Sublime's Self-Titled Was My First Album
How I remember discovering the concept of an album in 1996.
When I was a little kid, CD players were not commonplace to vehicles yet, and my parents had lost, sold or had stolen from them most of the vinyl and cassette tapes which they’d previously owned. I remember music reaching me in abundance from sources such as MTV (that my mom watched all the time), FM radio alternative rock stations (Take Away This Ball and Chain by Social Distortion was my first favorite radio song, according to my mom), educational TV programs with singing segments (such as Sesame Street, Barney, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood), VHS sing-along and tapes of Disney and Rankin & Bass songs, and music video compilations from The Red-Hot Chili Peppers and Love & Rockets. Some of the music that my parents liked scared me, and so I didn’t listen to Jane’s Addiction or Nine Inch Nails the way my mom did until my late teens.
My family moved and travelled so much in California by the time I was four years-old, that I can’t remember a single thing from those early years. My active memory starts when I was five years-old, living in Newport News, Virginia (where my mom had grown up), in a place called Deer Park Apartments, and riding around in a 2nd-generation Geo Metro (a tiny Suzuki town car with which my dad had moved all of our belongings across-country) which had a cassette player, through which I’d play selections from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers soundtrack. What I can’t remember is if we had Sublime on cassette or CD, or how soon after its release in June of 1996 we started listening to it. At the time, I didn’t even really understand the significance of why this album was getting so much play with my family—but it became a tentpole, as one of the few things with which all four of us (my parents, my baby brother victor and I) could be entertained.
Sublime was a three-piece band formed in Long Beach, California (which is on the South-Western edge of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area), in 1988. By the time of their third and final album (Sublime) release in 1996, singer-songwriter Bradley Nowell had killed himself by heroin overdose. Keep in mind, this was two years following the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and during the absolute height of West-Coast alternative rock as a genre in the 90s; and while some of their earlier singles would catch into radio play after Nowell’s death (and their 1992 debut, 40 oz. to Freedom, would eventually go double-platinum), none of that mainstream success came until after the immense success of the self-titled album. It’s hard to say if the music ever would have caught on if not for the tragic circumstances surrounding it, but that doesn’t mean that the success wasn’t completely deserved—even if it would be enjoyed by everyone except for the person who brought it to fruition in the first place.
I didn’t know about the suicide when I first heard the album, although I did know about it at least by a couple of years into listening. As attention-grabbing as the story around the album had been, I think it was more important to my family because we had just moved from Westminster, California to Newport News, Virginia, 3,000 miles away—and the very first song on Sublime is called Garden Grove and is about taking a trip to the titular city just East of Westminster (which itself is just East of Long Beach). I know all of this now because I decided to write about this album while staying at a hotel in Westminster, having no idea whatsoever until talking to my mom that I had lived there before, and thinking it was just a funny coincidence that my husband Bird and I were nearby to Garden Grove. (When I’m in LA I make a point to listen to all of the best LA artists.)
Garden Grove is a song which hadn’t struck me as a child, but hit me later in life with its groovy, laid-back atmosphere and depressed but brightside-viewing lyrics. It is most obviously a reggae/dub-inspired song (“Music from Jamaica, all the love that I’ve found”) but also has this hip-hop G-funk undercurrent, especially with the high-pitched keys toward the back end of the song which sound like Dr. Dre production on a Snoop Dogg track (also very famously from Long Beach). I particularly like the bit where Brad is listing off images from his life, in a sort of aggravated repetition that builds in intensity before dispersing back into the peacefulness of appreciating music. It’s a very turbulent song, which makes the best overture for an album in which every other track hits you with something completely different.
What I’ve Got is where the album everyone remembers really begins and was unquestionably the first song I’d heard from the band. I was well-familiar with it before we had the album thanks to its extensive radio play. It was the band’s second single ever, with a video dedicated to their fallen singer, and was the number-one song on alternative radio in 1996, even reaching #33 on the Billboard chart for radio singles. The album barely cracked the Top 200 chart that year, but its shelf life would far outlast Bradley Nowell’s short one. This song single-handedly made Sublime into the most-successful ska-punk adjacent band ever, and even created the career of successful tribute act Badfish, which played Sublime’s music for more than a decade to sold-out venues of people who never got to experience the band when Brad was alive. If you haven’t heard this song before, I would highly recommend it: I think it’s an ageless piece that will always have a way of hitting with people because it’s got such a firm core message, and so many melodic hooks.
As a journalist, I feel the need to mention how the chorus of this song is almost exactly ripped from a 1985 Dancehall song called Loving by Half-Pint, and that the hooky verses crib their melodies pretty heavily from 1968’s Lady Madonna by The Beatles. Where that song describes a working-class woman trying to make end’s meat, Sublime’s version is in first-person like the Half-Pint song, but much more intimately personal. Bradley’s specialty outside of some excellent story-songs that we’ll get to later, is the in-depth autobiographical portraits he paints on tracks like this. In the hip-hop tradition, it starts with the start of his day (“Early in the morning, rising to the streets; light me up that cigarette and I strap shoes on my feet”) and then the immediate need to fix whatever’s gone horribly wrong with his life (“Got to find a reason—reason things went wrong; got to find a reason why my money’s all gone”).
Up to that point, the lyrics are about as relatable to anyone on Earth as they could possibly be—but then Brad narrows in very specifically to the details of his life (“I got a dalmatian, I can still get high; I can play the guitar like a motherfuckin’ riot”). That last claim is satisfyingly substantiated right away by the incredibly memorable lick dropped over the next two bars—which Brad sells with enthusiasm by actually humming along to it in an off-kilter harmony, backed by a raucously fun transition on the keys in the background. That’s when the song suddenly shows its heavy hip-hop and reggae influence, as Bradley basically raps: “well life is too short, so love the one you got, ‘cause you might get run over or you might get shot; never start no static, I just get it off my chest—never had to battle with a bulletproof vest.”
At this point in the song, it’s impossible to ignore the prescience of the lyrics considering that the writer would be dead before the song even released. Life, it turns out, was WAY too short—and considering the way that Bradley died, it’s tempting to hear this song as a desperate plea to himself. “You might get run over or you might get shot” sounds almost hopeful—like something that might happen somewhere down the line when you’re not expecting it, as opposed to the grueling, all-too-expected way that a heroin addict who’s lost control actually goes out. Brad was proud of himself for not acting in a way that would get himself killed by someone else but forgot to look out for his worst enemy.
In a way, he made good on the next lyric: “take a small example, take a tip (ti-ti-tip) from me; take all of your money, give it up to charity.” In his suicide, he ensured that all of the millions and millions of dollars that his songs made would be kept by anyone other than himself. “Love is what I got, it’s within my reach, and the Sublime style is still straight from Long Beach; it all comes back to you, you’re bound to get what you deserve—try and test that, you’re bound to get served. Love’s what I got, don’t start a riot, you’ll feel it when the dance gets hot.” I think it’s fair to say that Bradley tested that and got served; and I think it’s worth noting the sort of confusion this album has on the subject of riots and whether they are a universal positive or negative. In this song alone, Bradley says that he plays guitar like a riot, and also asks the audience not to start one. I am not saying this as criticism of the song—I think the magic of this album is in the manic depression it displays in its hyperactive tone shifts and broad range of musical influences.
When I was a kid, the phrase “lovin’ is what I got” was a little too cloying—after all, I didn’t really love anyone but my mom, and was a lot more of an angry, critical kind of kid growing up. Still, I always appreciated that this song existed and was so eager to celebrate love, without coming at it from the perspective that love is easy or obvious; even the fact that it commands you to “remember that” implies that love is more often something forgotten. If I had a favorite part of the song as a kid, though, it is the similar part to Garden Grove, when Brad is once more listing off autobiographical visual details. (“I don’t cry when my dog runs away; I don’t get angry at the bills I have to pay; I don’t get angry when my mom smokes pot, hits the bottle and goes right to the rock; fuckin and fighting it’s all the same; living with the Louie Dog’s the only way to stay sane; life of loving, come back to me.”)
As a kid, I was fascinated by the lyrics. It probably helps that there’s a mental image of a dalmatian involved, but I remember thinking “isn’t it okay to cry if your dog runs away?” Especially if living with that dog is ‘the only way to stay sane.’ I also remember being unclear why he should be angry that his mom smokes pot when he does it too, although I didn’t know what the rest of that lyric meant as a kid. I also remember being confused about how, if “loving is all (I’ve) got",” then why does he need the life of loving to “come back to (me)?” Again, in retrospect, I think these contradictions are part of the point. This is a song about a person desperately clinging to the thought of love and trying not to freak out about all the bad stuff that goes on in life, even though it’s proving incredibly difficult. Struggling with bills, a drug addicted family, and a dog that’s always running away could be a lot of stress for someone without the sage-like love for love that he wanted to copy from Half-Pint.
I want to point out as well that while Sublime was a fully-fledged band with three core members and which performed live plenty of times in their existence, the song in question doesn’t sound even remotely live, built as it is from loops in the same way as so much other 90s music (categorically, this song is the same genre as Loser by Beck from 1993). While it’s an amazingly derivative song, the unique approach of drum and acoustic guitar sampling backed by groovy bass and keys, that dips between rock and hip-hop and reggae influences while telling a wholly down-to-Earth and personal story is what made the song stand out and survive as its own beast for so long. When you hear someone say that “great artists steal,” they are talking about stuff like this.
In 1996 and 7, when my family had this album in heavy rotation, I remember pressuring everyone to pick a favorite song. My brother’s favorite was The Wrong Way, which became the third big hit single from the album in 1997 and falls firmly into the category of “songs I’m not sure could be released on the radio today.” After all, the very first lyrics, “Annie’s twelve years old, in two more she’ll be a whore—nobody ever told her it’s the wrong way; don’t be afraid with the quickness you get laid, for your family get paid, it's the wrong way,” make the unbelievably dark subject matter of the song immediately apparent; and the tone of the song does NOT reflect the expectations set by those lyrics whatsoever. This jaunty ska-punk track in fact (not unlike the band’s 1992 single “Date Rape,” which would also make it to radio after the self-titled album’s success) a lurid, raunchy, and hauntingly bleak tale of a young woman’s sexual abuse, told from a tongue-in-cheek, almost dastardly perspective that accepts the situation way too naturally.
Keep in mind I was like 5-6 year’s old when I heard this song dozens of times, and unlike my parents, I really tend to think about the lyrics of songs. I had no idea what a “whore” was, but when I heard, “the only family that’s she’s ever had was her seven horny brothers and her drunk ass dad,” I understood at least that as the one girl in a house full of rowdy boys, things were probably weird for Annie. As time went on, I really started to appreciate the implication of this lyric—and frankly, even though I think it’s a very rough situation, I also know that this is a real type of place that some girls end up in, and that there’s no way Bradley would’ve written about this if he hadn’t known someone that had an experience like this. The whole thing feels way too real, which is why it’s insanely brazen that he goes and writes himself into the song in first-person as the next guy to get involved in this young girl’s life. (How old is Brad supposed to be in this song? We don’t know, but the answer is definitely ‘too old.’)
“A cigarette rests between her lips, but I’m staring at her tits, it’s the wrong way; strong if I can but I am only a man, so I took her to the can, it’s the wrong way.” So yeah, he gets into her pants, and he knows he shouldn’t be doing it, but he really does try to give this girl whatever she wants. “Happy, are you sad? Wanna shoot your dad? I’ll do anything I can—the wrong way. We talked all night, tried to make it right; believe me, shit was tight-it was the wrong way.” It seems like he’s trying to help this girl, but ultimately, he just keeps having sex with her, which isn’t really helping anything, and he knows it. Eventually, they try to run away together, but it doesn’t work out—she takes a hike, and it don’t matter if he like it or not, because “she only wants the wrong way.”
This song might be even more fraught with the emotional contradictions that define the album than any other—a constant push-and-pull of trying but failing, offering but not receiving, and being left with a sort of blasé feeling about the whole thing. It’s the little details that always intrigued me, like when he tells her to “spend some time in America;” and the repeated detail of “big soggy tears rolling down her chin, and it still ruins her makeup.” As a kid, I had such a vivid image of this whirlwind, emotional romance between two people who only know the “wrong way;” and I always felt a lot of empathy for both characters, even if I learned eventually just how problematic the narrator perspective really is meant to be. I never did understand why he’d taken her “to the can” though. (Is he taking her in the bathroom? Or to see a canon?? Why??)
Same In the End was my favorite song on the album as a kid, likely because it rips the fuck open with high-tempo reggae riffs giving way to hard rock hooks, and is jam-packed with disconnected, vivid lyrics describing weird, hilarious situations and darkly funny autobiography. (“Down in Mississippi where the sun beats down from the sky, they give it up and they give it up and they give it up, but they never ask why; daddy was a rolling rolling stone—oh! —he rolled away one day, and he never came home.”) (“Get down on your knees and start to pray—oh! —pray my itchy rash will go away.”) (“Now back up y’all, it ain’t me, Kentucky Fried Chicken is all I see, it’s a hellified way to start your day.” (That one is only funnier to me now, having lived in Corbin, Kentucky the birthplace of KFC.)) I always loved, “if I make you cry all night, me and your daddy gonna have a fist fight,” too. And who can forget, “I only am what you told me to be, I’m a backwards-ass hillbilly, I’m Dick Buttkiss,” or “Rec-tite on my ass and it makes me itch.” I don’t know if this song reached me because it’s as furious, fast and frenzied with emotion and intensity as I am, or if my style has been inspired by having grown up loving a song like this—but I can safely say this is the closest thing to a song I would write myself on this album. It even has words like “ascertain” in it, and so many fun, hooky bars, I’d have to quote the whole song to get them all. It’s got a pretty sick riff at the very end, too.
If any one song from this album has really lived in my head rent-free for all of these years, though, it’s got to be April 29th, 1992, whose title is mis-sung as April 26th at the start of the lyrics. “There was a riot on the streets, tell me where were you?” Well, I can tell you that I was one year old and living on Treasure Island—about 15 minutes from where the riots were happening in San Francisco, which is just one of the cities the song references to be sure you understand that this event was much larger than the name it came to be known with, “The LA riots,” would imply. I knew most of the words to this dark reggae and hip-hop inspired track, and I will never forget the time my mom warned me to “never sing any of the lyrics to this song at school.” At the time, I thought it was mostly an issue of swearing—then, I thought maybe it was more about how the song seems to encourage and celebrate the rioting itself—but then I also started to think the real issue was the subject of racialization that gets brought up midway through. (“They said it was for the black men, they said it was for the Mexican, but not for the white men; but if you saw it in the streets, this wasn’t about Rodney King, in this fucked up situation with these fucked up police; it’s about coming up, and staying on top, and yelling 187 on a motherfucking cop; it’s not in the paper, it’s on the wall; national guard! smoke from all around!”)
I would call this song a pretty fucking bold political statement, and also some much-needed perspective. It opens with a sample of police chatter where a cop is asking another if they can find the owner of a totally busted-in and looted-out building to see “if he can come try to secure his business,” since they aren’t going to do shit about it. When we get into the lyrics, we realize that our narrator is right down in the fray, darkly bragging about all the opportunity which the looting has given him. “You were sitting in your home watching TV, while I was participating in some anarchy. First spot we hit was my liquor store, I finally got all that alcohol I can’t afford. Red lights flashing, time to retire, and then we turned that liquor store into a structure fire.”
Right away, the singer’s behavior seems morally reprehensible and unhinged—he’s stealing alcohol and burning the store to the ground just for the hell of it. I didn’t know what liquor costs or how insurance works as a kid, but I still can’t say that I think Brad is “the good guy.” At the same time, when I consider the results of what he claims to have done here, I have to think it was the right move for him, and maybe for the world. “Next stop we hit was the music shop; it only took one brick to make that window drop; finally, we had our own PA; where do you think I got this guitar that you’re hearing today?” As a kid, that lyric blew my mind, because I understood stealing to be bad (and didn’t know you could like, admit to crime on record), but I also thought, well, what if he never got that guitar, and I never got to hear these songs? Isn’t the world a better place because Bradley took that free guitar, that I’m sure was not missed by the shop owner?
In the next verse, it dawns on Brad that he needs new home furnishings and so he fills his van until his living room is “much more comfterful” (my dad loved this mispronunciation). Even though there’s a definite villainousness to how Brad describes his intent with the looting, he also notes that the people around him are in even more desperate states than he is. “Everybody in the hood has had it up to here—it’s getting harder and harder and harder each and every year; some kids went in the store with their mother—I saw her when she came out, she was grabbin’ some Pampers.” (Those are diapers, if you didn’t know.)
The rest of the song plays out the aforementioned social commentary, and then a lot of “burn, let it burn,” in the style of the 1984 dance classic The Roof is On Fire, and a list of all the cities where the rioting took place (I’m not sure why the title denotes Miami specifically, but there is another version of the song set in Leary. Most of the police chatter references cities in South LA, however.) I think about this song still every time there is rioting in reaction to police violence and boiling over of tensions between those without and those who have. If you can’t understand why the riots happen, I think this song offers a more nuanced perspective than you’re ever going to get from someone who wouldn’t actually go out and commit these crimes themselves. I was an adult by the time I started stealing things, and I have never once felt like I was doing something wrong—in fact, I feel way more guilt about everything I actually buy from Wal-Mart than I do about the things I take from there. If you can’t understand why that is, try it sometimes—they won’t stop you and they don’t care. Just put a candy bar in your pocket and walk out of the store and tell me how you feel.
Santeria was my dad’s favorite song on the album, and the second massive hit single which made became a forever cult radio classic on alternative rock stations. This is another of the band’s mellower, more chilled-out reggae ska songs with a dark lyrical undertone and some evocative visual storytelling. It’s one of the most structurally-sound songs the band ever created, riding on a stunning bassline and rife with noodling riffs and aching guitar flourishes which crash eventually into one of the all-time great beach rock guitar solos.
Lyrically, this is another one that falls into the category of “probably couldn’t hit the radio today,” considering that it’s about wanting to murder the man who stole your girlfriend with a “new .45,” and “slap her down,” for running off on the singer. It’s a song of jealousy, anger, heartbreak and sadness at a loss that you can’t rectify with a million dollars and a gun even if you are desperate to do so. It’s chauvinistic, way too honest, and probably a little racially insensitive, what with its title refencing an afro-Cuban religion, and lyrical references to Chicano culture—although anyone who grew up in South LA will tell you that the culture here is mostly Mexican, and the white people here do not consider themselves as just white. All of those things are why I think the song is good—because I like honest songs about failure and sadness—but your mileage will vary. Suffice it to say that it’s because I grew up with songs like this that the aesthetic which Mac Demarco would pick up and run with didn’t blow my mind in 2012, even if his songs are probably more accessible today.
If I am being completely honest with you, the reason I’ve taken so much time to write about these first six songs on the album is that it may as well have functionally ended right here. In this span, we’ve covered the three big singles from the album, and also the three best songs (except for the last track that we’ll get to in a few paragraphs). Seed is another manic ska-punk track with similar energy to Same in the End, and similar lyrical themes to Santeria, but it never stuck with me nearly as much as the other songs—mostly because it’s just a little too unstructured. That’s an issue I’ve got with much of the rest of the album—too many of the following are what I’d consider “genre songs,” instead of blending those genres into something unique and memorable in the way the first 6 songs do. Jailhouse is a track I know I end up remembering when I hear it—but looking at the title and trying to recall the lyrics, I end up stumping myself.
If you’d asked me as a kid on which track this album ended, I probably would’ve said that it ended with Pawn Shop, as that six-minute dub jam was more than my patience could handle at that age, and usually was the point after which we’d be done with whatever drive around town had us playing the album anyways. I will never forget the hook (“Down here at the pawn shop”), and I think of it whenever I think of the concept of a pawn shop, but the jam song structure and repetitive guitar solos still wear on my patience listening to the song now, even if I get what the vibe is supposed to be a lot more. I have less memory of the next five ska-punk, hardcore punk, dub and reggae tracks, being Paddle Out, The Ballad of Johnny Butt, Burritos, Under My Voodoo, and Get Ready, although I think Caress Me Down is a decent-enough reggae love-making jam. There is usually a point when listening to Sublime where I just can’t listen to any more upstroke guitars, and the similarities in the less-structured songs start to all blur together. For some reason, there’s a whole-ass reprisal of What I Got towards the end as well, which I never really understood.
The final track on the album almost didn’t make it, and even had to have a lyric redone by another singer in light of Bradley having died before they were approved to have the song on the album thanks to legal reasons. It’s a slant-cover of a 1930s jazz standard from George Gershwin called Summertime, renamed by them to Doin’ Time (which is also the chorus lyric if you find the demo version of the song made before the album’s release). Besides the chorus melody, which they sped up considerably, the song bears little lyrical or structural resemblance to the original—and what they created I think stands on its own as a classic song, and perennial summer playlist fodder which eventually itself got a syrupy hit radio cover by Lana Del Ray. I have no idea why she didn’t adapt the lyrics even further, tho, as it makes no sense for her to sing, “Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras MG, all people in the dance will agree that we’re well-qualified to represent the L.B.C.,” considering that she’s not Brad and she’s from New York City. When “me and Louie” come running to the party, she’s talking about the same dalmatian referenced everywhere else on the album, which couldn’t possibly still be alive when her cover was released in 2019.
Doin’ Time is a slick, sly and sexy trip-hop track that sounds as much like Massive Attack as it does Sublime. Lyrically, it deals with a toxic relationship, and being in love with a woman that treats you like shit and “spreads her lovin’ all over, and when she gets home there’s none left for me,” whom the singer would like to “hold (her) head underwater.” It’s one of those songs where every single bar is a hook, and the drum samples and keys and guitars all melt into one-another just perfectly to create this cold, slick feeling, like the summer sun is melting ice cubes through a glass. Even if the very best, most memorable melody and lyric are ripped from an older song, I still think this is one of the structurally best and most memorable songs that the band made, and another one that I think makes sense forever, such that Lana barely changed a single thing when she recreated it except to be a worse singer than Bradley Nowell (whose singing I can’t really judge because it’s practically the first voice I heard as much of as I did at that age. )
Sublime’s self-titled album isn’t one of my favorites, considering that I think about half of the songs are completely skippable (though 17 tracks leave a lot of leeway), I have only grown less patient for full-length albums over the years, but also more forgiving of an album having just a few monstrously good songs; and I think this album falls into that category. I am almost never going to complain about having to hear What I’ve Got or Doin’ time if they come on the radio, because I think that they are both perfectly crafted vibes that are endlessly explorable. I still get hype when April 29, 1992 or Same in the End comes on my shuffle, and while Garden Grove is a little more meditative and contextual, I think it’s got a rich texture to it and lots of memorable melodies to keep it interesting. Wrong Way and Santeria can be a little bit more tiring, as they are both pretty short, gimmicky, and—sure—a little “problematic;” but I still think they are both very good songs. I don’t necessarily dislike the rest of the album, but it’s a lot of stuff that I can find better versions of elsewhere, and so it doesn’t strike me as necessary listening the way that those seven songs do—but I also don’t think it’s fair to judge an album with a few God-tier songs as though it’s “mediocre” just because it’s not amazing all the way through. If we don’t count anything but the hits, I think the album is like a strong-8 to a light-9, and a totally reasonable favorite to have if you like this style of music even more than I do.
Sublime was never my favorite band, and I never got into their other albums beyond the couple of songs that eventually made it to radio (Badfish eventually becoming one of their most famous tracks, but not one I ever cared for much—Date Rape is way more fascinating, but I don’t want to get into that here, and Smoke Two Joints is a stoner classic). I heard the main singles on the radio for years and years and still do when I listen to alt-rock radio (rarely), and I’ve “rediscovered” the album a few times in adulthood (coming to notice how good Garden Grove is and remembering Same in the End after forgetting it for lack of radio play and not really listening to the album between 1999 and 2009.) Mostly, I think my feelings on the album have changed surprisingly little—but then, it really was the first project I memorized to any kind of depth as a kid. Even though I would’ve said I liked Green Day more, I really just knew Basket Case and later Brain Stew in the mid-90s, and the next album that I remember liking as many songs on was, hilariously, the Pokémon Theme Collection. I may or may not write an article about that album on my way to the first one that I ever adored front-to-back, being Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory in 1999. Let me know if you wanna read about that, and how you feel about Sublime’s self-titled in the comments below! Thanks for reading, and happy new year, 2023!