"Don't Drink The Water" is about the European slaughter of Native Americans, as the colonization of North America caused the near-extinction of the Native American populace. Dave Matthews is South African, which gave him an outsider's perspective on American history when he moved to Virginia in 1985 when he was 18. Had he stayed in South Africa, he would have been conscripted into the military in a country that was still under Apartheid.
Matthews told this story from this travels to illustrate the song: "I remember one time standing at the edge of Lake Superior, up there, we were camping up on the northern side of it and looking out and imagining these little rocks that jut out, families of people going past in canoes and hunting on the side of the lake there, and also like if you sit and look at the Grand Canyon and get a little distance between you and that McDonald's that's peering down over the canyon with you, and just imagine the quiet that must have been there and the people that enjoyed it before we came, and I just get awed because it's sort of an overwhelming feeling looking at those things just going, 'Man does that suck, does it suck.' That you could erase somebody, ya know? Take somebody's whole universe away. It's just unbelievable for those people... just the fact that a little bit of our history has a lot of poison in it and that maybe we can't reverse things but maybe pay a little tribute to it every once in a while."
That's Alanis Morissette singing background vocals at the conclusion of the song, and Bela Fleck of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and The New Grass Revival on banjo.
The song is part of the
Before These Crowded Streets album, released in 1998 after the band was well established. They were strictly a live band the first few years after they formed in 1991. When they signed to a major label (RCA) they had lots of well-honed songs that became radio hits, including "
Ants Marching" and "
Satellite."
The sessions for
Before These Crowded Streets were different because the band had no idea what they were going to record when they headed into the studio. Matthews booked studio time before he had any songs written, so the pressure was on to create something from scratch. What followed was lots of experimentation from each band member to figure out what did and didn't work. It especially took awhile to figure out this track, which became the album's lead single.
"'Don't Drink The Water' kicked our asses," Matthews recalled in MTV's documentary about the album. "We all hated it, and then we were all in bad moods, furious."
Once producer Steve Lillywhite played it back to them, however, the band realized the song's potential and it became a fast favorite.
In a 1998 interview with Allstar Music, Matthews said the song started out with him imagining the civilizations and societies that made up North America before the colonization but became about "any sort of genocidal attitude toward other people." He added: "I think we forget about it somehow, behind the horrors, whether we're talking about South Africa or all of Africa, really, or South America or Japan going to China or China going to Tibet."
In this song, Matthews was also addressing the tendency to rewrite history by excusing atrocities under the guise of fighting for freedom, an idea sparked by reading the work of philosopher/political activist Noam Chomsky.
"There's this method of writing history with slogans in which you can erase the real part of history, you know," he said. "I was reading Noam Chomsky when he said this country was built on freedom and justice... he says you can just as easily and more accurately suggest - at least for the first 300 years - that in the development of this country and the arrival of the English and the battle between the English and Spanish, that it was more [built on] slavery and genocide. But if you put behind it a good idea underneath it all, say we were fighting for free ideals and a just society - you know, it was those curly-haired, clever handsome fellows that were on top of everything - they were the ones who had the freedom ... that was the inspiration."
Matthews cites "Don't Drink The Water" as the best song he's ever written.
"I have nothing to apologize for that," he
told GQ. "I was as clear as I could be. Why am I mad at the history of North America? The thing I'm maddest about is all of the knowledge and all of the culture and all of the perspective that we erased for greed and to steal the future away from our children. The idea of conquering people is deeply misguided, arrogant, and stupid."
The band didn't release singles for sale in America at this time, but "Don't Drink The Water" was issued as the first promotional single from the
Before These Crowded Streets album, meaning it was sent to radio stations an MTV to garner airplay. "Stay (Wasting Time)" was the next single from the album, followed by "
Crush."
The album debuted at #1, as did their next six, a remarkable run that's a testament to their loyal fanbase.
The song is sung from the perspective of a colonizer, so it sounds rather nefarious. "I realized that the best way for me to say that was to be the villain, and that's the part that I like so much about that song," Matthews told GQ. "It's like being the hunter: 'Where are the skulls I've gotta crush? This is all mine.' Then the 'don't drink the water' part is turning around and facing what you've done."
The music video, directed by Dean Karr, shows native people holding the severed, singing head of Dave Matthews - quite the visual!
The footage came from the Amazon forest in Venezuela, where members of the Indigenous Yanomami tribe were filmed holding a prop head. Matthews' face was filmed separately against a green screen and composited onto the prosthetic head during post-production. This allowed the head to appear to "sing" the lyrics in the jungle scenes.
Living in Virginia, which was part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, Matthews came to realize that there was a skewed perspective on what parts of the country were considered racist.
"In America we've told this oversimplified story that the racism of America primarily existed in the South," he said. "But the truth is, when you look at our history, the racism was everywhere. Of course it was enormously central to the South, but when I talk to people in Virginia or Louisiana about race issues, you might find the most overtly secessionist people, but you also find the most aggressively progressive people in the country. Down there is the front line. That's where you find the people that have changed the country, because that's so much of where it happened. Of course, it happened everywhere, but it really happened there. A lot of the hopes of that we have for resolving the problems in this country will be found in the southeast."
