Hootie & the Blowfish "Cracked Rear View" [1994]

Here it is: the soundtrack for when they finally let black guys play golf at the country club. The main tragedy with this album -- and there are quite a few -- is that said black guy needs to fake sounding like a redneck to get in, as Darius Rucker does on "Cracked Rear View" (and elsewhere, I imagine; it would take someone paying a lot of money for me to listen to another note of Hootie & the Blowfish after enduring this pap). Thus, everybody's pretending to be someone they're not: Rucker acts like he's a sincere country fan, and the country club assholes try not to bristle when they hear him singing about wanting to "love" their white girls. Within this vast aural environment of fabricated arena pop is a chokingly disconcerting claustrophobia, though nothing the preppiest fraternities aren't already completely used to. As long as you're willing to exist within these extremely narrow confines it's not really a tragedy at all; I guess they cracked that rear view on purpose, lest they see what everyone else does about them.