My boyfriend is really into punk, including Sublime. Before we started dating I would have put Sublime in C tier for music. They're fine enough- I most likely won't complain or anything if a song of theirs comes on, but not good enough to go out of my way to listen to.

At my bf's suggestion I listened to their first album last month. It was... Challenging. Aside from one exception, every single song sounded the same. Like, basically they had 1 idea for how they wanted to sound and milked it. I don't tend to care about lyrics a whole lot, but I appreciate most of the political messaging. I thinj my bf expected me to like the weed references but... Eh.

The one exception was "Date Rape", which I had definitely heard before. Musically, it differentiates itself by leaning more into swing and just sounding goofier overall. The lyrics... I felt differently about them when I waa younger. The idea of a terrible man preying upon women being sent to jail to be preyed upon himself has a certain appeal of karmic justice to it. But now that i'm older i'm just kind of disgusted by how predatory american criminal justice system is. "Don't drop the soap" humor makes light of a very serious issue, and "the for-profit prison system is the answer" doesn't have the appeal that it used to. It perpetuates the cycles of violence within our society in order to be more emotionally satisfying. The modern Norwegian prison system is IMO a much better model for creating a society with less violence in it.

Maybe some day I'll go and listen to their other few albums, but... Eh.