You have to hand it to Sublime: it’s tricky to write an anti-rape song that ends with what amounts to a celebration of rape, but they managed to pull it off. On their 1992 debut album “40 Oz To Freedom,” Sublime gave us the extraordinarily problematic song “Date Rape.” Not only was there very little blowback but, in a testimony of just how different the 1990’s were from today, it ended up being their breakthrough radio hit.
Despite the fact it was structured like a cautionary tale, “Date Rape” was never really meant to be a “message” song. “I’ve never raped anyone at least as far as I can remember,” Bradley Nowell was careful to point out in one of the few interviews with the band’s late singer. “We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about how much date rape sucked. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad; if it wasn’t for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.”
The song’s defenders will point out that, technically, the song is about a rapist who gets his comeuppance at the end, so there’s an attempt here at a moral. Unfortunately, that comeuppance is that he’s eventually raped in prison in what’s presented as karmic justice: “Well I can’t take pity on men of his kind/ Even though he now takes it in the behind!” The implication is clear: prison rape is a fitting, emasculating and above all *hilarious* punishment. “Date Rape” is not the only example of this, prison rape was one of the go-to punchlines of the era (also see Ben Affleck’s character’s fate at the end of Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats,” which was released around this time). The band even shot a tongue-in-cheek music video with porn star Ron Jeremy in a dual role as the judge and the cellmate, if there was any doubt on that matter. The chorus invites the listener to sing along with the rapist in question and then to cheer the fact that he himself then gets raped.
Maybe the most famous person who spoke up in favor it was including Dr. Drew, who has never shied away to jump on the record for a chance to be painfully, wildly off-base: “My take on the song is that it very clearly discusses the consequences of date rape–the perpetrator ends up in jail and gets raped himself. To me, there’s a message there. It shows that date rape is not OK.” In other words, it jumped past the lowest possible bar in the fact that it wasn’t explicitly telling the audience to commit date rape.
In what seems to be a recurring theme here, the worst part of the song is that if you gave it different lyrics it would be great. It’s insanely catchy, a jaunty ska number that digs inside one’s head, even those who are (understandably) predisposed to hate the genre, and it’s one of the musical highlights of the rather sloppily uneven “40 Oz. To Freedom.” The result: the whole song nearly compels the listener to sing its chorus, which isn’t great because the chorus is “if it wasn’t for date rape, I’d never get laid.” The listener, essentially, finds himself in the shoes of the rapist himself.
Maybe Nowell would have matured with time, and “Date Rape” would have just been remembered as an ill-conceived relic of an extended adolescence. We’ll never get to know, he overdosed on heroin after the recording of the band’s self-titled follow up at the age of 28. That self-titled release, a sentimental favorite among those of us who were teenagers at the time, became a massive hit. The rest of the band has continued on in various incarnations to keep Nowell’s memory alive and/or bilk money out of several generations of fans (many of whom were not even alive at the time of his passing). As far as I’ve been able to tell, they still break out “Date Rape” on occasion. They should probably just stick with “Smoke Two Joints.”
World's Worst Songs 