Be With You”) are chained together in the tracklist and all happen almost immediately. But unlike too many ’90s CD–er, albums, View has a bit more heft than most of the press and/or haters were willing to give it credit for at the time. Taken in totality with the deep cuts, it’s nearly an album long meditation on a toxic relationship with an ambiguous ending: the sort of thing practically strip mined by best sellers and prestige TV shows in the years since it came out.
Because Rucker is the frontman and helps write the album, it’s easy to see him mining his past to fuel the lyrics. Hootie became a shorthand joke when the inevitable backlash came calling yet what makes their signature sounds stand out is the fact that Rucker’s Black, Southern roots were not frequently getting video and radio time. They might not have upended the industry like a Nevermind or The Chronic, but that didn’t mean that in his own smaller, quieter ways that Rucker wasn’t selling millions of albums with songs he wrote about his own outsider experiences and delivering them to the world.
The big three singles tell the story of the album in a nutshell, whether it’s the hopeful uplift of “Hold My Hand,” or the playful banter and Dylan lifting of “Only Wanna Be With You.” But album highlight “Let Her Cry” has the most in common with the rest of the album, as Rucker sings about the joys and pains of being in a relationship with someone with substance abuse issues, the lyrics of a man who frequently looks at a door he’s almost positive he’ll never use and who’s prayers go up in service in the betterment of another. Toward the end he inverts “Hold My Hand” and turns it from his outreach to his significant other into a prayer to God to help him through this relationship. It’s hard to say what’s more telling, the fact that despite the rollercoaster relationship the only way the narrator sees it ending is by her walking out on him or the cringe Rucker would sometimes get when an audience would whoop over the line “She went in the back to get high” despite the fact the rest of the song hinted at deeper and more disturbing waters.
When he speaks of “Drowning” in another track, it’s not just the darkest parts of a relationship with a power imbalance, it’s the sea of racism he’s drowning in that’s been cresting since 1492 with not rough falls; essentially a song like “People Are People” but through his eyes and pen. A couple of tracks later, “Look Away” apes the lyrics of “Dixie” but makes it a personal story of an interracial relationship imploding due to parental pressures. He doesn’t sing about the joys of plantation life, but a whip hand is coming down nevertheless, and as usual it’s aimed at a Black man. It’s hard to listen to View in totality and measure it against the complaints made against H&tB of them being aggressively normie and middle-of-the-road soft rock from a band that loudly and proudly were fans of R.E.M. and therefore used the likes of the Turtles and the Byrds as North Stars to guide their way. You got the sense that the critics let the tone lull them a bit to sleep mentally and you sure didn’t qwhite see the same sort of accusations leveled at the Bryan Adamses and Collective Souls of the age.
Relistening to Cracked Rear View didn’t make the Circuit City I bought it from suddenly reappear or regrow the flopsweats I used to get before biology class but it was a reminder that 30 years of time and “Time” have barely aged it at all. You just hear it inside of a CVS instead of on MTV, and for a bar band made good there are far worse legacies to have than being briefly ubiquitous and then having to leave fame in their rear view.
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