A decade of unsightly sun tattoos has passed

I got ahold of a copy of the new Sublime reissue of their self-titled record. I have to say, any appreciator of the mid-90’s skatepunk / ska / reggae influenced music who doesn’t enjoy this is simply lying to themselves. Or they’re still pretending they’re 15 and don’t want to have the “cool kids” listening to their music.

It’s odd when a truly great album gains some sort of traction in the mainstream, coming up from the underground. The majority of the time, for various reasons, it seems as if an “underground” band’s major label debut falls short of the mark for old fans. Maybe this was true for Sublime, as I can’t say I had heard the band aside from a clip of “Date Rape” on 120 Minutes, but as someone who not only appreciates, but idolizes, their whole full length catalog, it’s obvious that their break into the mainstream was nothing short of a culmination of their sound up to that point. They took the rawness of 40oz to Freedom and cleaned it up without taking away the interesting mix of southern California surf/punk/reggae culture that made them so interesting.

As for this 10th anniversary edition: has it really been that long? The glut of mildly inappropriate “Bradley Nowell taking a Twosy” demo tapes that were released after his death definitely seemed to take the chutzpah out of the album. I remember hearing Secondhand Smoke and being mildly uninterested; the same applies to the Long Beach Dub Allstars. Here’s a tip: don’t get a new singer that does imitations of your dearly departed former singer/bandmate/creative visionary in his free time. It makes you look like a group of hacks. This edition of the album sounds good, although the extra tracks and re-sequencing seems…confusing? I’m not sure why they felt the need to take an album that actually felt like a document of a band, rather than simply a collection of tracks waiting to become singles, and confuse the old fans while adding nothing new. The big bonus seems to be the second CD, consisting of a metric ass-ton of remixes of “Doin’ Time.” And while I love all these mixes (as they have been available for many years on CD singles), who really wants to hear the same damn song slightly (or even not so slightly) tweaked five times in a row? Not me, that’s for sure.

I guess in the end, I’m not sure why this CD exists. In the 10 years since Sublime’s tragic rise, the music scene has shifted both in the mainstream and the underground; gone from both venues are bands with a sense of connection to a rhythmic, socially aware dance music, eschewing upstroke guitars and insightful lyrics for double-bass drum hits and screaming misogynistic poetry that an 8th grader would be ashamed of. I don’t foresee this capturing many new fans in this climate. The extra CD is fun, but aside from replacing the copies that have been stolen, broken or worn out on drives around the country, I can’t see a good reason for myself or many others to repurchase this.

Hopefully the upcoming rarities box set will prove to be a better eulogy for the band.