Just Remember It’s Flesh and Bone: Sublime Turns 30

Your new favorite band is dead. That may as well have been the ad campaign MCA had to push and shove to alternative radio in summer ’96.

It doesn’t necessarily feel like it now because the cultural noise bends and distorts time, but Bradley Nowell died before Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Kurt Cobain was a very shocking and sudden loss that reverberated through the world for years, but he was alive for his own impact; the suffocation of fame played a role in his death. Nowell was not around to know that he ever scored more than a regional hit after building up enough buzz to get Ron Jeremy in its video. His label didn’t have a hard sell turning earworms we now take for granted like “What I Got” and “Santeria” into singalong smashes heard far and wide from boardwalks to dorm rooms and selling five million copies of Sublime, the album released two months after Nowell’s fatal overdose.

Nowell didn’t live to learn his final music would become classic rock, and it’s impossible to calculate how much the tragedy of that legend contributed to the sales, but I’d say probably less than usual — these were extraordinarily catchy songs and they arrived squarely at the right time even if everything else about the circumstance was unfortunate. No Doubt especially had paved the way for genuine superstars cut from the cloth of southern California ska-punk (Gwen Stefani even sang on Sublime’s 1994 song “Saw Red”), and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones had prominently appeared in Clueless, a defining document and send-up of Californian ’90s culture that knew this sound was next. It’s highly possible the band would have enjoyed multiplatinum stardom had Nowell lived, though it’s very unlikely we’d be talking about a biopic.

About that regional hit. Sublime’s “Date Rape” was part of a wave (Stone Temple Pilots’ “Sex Type Thing,” Tool’s “Prison Sex,” perhaps even Kurt’s own “Rape Me”) of mid ‘90s alt-rock hits by men who tried to subvert their aggressive music’s built-in maschismo and say something profound about abuse of power, especially towards women. Suffice it to say that this rhetoric was so omnipresent — an awkward meeting of meathead rock trying to incorporate new conscientious politics that perhaps even started with “Janie’s Got a Gun” — that Nowell didn’t have to be particularly thoughtful to enter its lineage. He just happened to come of age in the Clintonian era when don’t-drop-the-soap humor was a tonal shift in mainstream messaging.

 

VIDEO: Sublime “Date Rape”

So his song was about a perpetrator who gets his in prison with Ron Jeremy as his cellmate in the video because you know what that means, wink wink. Just kidding, Nowell actually says it in the song: “He now takes it in the behind.” It’s not deep, and it wouldn’t be a laughing matter today, but the sentiment resonated during Nowell’s lifetime, and he spent the rest of his continuing to sing about complicated and dicey subject matter in a crude manner with soul and honesty in his voice that signaled tenderness in regards to brokenness. You can hear a heartfelt appreciation of Jimmy Cliff and Gregory Isaacs in Nowell’s inflection, one now associated with beach bums like Jack Johnson but jousted compellingly with Butthole Surfers and N.W.A. influences in his own music relaying lyrics sometimes just as ugly.

It’s here that we might as well bring up “Wrong Way,” one of the most shocking songs to earn heavy rotation in the ’90s. Like “Date Rape,” it presents a facile solution to a serious issue, that the 14-year-old prostitute pimped out by her abusive dad to other scumbags like Nowell’s narrator simply run away with him to escape this hell. It’s not played for laffs as blatantly as its predecessor, but with Nowell “staring at her tits” and characterizing incest and molestation as “her seven horny brothers” and unquestionably “I am only a man so I take her to the can,” it trivializes the unthinkable like a wacky coming-of-age road movie.

The rub is that I’m not sure “Wrong Way” would be better art if it didn’t do these things; if the deplorable “Wrong Way” has to exist at all it might as well be the gripping piece of work that it is, an honest portrayal of its author’s gross gaze and an immensely skilled musical pleasure with its modulations and crowd-pleasing energy. If nothing else, it’s as unflinching a document of what was and wasn’t normalized in the ‘90s, and an ahead-of-its-time look at how grim storytelling in gangsta rap was impacting white rock bands before less narratively adept ones like Korn blew up by desensitizing the same content. The words “at least” could get a hernia from this type of heavy lifting, but at least Nowell admitted it was the wrong way. Eminem would go on to be far more successful artistically and commercially for leaning harder into who’s contradicting whose morals.

 

VIDEO: Sublime “Wrong Way”

But Nowell’s comic gift, tasteless and privileged as it was, impressed people so much because he was imagining these fucked-up screenplays in the first place, inside of would-be pop hits that barely breached three minutes. The most enduring one, “Santeria,” exploited the title religion, Spanglish appropriation, and first-person gun-violence for a feel-good reggae ballad bearing Sublime’s sweetest melody, so fully realized you can even sing along with the guitar solo. Perhaps the band’s signature song “What I Got” (spoiler: it’s love), which is downright kumbaya shit compared to these follow-ups, cloaked them in some immeasurable way that doesn’t make “pedophilia” and gun threats” spring to mind first when one thinks nostalgically about Sublime songs.

Or perhaps the pre-Woodstock ‘99 era was closing in on itself in terms of white guys “pushing the envelope” from irony to edgelordism and even people like me who grew up knowing and singing every word of Sublime had to detach altogether and return decades later to comprehend how abnormal it was. I regret to inform the scandalized that these complexities do not diminish the music, if you can still listen to it. “Caress Me Down,” which invokes Ron Jeremy again, might as well be sung from the perspective of the father in “Wrong Way,” and it’s one of the most openly horny songs ever sung by a dude, moans and all, but that doesn’t make it any less singable, and I imagine it’s even more fun for people who understand the Spanish verse (the opening lines translate to “I like my reggae, and I like punk rock, but what I like most is pussy”).

 

VIDEO: Sublime “What I Got”

But the best ska album of the last 30 years isn’t all louche; “April 29, 1992 (Miami)” captures the unrest of the Rodney King riots even if Nowell can’t help but insert himself into it and crack wise about how he took advantage of racial injustice to obtain his guitar looting. “Jailhouse” and “The Ballad of Johnny Butt” swipe rocksteady obscurities for potent reggae-rock, and the stylistic headache-shifts of “Seed” are mesmerizingly nuts even by cliche loud-soft ’90s standards. “Under My Voodoo” is the Hendrix send-up that spiritually links them to Red Hot Chili Peppers for better or worse, but “Paddle Out” is great hardcore, “Garden Grove” entrancing G-funk, “Same in the End” tense with more pulsating veins than ska-punk ever is, ditto for six minutes of the bluesy dub “Pawn Shop.” Most surprising of all after two welcome “What I Got” options is closer “Doin’ Time,” a dreamy slice of evil-woman trip-hop that interpolates Gershwin’s “Summertime” — of course Lana Del Rey covered it. Picture her singing along to it with the trailer TV showing Blue Velvet on mute and it’s practically an origin story. It’s at least a relief that the trio’s musical omnivorousness was as flippant as their intoxicated moral sense. Sublime isn’t a completely amoral world and it’s usually clear what it’s doing even when it’s the wrong way, but it is permanently audacious in a way no living frontman could have dared.

Setting aside questions of posthumous virtues (it’s the way Bradley would’ve wanted it), Nowell’s now grown-up son Jakob has made it his duty to study and inhabit his dad’s musical persona and legacy, to lead his dad’s bassist and drummer under the Sublime name and again and they released their first album, Until the Sun Explodes (named for when this brand will finally retire) under this configuration last month. It starts strong with “Ensenada,” which nails dad’s clever chord changes and an acceptable-enough version of his filthy humor for 2026 by making “I want to make love to a whore” part of the easygoing refrain. Jakob’s uncanny Bradley-channeling voice continues to impress as the record goes on, as does its range from Bad Brains to, well, Fishbone in its balance between skate-punk and reggae with synths and hip-hop squiggling into crevices here and there. But as it goes on and on and on, it’s just clear they don’t have the songs to compel further hour-long listens. Even the two albums Sublime released when Bradley was alive don’t have those, much less the barrel-scrapings and compilations MCA trotted out after.

 

VIDEO: Sublime “Santeria”

Sublime is one of a kind even for the dead legend himself, a document of lightning striking in all the right ways artistically if not moralistically, while even worse compulsions and happenstances befell the last days of Bradley Nowell’s personal life. Forget him as a beyond-the-pale provocateur, remember him as an ambassador of love (especially for his oft-mentioned dalmation Lou-Dog); it’s all the same in the end. “Pawn Shop,” a Nowell rewrite of the Wailing Souls’ “War Deh Round a John Stop” might be the most fitting epitaph for both the inherent dehumanization in material like “Wrong Way” and the conflicted legacy of Nowell’s posthumous success: “What has been sold, not strictly made of stone / please remember that it’s flesh and bone.”