In the early 1990s, white American music, collapsing under the weight of hair metal and trying hard to get its head around hip-hop and rap, broke into two factions. The first faction, inaugurated by the Pixies and led by the Pacific Northwest cabal of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and the Posies, emphasized a post-punk sound dubbed "grunge." The underlying tenets of the music were a distrust of the corporate music giants, a DIY attitude towards making music, lyrics emphasizing how awful life was and how the drugs couldn't cure the pain anymore, and a discordant, minor key barrage of guitar-driven noise to drive home the nihilism of the words. Grunge rose to prominence very quickly and was made corporate almost as fast. "Alternative rock" stations popped up all over the country touting what they called "grunge" and flogging the latest band the monopolies could pump out. Still, more of these post-punk waves came — the slackers and nerds led by Weezer; the dykes and riot grrls led by Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney; the shoe-lookers and their emotionally raw lyrics popularized by the Get Up Kids. The post-punk white kids are now the most powerful of the two factions, with their musical sound standing as the sole alternative to the overwhelming domination of modern music by African-American singers and rappers.

There was, however, another faction. Instead of discord, they sought out the pop hook and folk-based acoustic guitar playing. Their lyrics were often just as raw and introspective, but they weren't the loop tape of post-divorce parental hatred one heard in grunge. Instead of the Pixies and the Stooges, they had REM and Camper Van Beethoven. And the band at the forefront was the ever-reviled Toad The Wet Sprocket.

What were the musical crimes of Toad? Their songs all sounded the same, yes, but there's something disingenuous about damning them for "repetition" while lionizing the Ramones. Were they boring? It's a subjective statement, but most people asked would agree they were. However, there were bands of that era (like, oh, Candlebox) that received more acclaim and got away with being monotonous and uncreative. Toad the Wet Sprocket wrote controversial songs, played a few festivals, and did what every other band of that era did. There was no musical crime they committed that a hundred other bands of that era would be sent to San Muzak for. No, their only problem was that they just weren't a loud, discordant rock band; they were music for sensitive guys and girls in Birkenstocks to listen to in the thousands of coffee houses popping up across the street from college campuses. And here are your Two Americas. You have Margot, the girl with a stack of TtWS and Gin Blossoms CDs and a nice batik wallhanging whom you dated a few times before she took her junior year abroad in Spain and came back with a stack of Gipsy Kings CDs and a girlfriend. You have Becca, the black t-shirt wearing Pixies and Soundgarden nut with whom you had a violent triste after you met her at a Mudhoney show and was the first woman with tattoos you ever slept with.