Three white dudes from LA singing in what sounds like Jamaican accent? No. Three white dudes from LA covering Bob Marley is not something anyone needs. If you can get past the messed-up lyrics – hey, it’s hardly a first in rock music and perhaps merely a reflection of 90s Long Beach – then perhaps, the blatant cultural appropriation will give you reason to leave Sublime off your next ‘ULTIMATE 90S’ playlist. It’s dark, dark stuff all tied up in a neat reggae ribbon, which quite frankly, seventeen-year-old me had no business listening to. Strong if I can but I am only a man/ So I take her to the can/ It’s the wrong way“ “ A cigarette pressed between her lips/ But I’m staring at her tits/ It’s the wrong way Oh, and there’s ‘Wrong Way’, a tale about a child prostitute who is “rescued” from her pimp dad by some sort of protagonist (Nowell, perhaps?), who then goes on to fuck her all the same.
#SUBLIME BAND PLUS#
Then we have ‘Mary’, a song about sex with a minor, which includes the line: “ Fifteen years old plus one/ Hotter than a microwave oven“. The view that some things shouldn’t be joked about seems particularly pertinent here.
The jovial ‘Date Rape’, a comedy-cautionary tale about a man who date rapes a woman at a bar, really has not aged well. This usually happens late at night, when playing Pass The Aux at someone’s house and typically, it goes badly. There has been many an instance over the last decade or so where I have tried to introduce Sublime to friends who went straight from Britpop to indie landfill with no California detour. Its singles are the ones that are still played on Los Angeles’ KROQ FM now – the impossibly 90s ‘What I Got’, sweet-but-problematic love song ‘Santeria’ and Lana’s favourite: the ‘Summertime’-referencing, ‘Doin Time’. Nowell would never know the huge success that came with the release of Sublime’s self-titled third album, released posthumously.
In many ways, their stories are eerily similar, all three gone within two years of each other. Much like Kurt Cobain and Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon, he left behind a partner and baby. By the time I was into them – as is true for most of their fans – Bradley Nowell, had died from a heroin overdose, aged 28. Their mashup of reggae, ska and punk provided an antidote to the distinctly British sound that had dominated the charts for close to a decade. But in the UK, they didn’t quite permeate the consciousness as they did in the US.įor a teenage, skateboard loving, SoCal culture stan, Sublime in the late 90s represented everything that London didn’t. Get into any LA taxi even now – some twenty-four years after the death of the band’s lead singer, Bradley Nowell – and you only need to sit in traffic for a moment before one of their songs comes on the radio. Sublime are hardly an underground band – their self-titled album went five times platinum. Last year, Lana Del Rey released a cover of Sublime’s ‘Doin’ Time’ in a move so exciting to me (and seemingly only me) that I could barely contain myself.
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