What you cannot say in 61 seconds
On unpaid parking tickets, overdoses and one of SoCal’s most iconic bands.
A video I made about the band Sublime recently appears to have struck a chord with folks (a power chord, perhaps). As of writing this, that video has been shared over 21,000 times and so I wanted to tell you a little more about what went into it.
I think every song has three meanings: what it means to the person who wrote it, what everyone thinks it means to the person who wrote it, and most importantly, what it means to you.
The first two can be debated and analyzed, they can be picked apart by experts and debunked by loud assholes talking over the DJ at the bar. But the third one is always, perfectly and indisputably true. It is how Such Great Heights by the Postal Service is about your college break up, but the Iron & Wine cover is about the summer you spent waiting tables in Nashville.
It is how you (you, personally) feel the song.
Now occasionally there are these beautiful moments where the third thing - how you feel it - is the same for more than one person. It is how 360 and Pink Pony Club will always feel like the summer of 2024. It’s why you feel wildly connected to the three friends you road tripped to the coast with in 2019 whenever you listen to that playlist someone made called Santa Cruzing.
When it is that third thing, it elevates the subjective work of art to something universal - it becomes culture.
Oddly enough, I believe that for many folks, that is exactly what the band Sublime represents to them (to us), whether we know it or not. And so when I set out to write about the band in this video, that is what I hoped to achieve. Below you will find where it landed, where it didn’t, and what I couldn’t fit into 61 seconds:
If you asked me about the band Sublime, I might say that they are the Lynyrd Skynyrd of Southern California,
I’ve had this one in my pocket for about 20 years, honestly. It’s something that I feel like intuitively makes sense: that Sublime is to Southern California what Lynyrd Skynyrd is to the south - that the music evokes a certain idea of a place, that while flawed (in some instances deeply flawed), is also idealistic and pure. A band that is so inseparable from a place that it makes you love it because of its grit, not in spite of it. It’s not perfect, but it works.
But if you were to ask me on a deeper level I would say that for the past two decades every time I have seen a teenager in a 40oz to freedom shirt - ironically or not - I know I can trust them more than most cops.
Ok, a few things going on here: First, I stole this convention from a popular meme template on tiktok. What I loved about it is that you don’t know if that final slide is going to be a punchline or a gut punch. A true testament to the power of the medium.
Second: Since Sublime has been a band there have been 16 year olds wearing Sublime shirts, and as a person who was once in a band that sold a lot of T-shirts to 16 year olds, I know that is no easy task.
I might say that Sublime is the shake left over from a dime bag filled with ska, reggae, punk, 7-11 hotdogs and bench warrants from unpaid parking tickets you obtained at the beach.
I moved out on my own in LA when I was 18 and, after couch surfing for a bit, my first real place was a one-bedroom apartment (shared between three guys) on Pico and 6th in Santa Monica a few blocks from the beach. Parking here is so bad that it is almost a supporting character in everyone’s lived experience. It makes you constantly uncomfortable even in your own home knowing you have to set an alarm to go move your car, or if you get off work too late the night before street cleaning you can expect to drive around for 45 minutes (at least) before you can go to sleep. And there were plenty of nights where I said (we all said) fuck it, I’ll pay the $60 (spoiler: he did not pay thew $60).
In Southern California the beach is invariably linked to parking tickets.
I think it’s important to address the “dime bag” mention here as well. It is hard not to talk about drug use when talking about Sublime, but it’s tricky. On the one hand, I’d say Sublime lyrics give a relatively rose-tinted portrayal of addiction, and it’s hard not to treat it with the same light hand when painting my own picture. On the other hand, the reality is Bradley Nowell died at 27 from a drug overdose, and in researching this piece I could not find a single interview on him where he wasn’t visibly intoxicated. It is impossible to separate the man from the party.
I think it’s hard not to get married to a clever line, and I hope that I didn’t abuse that with this (I’m just talking about weed, after all) but still, I tried to rectify further on in the piece.
That no matter how pretentious your friends are, everyone knows the words to Doin’ time and that’s probably because it reminds them of that one friend who was the first to get a tattoo and probably didn’t make it out alive.
Truthfully, this is mostly about me. I have definitely used Sublime as a punchline more times than I am proud to say, and I also cannot make it through a road trip without playing 40oz to Freedom (no skips).
Also, while I have been sober/XstraightXedgeX/whateveryouwanttocallit for most of my life, there have been times when I wasn’t. The first time I smoked weed, I was 13 with two other kids (and I do mean kids) who also loved Sublime. One of them went crazy, and one of them OD’d and died before high school graduation.
This is a time when you, as a writer, decide to share a very personal memory as though it is a universal lived experience and hope it resonates with the reader/listener - and are moved when it actually hits. While it’s cool when that happens, it is admittedly heartbreaking that this particular experience is one that so many of us share.
I might tell you that for a generation of kids raised by TRL and Y2K anxiety this was the soundtrack to ferrel summers spent making memories that you probably shouldn’t mention at the dinner table and definitely not in a court of law - fight songs in a war against your innocence and honestly, 20 years later, I still can’t tell you what side they were on.
I honestly think this section speaks for itself, but if you want to know anything specific about it, or anything else included in this piece please ask, I’d love to know.
In closing, I was (and still am) overwhelmed by how many people related to this video. I described what felt like my personal relationship with a band, and seeing so many people feel the same way truly makes the world feel less small and more warm at a time when we really fucking need it.
Thank you so much for your support of this series. Please let me know if there is anything you’d like me to cover going forward - I’m genuinely enjoying this.
Loving these breakdowns, and A+ playlist (was very stoked to see Aldous Harding on there).
Love this