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Sublime 40 oz. to Freedom, 1992
Part 2 of "Man the Early 90's Were Filthy, Huh?" is the debut album from polygenre band Sublime. There are some truly explicit things going on on this album and I will now confess that I was listening to it for almost the entirety of a family trip in roughly 2000 or 2001 and reveling in the taboo content. My mom would have COLLAPSED if she'd heard what was going into my ears. And sometimes that's the best way to forge a lifelong love for an album :)
I think of my favorite things about 40 oz to Freedom is that it feels like it was loosely and casually put together by EXPERTS. There's a lot of playing around and silliness, but you can tell that, at the end of the day, these guys know what they're doing and they'll take the song and album exactly where they need to be.
From "Waiting for My Ruca" all the way through "Rivers of Babylon" (I don't always listen to the Thank You track. I'll admit it) you're on a roller coaster of genre shifting and partying and drugs and fun times. The album has (let me count) 6 covers. The Toyes (a little known Portland (I think) reggae band), Bad Religion, Toots and the Maytals, the Grateful Dead, Descendents, and the Melodians are all on the covers list. You could almost count the Specials, too, since "Message to You Rudie" is heavily represented on "D.J.s"
And they do it all with ease. This is what I would want to be able to do if I ever started a band: Be incredibly knowledgable about a wide range of music and be able to incorporate it all into the music that my band made.
Sure, Sublime made catchier songs/albums, but, for me, it never gets better than their first album when they were just hopping from sound to sound to sound and having a great time.
I'm going to try to cover as much of the range of sounds that are on this album with the video and featured tracks, so here we go.
I actually had found another sample video for this album like the one I had for Paul's Boutique, but, in my opinion, it wasn't as strong or comprehensive, so I nixed it.
Sublime - Don't Push
Sublime - New Thrash
Sublime - KRS-One
3 comments:
Scarlet Begonias is still one of my all time favorite tracks. Excellent album all around.
Completely agree. If I could be guaranteed that I would enjoy all Grateful Dead songs as much as I enjoy Sublime's rendition of it here, I would likely be a huge deadhead
It was five years after first hearing the sublime version before I found out it was a dead cover.
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