She’s wearing a black Sublime shirt, complete with the sun and clean white script above it. “They’re definitely one of my favorite bands,” says Nikki, a twentysomething woman walking down Pine Avenue in the East Village Arts District. Millennials and Gen-Zers can quote lyrics as easily as gnarled skankers and rockabillies. Critics who dismissed the bar ballads and soul vocals of Bradley Nowell are finally reassessing their worth. The reconstituted Sublime With Rome tours the world their back catalog continues to sell well. Two decades after the trio’s eponymous album propelled them to national recognition and quickly became a summer soundtrack for Southern California, Sublime is more popular than ever. And then the homie blurted out a common conversation opener in beach-themed dives, pretty much the official compliment of SoCal surfer and stoner bros everywhere from Menifee to Solana Beach, Baja Sharkeez to Woody’s Wharf. But the homie kept looking at a simple white shirt with a basketball-sized print of a multicolored crying sun across the chest: resplendent, oversized, a skeleton on the bridge of its nose, a devil on one cheek and a switchblade on another, a mushroom for a brain-folk art to the max. The maroon one had the band’s hometown of Long Beach written in white under the group’s name the black tee featured a round “LBC Sublime” logo in an ornate font.
Instead, one of the guys pointed at a bunch of T-shirts reppin’ Sublime. Before them was a galaxy of iconic rock-band logos on T-shirts, including the golden “W” of Wu-Tang Clan the Doors’ bubbly lowercase font a red, yellow and green headshot of Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones’ wagging tongue. The two men in front of a booth at the Body Art Expo convention in Pomona resembled homeboys straight out of American Me: black tank tops, backward baseball caps, dark-gray shorts, each heavily tattooed with black-and-gray portraits and imagery down their arms and back.
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