Never mind that Sublime weren’t great at all of those styles, or even most of them. 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. to Freedom’s only binding thread, on the other hand, was Nowell’s insatiable need to play a little bit of everything. 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. Even Steve Albini’s defunct noise project Rapeman got a nod. 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. 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. 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. That meant that all roads from Sublime’s crossover hits like “What I Got” and “Santeria” led back to their 1992 debut 40oz.
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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). 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.Īll those knockoffs proved poor substitutes for the real thing.
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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. Yet Nowell’s death left a bigger void than even his loved ones and bandmates could have imagined. “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. 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’s human nature to cling to a comforting takeaway after a tragedy.
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