If God's Good Word Goes Unspoken

Of course, being the down white boys didn’t hurt. Music critic and English professor Josh Kun, who does not consider himself an expert on the band or even a fan, says he wonders how many other bands — Mexican, black or mixed — were playing the same kind of music, but never got radio play at all. Kun does teach his UC Riverside classes their song “Waiting for My Ruca,” a serenade to a Mexican girl who sells oranges on the highway, and he acknowledges their influence: “In their music,” says Kun, “you could hear proof that in Southern California there was a vibrant Mexican culture and a vibrant black culture that these white kids were interacting with, either superficially or in real ways.”

As for Southern California post-punk, Kun prefers the Chili Peppers or Fishbone.

Gone to flowers, everyone: The late Bradley Nowell, right, with Sublime in the day.

Illustration by Pamela Jaeger

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• Bradley Nowell
• Long Beach (New York)
• Isaiah Ikey Owens
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Celebrity News

The members of Fishbone, on the other hand, count themselves as fans. They contributed the best song on Look at All the Love We Found, the latest Sublime tribute album, which includes bands as varied as the Ziggens, Los Lobos, Camper Van Beethoven and, of course, No Doubt. “They were true musicians,” says Fishbone bassist Norwood Fisher, “and one of the only popular bands that had muscle.” Anyone who dismissed them for writing catchy tunes, adds Fisher, “doesn’t know anything about what it takes to make those kinds of hit songs, not once, not twice, but over and over again.”

It takes more than just musicianship, which the band had in spades, but also a sensibility that strikes a nerve. Nowell found his in his working-class persona, one with a distinct California ZIP code. On “April 29, 1992,” he took a populist’s view of the L.A. riots, singing about mothers getting the diapers they couldn’t afford and his band getting its guitars and amps. He sang about jail time as if he’d served it, about down-and-out 12-year-old prostitutes as if he’d grown up with them in a trailer park. Never mind that he himself had grown up well off, with a family able to take him on trips to the Caribbean, pay for his music lessons and send him off to college. Then again, Bobby Zimmerman wasn’t exactly the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and it didn’t stop him from reinventing the blues.

In their own way, Bradley Nowell and Sublime were reinventing the blues as well, the way rock & roll did in the ’50s and hip-hop did in the ’80s. It was a hybrid that belonged to Long Beach, specifically, and to multiracial America in general. In “Don’t Push,” the very first Sublime song Owens heard when he was 18, Nowell chants a litany of musical influences ranging from Half-Pint to Bob Marley to Pink Floyd. He also serves up one of the closest things Sublime has to a mission statement: “The bars are always open/and the timing’s always right/and if God’s good word goes unspoken/the music goes all night.”

The music is still going; too bad Nowell’s not around to hear it.