40oz. to Freedom

Most Sublime fans have only ever known Bradley Nowell as a ghost. The frontman overdosed in a motel just two months before his band’s self-titled blockbuster 1996 album, never living to witness its impact. And so, tasked with promoting a cheery, summertime record now indelibly associated with death, Sublime’s label MCA and imprint Gasoline Alley worked some marketing magic, covering for Nowell’s absence in the band’s music videos by superimposing archival footage of him, as if to reassure viewers he was there in spirit. In one, his apparition looks down from the heavens at his beloved dog Louie, the Dalmatian that had spent Sublime’s concerts on stage curled up at his master’s feet, and smiles. Later in the same video, as the band’s surviving members run afoul of Deebo from the Friday movies on a cheap spaghetti western set, Nowell’s hologram sits on a stoop removed from the action, doing what he spent so much of his life doing: playing his guitar. He looks at peace.

It’s human nature to cling to a comforting takeaway after a tragedy. In a “Behind the Music” special years later, those closest to Nowell all framed his death the same way: After battling addiction for so long, he was prepared to die, and maybe even on some level all right with it. “It wasn’t a question of was it going to happen, it was a question of when it was going to happen,” drummer Bud Gaugh recounted. Yet Nowell’s death left a bigger void than even his loved ones and bandmates could have imagined. As Sublime’s popularity ballooned, and their eponymous final album sold by the millions, MCA rushed to capitalize on the seismic demand for a band that no longer existed, clearing the group’s vault with a series of live albums and rarity and greatest hit collections. Cover bands popped up, too, along with acts that traced the band’s template of breezy Cali reggae-punk so closely that they might as well have been cover bands—an entire cottage industry, cast from Nowell’s footprints.

All those knockoffs proved poor substitutes for the real thing. Sublime only recorded three albums during their run, and the middle one, 1994’s Robbin’ the Hood, was so haphazard and caustic that only the most devoted fan could tolerate any significant time with it (it was recorded in a crack house, and it sounded like it). That meant that all roads from Sublime’s crossover hits like “What I Got” and “Santeria” led back to their 1992 debut 40oz. to Freedom, their most enduring work and one of the most musically ravenous albums of the ’90s, a countercultural melting pot that extended its hand to skate-punks, surfers, burnouts, tape-trading jam kids, and hip-hop fanatics alike, inviting them all to gather around the same bong.

Sublime trumpeted their influences proudly, stuffing the album beyond its seams with covers of Bad Religion, Descendents, Toots and the Maytals, and the Grateful Dead, samples of Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Minutemen, and repeated salutes to KRS-One, the rapper Nowell idolized most. And, as the 75-minute record hadn’t sufficiently established the scope of their tastes, they spent its closing track shouting out to all the other acts that they just as easily could have covered if the album ran another hour or two—Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Frank Zappa, Eek-A-Mouse, Crass, Big Drill Car and on and on and on. Even Steve Albini’s defunct noise project Rapeman got a nod.

The only album of its era that neared its big-tent ambitions is Check Your Head, which the Beastie Boys recorded around the same time in Los Angeles, a short drive from Sublime’s native Long Beach, but even that album was rooted in one primary style and one very specific notion of cool. 40oz. to Freedom’s only binding thread, on the other hand, was Nowell’s insatiable need to play a little bit of everything. The album feels like a marathon attempt to hold his own interest, cannonballing from ska to thrash to dub to campfire sing-alongs at the speed of a “Beavis and Butt-Head” channel-surfing session. Never mind that Sublime weren’t great at all of those styles, or even most of them. In their wide embrace of music, they came to stand for something greater than any single sound: a spirit of radical inclusion. The group’s forbearers, Berkeley ska legends Operation Ivy, had preached unity, making overtures beyond the punk circles they primarily played to, but it was Sublime that put those ideals into action.

40oz. was an enormously prescient record, predicting hip-hop’s influence on the late-’90s alternative sound years before a DJ became a perfectly normal thing for a rock band to have on its payroll. Mostly, though, the album resonated because it captured a lifestyle. Rejecting the smoldering angst of the grunge music that was beginning to take root on the radio, Sublime made revelry their primary muse, detailing parties, hookups, and bad decisions with such rowdy immediacy. To make the most of their modest budget, they snuck into a studio after dark to record it, and you can picture the band, their friends, and their many hangers-on crowding the room, clanking beer bottles and stubbing out cigarettes on the couch cushions. It’s no wonder why the album became a staple of so many cookouts, keggers, smoke sessions, and all-night “GoldenEye” tournaments—it was a record born of having nothing to do and nowhere to be, which made it the perfect soundtrack for a generation’s leisure time.

Yet while it’s hard to imagine a future when it won’t be blasting out of dorm rooms, time hasn’t flattered the album. A belated regional hit that primed the band for their breakthrough, “Date Rape” in particular was questionable even by its era’s standards, but today it sounds downright vile. The band sold the single as an anti-rape song, which it halfheartedly tries to be—the rapist is the villain, after all, and he gets his comeuppance—but mostly it’s a “sexual assault as entertainment” song, a titillating yarn about a predator and his prey, set to giddy, Fishbone-style horns that undercut any empathy it pretends to have for its victim. “Suggestion” this is not: Even if you can look past the noxious homophobia of the song’s parting shot about the imprisoned rapist taking it “in the behind”—poetic justice at its least poetic—ending a song denouncing date rape by cheering prison rape is unjustifiably bad.

In surprisingly callous comments to an Orlando magazine that suggest he might not have been ready for the spotlight international fame would have put on him, Nowell leaves no reason to give the song’s intentions the benefit of the doubt. “I’ve never raped anyone at least as far as I can remember,” Nowell said. “We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about bad date rape was. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad; if it wasn't for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.” If you want to understand why so many people loathe this band, remember this anecdote, because it epitomizes what Sublime sounds like to outsiders: Dudes guffawing at a joke you find appalling.

That interview is hardly the only indication that Nowell’s offstage behavior might have fallen short of even the most basic standards that today’s listeners expect of musicians. “Pinching girlies’ asses, I was drinking recklessly,” he sings on “What Happened.” On “Right Back,” he dismisses his girlfriend as a ho and strongly suggests he slept with yours—like many white rap fans of the era, he took the genre’s influence as license to parrot its misogyny. Nowell could also play fast and loose with the cultures he appropriated. His reggae voice is broad almost to the point of insensitivity, a throaty imitation of a lascivious islander, and he mimics KRS-One’s gunshot adlib (“Bo! Bo!”) with the same overzealous glee some of his white fans would adopt years later when shouting Chappelle-ified versions of Lil Jon’s catchphrases: “What? Okay!!!” There’s a fine line between homage and caricature. Sublime’s appeal rested on never asking fans to consider it.

None of those criticisms probably would have bothered Nowell much. California’s punk scene was often proudly less PC than those in other parts of the country, and Nowell never tried to pass himself off as a saint. He sang unapologetically about robbing, drugging, and whoring. On “Wrong Way,” a hit single from their self-titled album that’s somehow even more squeamish than “Date Rape,” he sang far too vividly in the first person about sleeping with an underage prostitute (“It’s almost a true story,” bassist Eric Wilson once said). It’s remarkable, then, that listeners heard so much grace in him. Here was a guy who once used—and possibly even coined—the term “butt-housed,” yet in fan circles he came to be celebrated as almost an American Bob Marley, an emissary of peace and love who proved too pure for this world.

So how did such an uncouth horn dog, a man with so many vices and such an indelicate way with words, come to represent such an ill-fitting ideal? Chalk some of it up to his most powerful instrument: his voice, a weary croon with an inviting twinkle that implied wisdom and sensitivity that wasn’t always actually present in his lyrics. “I thought that Bradley was a black guy, because his voice is so soulful,” Gwen Stefani recalled. “And I had it all in my head exactly what he looked like, you know? And I was falling in love with him, just because [of] his voice.” On record, he certainly doesn’t sound like the shirtless bro with a tattoo of his own band’s name jetting across the massive canvas of his back on Sublime’s cover. To watch old concert footage of the band is to be suffocated by their burly, beer-gut ideal masculinity, yet listening to “Badfish” on headphones it’s difficult to imagine anything other than a gentle soul. For 40oz.’s penultimate track, he even pulls off a convincingly heartfelt cover of “Rivers of Babylon,” the Melodians’ gorgeous hymn from the Harder They Come soundtrack. That’s something Op Ivy never could have done.

And of course, death has a way of imparting mystique on fallen musicians, and the band’s posthumous music videos stopped just short of literally painting a halo over him. Watching those videos with Nowell piped in from the great beyond makes it easy to buy into his coronation. Just as the immortal image of Kurt Cobain became him in a cardigan, performing angelically against a candlelit stage on the “Unplugged” special that aired ceaselessly after his death, Nowell’s became him looking down from the heavens, watching lovingly over his dog. It’s less subtle, no doubt, yet no less effective.

For years, Gaugh and Wilson resisted exploiting their late bandmate’s legacy, a moratorium that lasted until 2009, when they joined with young Nowell soundalike Rome Ramirez in a band called Sublime With Rome, despite the furious objections of Nowell’s estate. Even setting aside questions of legality and tastefulness, the band has released two albums, and there isn’t a moment on either that feels spontaneous or surprising. Without Nowell’s acerbic personality cutting through all those peppy guitar riffs, their sound is too bright and saccharine, almost cloyingly so. Nowell, for all his faults, was the human contradiction that a band like this needed to hold any interest, which is why none of Sublime’s imitators, semi-official offshoots included, have made anywhere near the same impact. Despite the popular misreading of Nowell’s legacy, listeners didn’t just want the pleasing sounds and platitudes about love. They wanted the full sordid package: the raunch, squalor, drugs, side chicks, and dog shit. Nowell’s music didn’t resonate in spite of being problematic. It resonated because it was problematic. As a white musician at the time, Nowell had license to skirt taboos and cross cultural boundaries, his intentions rarely doubted or scrutinized, and he took advantage to an extent few of his peers ever had.

And that’s why there may be a window on the movement that Nowell started. Each year 40oz. sounds a little further past its sell-by date, its songs a little more sour and its sexual politics even less excusable. For the same reason that Mötley Crüe doesn’t make many new teenage fans these days, Sublime’s well of young fans may dry up, too; time has a way of gradually erasing music that doesn’t meet modern mores. Even many original fans who still sneak a listen while doing weekend yard work probably wouldn’t want to be seen wearing their old 40oz. T-shirt in public anymore. Yet if you talk to those same fans candidly, many will admit the same thing: It’s the most embarrassing album they’ve ever loved.

Sublime: 40oz. to Freedom

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