It’s wild how your reasons for feeling guilty about an adolescent pleasure can shift so radically over the course of your life. By way of comparison, when I was a recently-baptized child in Primary, I hated driving down the Las Vegas strip because it was so self-evidently a den of sin and iniquity, of literal whoredoms and temptations of the flesh, of everything our Sunday school teachers warned against; as an adult, however, I hate Las Vegas because it is a capitalist dystopic hellscape, brazenly calculated in every detail to take away all your money and give none of it back, flagrantly wasting water in a barren desert amidst an unsustainable climate crisis, and misogynistically commodifying women’s bodies for sale. But though my reasons have shifted as I’ve aged, I still hate Las Vegas.
Likewise, as a teenager dutifully attending early-morning Seminary, I felt guilty for enjoying the music of Sublime because they used swear words in their lyrics, promoted pot-smoking (“Smoke Two Joints”, “Get Ready”) and drinking (“40 oz to Freedom”), romanticized rioting and looting (“April 26, 1992”), and sang on such un-edifying topics as “Date Rape” (even if the rapist is explicitly the villain), teen prostitution (even if it’s explicitly called the “Wrong Way”), and the devil’s own “Santeria” (even if he explicitly says he doesn’t practice it).
Nowadays however, I instead feel guilty for enjoying Sublime due to their queasy cultural appropriation of black reggae music, wherein they made little effort to honor or promote the artists from whom they stole entire lyrics, melodies, and beats—e.g. their CD liner notes give due credit to George Gershwin on “Doin’ Time”, but you have to already know your music history to know they are sampling Dandy Livingstone and The Specials at the end of “DJs”—who don’t even get a call-out on “Thanx”. He also straight-up lifted the chorus to “What I Got” from Jamaican artist Half Pint, which for middle-school me was like learning Santa Claus was my parents.
My main problem with “April 26, 1992” is no longer that the singer promotes looting by the oppressed, but that he downplays the importance of race to the Rodney King riots. My issues with “Date Rape” and “Wrong Way” are no longer the heavy subject matter itself but his flippancy towards the same (not to mention his juvenile endorsement of prison rape as a “funny” punishment). My issue with “Santeria” is no longer that he names it for an Afro-Caribbean religion (a faith as valid as anyone’s, and racist to imply otherwise), but that he associates the faith with violently smacking his ex-girlfriend and murdering the man who stole her away.
And on their biggest hit “What I Got,” my biggest objection is no longer that he drops an F-bomb on the line “I can play the guitar like a mother[…] riot,” but that he then follows that boast with the absolute simplest, most milquetoast guitar solo ever. (Likewise, the way he rhymes “love’s what I got” with “don’t start a ri-ot” is kinda cringe).
Yet still, after all these many years, Sublime remains a guilty pleasure of mine, especially in the summer time. Part of it, of course, is simple childhood nostalgia: it’s hard to deprogram yourself of your favorite music from middle-school, no matter how much more respectable your tastes become in college, no matter how much you learn your once-favorite band were largely just a knock-off of The Minutemen. Part of it, too, is that frontman Bradley Nowell really did die of a heroin overdose at age 27, and it always feels a little gauche to speak ill of the dead (at least as long as they’re not a war criminal like Kissinger, anyways). But part of it, too, is that Nowell, whatever his other personal flaws, seems to have actually absorbed the most important parts of reggae: namely, a sincere religious sensibility. “The stone that the builders refuse/have become the cornerstone” he sings on the aforementioned “DJs”; and while he was likely just quoting some of his favorite reggae artists there, nevertheless the fact remains that some bona fide, second-hand Isaiah (“Great are the words of Isaiah” said the Savior Himself) has indeed made its way onto a Sublime track.
Sublime are also the folks who sincerely covered “Rivers of Babylon,” declared “Ain’t got no quarrels with God” on “Bad Fish,” sang of the day when the prisoners shall go free (D&C 128:22) on “Jailhouse,” and could’ve been summarizing the Book of Mormon itself when they covered Bad Religion’s “We’re Only Going to Die for Our Arrogance.” Even if it was almost in spite of themselves (though who knows better than a sinner how badly they need redemption), an unmistakable religious feeling threads its way through the oeuvre of Sublime.
There is also the fact that, as cliched and derivative as “What I Got” may be, he does indeed teach true doctrine here–and even quotes Christ to the rich young man directly–when he belts out “Take all of your money, give it all to charity.” Like King Benjamin, he stipulates that we must give away our wealth freely, without precondition or price, like the Atonement itself.
Even truer doctrine, for that matter, is the song’s (again, lifted) singalong chorus of “Lovin’/Is what I got”. Nowell in the song here presents “lovin'” as the one thing that helps him endure when he’s broke, when he’s down, when he’s let down, when his own dog runs away, and etc.; Mormon takes it one step further, to note that love is the one thing that helps us endure, not just through the bad times, but just in general, in all times, period. As our own Book of Mormon pronounces, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.”
Whether Bradley Nowell was possessed of that love, or was just a frat-boy aping the sentiment from other reggae sources, one must decide for one’s self–or better yet, not decide, because it is God alone who shall judge. But in any case, no matter your own feelings on the band all these years later, the sentiment remains a true one: love is not only the one thing that helps us endure, but the only thing worth enduring–and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with them (which, as Nowell’s untimely drug-overdose reminds us, is always far sooner than we think; it is always the Last Day for someone). Lovin’ is not just what we got, but all we got: Remember that.