“For those who have not experienced it, no words are possible. For those who
have, no words are necessary.”
—Ram Dass, Be Here Now
1- Right Back
Bradley Nowell was a searcher: an attempter and experimenter. This was true both of his music and his life. He simply did not fear consequences—the alchemical effect of a preternaturally open heart and mind, a deep-rooted impulse to push boundaries, and a complete lack of common sense. This peculiar cocktail, however, formed the basis of an inner vision that allowed him to organically mix genre, style, attitude, and lifestyle with entirely original, counterintuitive, and countercultural implications.
In the music world of the 1980s in which Brad was schooled, biographer Heidi Siegmund Cuda explains in Crazy Fool: Portrait of a Punk, it wasn’t considered cool to mix genres; and if you did, you certainly didn’t “rob the entire hood”—that is, unless you were Bradley Nowell. His creative capabilities seemed to be as much a product of who he was as where he was from: the “multi-culti maximus” Long Beach, California. “Driving down the street with your windows down,” drummer Bud Gaugh recalls, “you’d hear five different types of music down five different blocks. Latin jazz, hiphop, rock … Cal Tjader on one corner, P-Funk on the next.” And somehow this precocious, slightly awkward, yet endearingly charismatic, middle class white kid emerged as the locus in which all these disparate traditions and perspectives fused and transcended—where they became Sublime.
But while this fearlessness was Nowell’s greatest strength, it was also the tragic flaw that led to his downfall: an overdose right as he stood on the brink of greatness. Two months following his death, Sublime's major label debut was released. Originally called Killin’ It, but changed for obvious reasons, the self-titled album would spend 208 weeks on the charts and be certified five times platinum. It would also spawn one of late modernity’s most irritating, least irie subcultures: white boi stoner reggae. What separates them from their innumerable imitators, however, is a depth of character and unprogrammatic curiosity that lay just below Nowell’s bleach blonde surfer surface. Inside this unhinged punk rock persona beat the heart of a scholar: philosophy, history, anthropology, literature, religion—his literary, like his musical tastes knew no bounds. As those who know him best unanimously attest, Bradley sought nothing less than the meaning of life. The problem was he could never just take someone else’s word on something. He needed to be there himself.
A retrospective essay (and a serious one at that!) nearly three decades after Nowell’s undistinguished demise likely seems an odd prospect. As a writer for the Village Voice observed when Sublime first began burning up the charts, “If you've resisted, I understand. They're surf punks and ska boys and heroin addicts, each a reasonable ground for summary dismissal.” This is a band after all who came to national prominence by way of one of the cringiest expressions of allyship ever recorded, a song denouncing (perhaps?) “Date Rape.” Yet despite these warning signs, there is one thing, the reviewer notes, that shines through regardless of its questionable packaging: “Brad Nowell writes like he’s got life, even if he ended up wasting it.”
And why not? The Nineties are totally in right now (believe it or not, “Sublime” even just released the new song of the summer). Everywhere I go nowadays, the soundtrack of my youthful rebellions has become the soundtrack to my daily routine. The number of Doc Martens and Nirvana t-shirts I see only further confirms this. That era’s effect on our current culture, however, extends far beyond these superficial signifiers, and its true relevance is hardly remarked upon. It will likely be denied even after I convince you of it. But as Nowell’s favorite philosopher Frederich Nietzsche cautions, “Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”1 And the truth is our entire culture has become Sublime.
Turn on any radio station today (or more likely streaming channel), and you would be hard pressed to define any clear cut genre to place what you hear: country twang over hip-hop beats, electronica remixes of classical arias, rock songs implementing any and every style under the sun. There has been a complete category collapse between these formerly agonistic modes of human expression. Yet as cultural critic Justin E. H. Smith notes in a recent essay about Gen X, once upon a time, these markers were the very essence of youth culture—
The musical totemism by which postwar youth consolidated their identities through affiliation with some genre or other was as real as any other social fact. Bobby-soxers, teddy boys, mods, rockers, punks, new wavers, and metalheads were governed by no board of directors or elected representatives, but these taxa constrained our range of choices nonetheless, and defined our sense of self as fully as any professional guild or political party.
Entering the Nineties, you were either a Banger or a Yo, my older, wiser neighbor used to patiently explain to me over the embers of a dying roach. By the dawn of the new millennium, it was all about self-creation through the transgressing of these once sacred signifiers.
This blurring of musical lines, of course, was not exclusive to Sublime. The Clash and Bad Brains had previously fused punk and reggae, and Ice-T, The Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine and countless others were combining rock with rap. No one, though, had such a principled disregard for boundaries as Sublime: punk, dub, hardcore, reggae, hiphop, blues, folk, ska, surf—once even seemingly ripping off the theme to Green Acres. Nothing was off limits. However, what most distinguished them is not that they break these old battle lines, but that it is so seamless as to expose the artificial ghettoization our taxonomical addiction has forced upon the world. By donning all cultural masks, Brad removes the mask of culture, exposing the unmitigated, unadulterated, immutable truth: All is One.
When their self-titled album came out in 1996, it did not leave my stereo for nearly two years. I had never experienced anything like it in my life. There was just something so real about it. Because really, nothing says “I don’t do irony” like getting your own band name tattooed across your back in bold old English script. Somehow the lyrics manage to evoke both a precise specificity and an expansive universality. When Nowell wraps up an intimately detailed litany of complaints on the opening track “Garden Grove,” you understand exactly what he means when he tells you his “soul is unsound”—and can completely relate. Enjoying life, hanging with friends, struggling with substances, loving your dog, hating the man—all the pain, all the joy, all the anger, love, despair, hope—all the good and all the bad life contains nakedly rendered, yet delivered with unwavering good vibes.
Over the decades as I have strayed from the countercultural trappings of my youth through my own reading, thinking, living, and growing, I have made numerous bonds with other philosophically-inclined individuals over our shared love of Sublime. For me, Bradley’s untimely death will always remain one of the great tragedies of late modernity. He simply burned too bright too quick. He did not return to dust, though; his body of work has sublimed into the spirit that now infuses our entire culture. But Bradley Nowell was an end, not a beginning. As the questionable output of Sublime’s direct descendants attests, his method was less a point of departure than a creative cul-de-sac. Our indiscriminate embrace of everything has left us with nothing, and we now seem stuck endlessly mixing and remixing the past with no vision of the future. Still, a lingering question remains—How did Brad make it work?
2- The ’89 Vision
“When I was a youth in 1983 / was the best day of my life,” Nowell croons over an embellished mashup of The Wailers’ “Jailhouse” and Tenor Saw’s “Roll Call.” He then completes his rueful recollection, “Had the ’89 vision / We didn't fuss or no fight.” To listen to Sublime is to experience history. You are not simply touring fin de millenaire LBC; you are being initiated into the very roots of our world. As band manager John Phillips reveals, “Brad created his own songs from an original master’s work, but he’d put it in his own context, rap style…. He left all the clues for kids to find out about the masters that musically he wanted people to know about.” Every song is an intricately arranged edifice of nods, quotations, samplings, and straight up robberies from the entire corpus of civilization—and as Nowell’s hero KRS-One commands, You must learn.
The ’89 Vision evoked by Brad on “Jailhouse” is a perfect case in point. In his typical fashion, he takes the original idea (a movement begun by KRS preaching unity and love in the black community) and remixes it, offering it up as both personal prophecy and breadcrumb trail to his Teacha—a moniker KRS had assumed that same year. Despite his group Boogie Down Productions’ debut Criminal Minded being considered one of the first gangsta rap albums, after the murder of their DJ Scott La Rock, followed by a fan at one of their concerts, KRS had a change in perspective. He renounced petty gang rivalry and violence, and sought instead to elevate the socio-political consciousness of his brothers-in-arms. Nevertheless, one of his most studious pupils was the white Bradley Nowell. As he effuses in his tribute closing Sublime's debut 40oz to Freedom, “And I know because of KRS-One.” Yet likely neither of them knew the full significance of the vision to which they had committed themselves.
“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama muses in a now infamous 1989 essay, “it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” Although it would be another few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and two years until the hammer and sickle lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, the spirit of a new era, he felt, was already evident. Fukuyama, an unusually philosophic poli-sci practitioner, sought to place the dawning consciousness of these events into a larger context of historical meaning. His Neo-Hegelian analysis:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Contrary to prevailing postmodern protestations against “grand narratives,” he declares that history is not just one damn thing after another; its movement has a knowable structure, direction, perhaps even telos—and we have arrived. With the self-destruction of liberalism’s final ideological competitor, there was no more reason to “fuss or no fight.”
WHEN I WAS A YOUTH in 1998, I wrote an essay for a high school English assignment about the dual deaths of Bradley Nowell and Kurt Cobain titled “The End of Great Music.” In my
angsty adolescent estimation, it was all over—at least according to how I defined greatness at that stage of my life, which is to say—counterculturally. I would, of course, go on to discover many subsequent bands that moved me, and even tried my own hand at rockstardom, but from a world-historical perspective, it would seem my intuition was correct.
With the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in ‘91, pop culture connoisseur Chuck Klosterman affirms in The Nineties: A Book, “Rock music had reached its logical conclusion—not as a genre, but as the pivotal force propelling youth culture … end[ing] the dominance of rock as an ideology.”2 But to follow Fukuyama’s example and place this event in a larger historical context, Cobain’s mainstreaming of punk rock pathos brought something much more consequential than rock music’s sway over postwar youth culture to a close. It ended the very animating spirit of modernity: the quarrel begun by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1750 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts between bourgeois capitalism and bohemian vibes. Liberalism, it appeared, had not only vanquished its political opponents, but won its battle for the very soul of Western civilization.
This final historical act, however, was less an overcoming of romanticism by rationalism than its sublation. As documented by Neocon turned Neo-dealer David Brooks in his 2000 study Bobos in Paradise, the bourgeois hadn’t so much defeated bohemia as appropriated it. After a mid-decade stint in Europe, Brooks came back to find an unusual new trend amongst his generational peers:
Most people, at least among the college educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations, and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos.3
The “Bobo” of Brooks’ title is shorthand for Bourgeois Bohemian—the name he gives to the new meritocratic elite that emerged during the Nineties to displace America’s hereditary WASP ruling class.
Bobos are something entirely novel in the modern world: the synthesis in a single lifestyle of what were once seen as fundamentally opposing types—the businessman and the artist. For the End of History to function properly, a new style of ruling class was needed to manage the new borderless movement of ideas, individuals, and capital. The open, “on the road” bohemian spirit was the perfect solvent for dissolving any lingering parochialism that had inhibited the old elite from fully embracing the bourgeois mindset. With the fusion of bourgeois and bohemian, the categories of outsider and insider collapsed—and with them, the basis of categories as such. The ’89 Vision of universal unity was becoming reality.
Yet at the conclusion of Fukuyama’s essay, the soon-to-be signer of The Project for the New American Century makes a startling confession: “The end of history will be a very sad time.” Absent meaningful struggle, much of what constitutes our species’ particular dignity and greatness will no longer be available. All that will be left for human activity and creativity, he laments, is the mere “endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” As Nietzsche had predicted over a century earlier in his anti-Hegelian diatribe, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” this lowering of the human horizon would bring on a pervasive mood of “irony” and “cynicism”4—two words indelibly linked with artists in the 1990s. Yet nothing could be further from the spirit that animated Sublime. Something seemed to exempt them from the logic of History.
3- New Realization
As a freshman finance major at University of California, Santa Cruz, Nowell was required to take a year-long seminar exploring classics of Western civilization. Beginning with The Iliad and ending with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the program was designed to introduce students to the complexities of the civilization of which they were inextricably a part. Brad absolutely loved the experience, and it was here that he was first introduced to the works of Nietzsche. What drew him to the proto-punk philosopher, college roommate MC Naitch would later speculate, was the “shock value” of Nietzsche’s ideas, especially in the context of a 19th century Europe enamored with the ideology of progress. These ideas, of course, would have been equally as shocking on what Naitch describes as the “very far left wing” 20th century USC campus—which Nowell, the consummate punk rock rebel, reveled in. This was basically “the story of his life,” he reckons: “testing the generally accepted assumptions of society.” Brad seemed to be a man caught between two modes, incapable of deciding where to plant his flag. Though he was passionately drawn to the tradition, the bohemian part of his soul couldn’t help being seduced by the siren song of Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go! then flooding the SoCal airwaves.
“Unlike many kids,” his father Jim recounts in Crazy Fool, “Brad actually went to college to learn.” From his days in a youth program for those with IQs 142 and above, to forcing his way into an upper level Chaucer course during his first semester, to the “Brad Nowell book of the month club” (“borrowing” a book from someone’s shelf who let them crash at their pad while on tour, reading it, then passing it along at a later stop), Brad’s desire for knowledge was capacious and voracious. “He was just so freakin' smart,” their manager recalls, “always watching the History Channel, reading Kerouac, Burroughs, Henry Miller, tons of history books, religion, philosophy. He read everything—Mein Kampf, the history of Australia, Greek mythology.” Yet nothing seemed able to satisfy his search for meaning. As his father concludes, “At college, he was asking all the questions but nobody had any answers. He decided there are no answers.” So following Nietzsche, Brad decided he would create his own.
Back in ’89 when Sublime started doing shows, promoters did not know what to do with their all-embracing style and refused to book them. For those in the now well-established business of rock music, it was inconceivable for a band not to conform to some preprogrammed genre. So instead Sublime spread their gospel at ghetto house parties out beyond the reach of bourgeois propriety. Underground, the legitimacy of inherited categories had been collapsing throughout the postwar period and was coming to be the very definition of cool. The essence of this movement was articulated by self-proclaimed “Philosopher of Hip” Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” The West was heading for a dead end, he exclaimed. The only way it could be saved was for disaffected white youths to embrace the lifestyle of black jazz musicians. If there was any hope of avoiding a totalitarian future of bourgeois rationality and repression, Western Civ must be renounced wholesale and replaced by the free flowing naturalism still subsisting on the fringes of society.
The year following Nevermind’s release, this ideology would go mainstream with the election of the first black leader of the free world—a white man named William Jefferson Clinton from Hope, Arkansas who the GOP viewed as the very embodiment of bohemian relativism. The periphery had become the center of American life. But as E. H. Smith observes, mass self-expression also brought on new forms of oppression. While in communist East Germany one’s subculture affiliation was employed by the secret police to assess threat levels to the regime (skinheads had “partly neofascist tendencies,” punks were known by their “criminal conduct and asocial lifestyle,” goths, of course, possessed “total political and social disinterest”), in capitalist America, they were used to segment and target consumer groups, as a Disneyfied representation of countercultural transgression was packaged up and distributed for mass consumption. Overwhelmed by the all-encompassing forces of neo-liberalism, irony, ambivalence, and cynicism became the youth’s only refuse.
As Nietzsche liked to point out, there is no easier way to undermine something’s legitimacy than through comedy.5 In a last ditch attempt at self-defense, the very concept of fashion was turned into a joke in the Nineties. Thrift stores were raided, and the cutting edge of youth style became the absurd layering of whatever could be salvaged from the bargain bin of history. Alternatively, black hiphop artists began appropriating preppy brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Polo and the white working-class Timberland, which further unraveled narratives linking particular modes and values to certain identities. As Sara Tatyana Bernstein notes in Dismantle Magazine, “By mixing and matching all of these pieces from different times in history, and by confusing gender, sexuality, class, etc. codes, we were enacting the breakdown of progress narratives that fuel American mythology.” But with the sublation of bohemia by the bourgeois, a move from socioeconomic to identity-based struggle was, in fact, the next dialectical step forward. While this focus on style over direct social engagement led to the caricature of Gen X as apolitical slackers, as Hegel and Fukuyama argue, there is no greater political act than “the struggle for the universal recognition of rights.” What began as a revolt against the divine right of kings became a fight for the right of men to be queens.
THIS REJECTION OF ALL categories and narratives, what Klosterman calls “the context of no context,” is generally referred to as “postmodernism” and is seen as a progression beyond the worldview that had been guiding the West since the Enlightenment. Modernity, as this tale goes, was defined by scientific objectivity enacted socially through bureaucracy; or as Hegel summarized, the attempt to make “the rational real, and the real rational.” But, if we permit ourselves to speak in such terms, this is only the exoteric face of modernity, masking a hidden core. The truth is, like the First Gulf War—postmodernism did not take place.
The essence of this supposed alternative to enlightened objectivity can be summed up in the phrase, “Everything is a social construct”—not only values, but our knowledge of nature. Yet if, like Nowell in his freshman classics seminar, you were to actually traverse the history of Western civilization yourself, a much different picture comes into view. What you would find is that many of the ideas espoused by modernity’s foundational authors actually appear quite contemporary. Whether it is the forefathers of liberalism Hobbes and Locke claiming that good and evil are mere opinions6 and that we are born tabula rasa.7 Or perhaps Hume’s contention that cause and effect are but convenient fictions humans have created to better live and act in the world.8 And don’t even get me started on Kant! But if one were to go even further back to the thinker generally credited as the first modern, we find a call for “effectual truth”9 over metaphysical certainty that inspired his followers to chop off Aristotle’s head—which is to say, to deny that meaning and purpose are inherent in the nature of things. In light of such revelations, the so-called “postmodern” dissolution that infiltrated mass culture in the Nineties seems less like the end of the world as we know it than its logical conclusion.
In the summer of 1999, as we sat around waiting for an unforeseen computer glitch to bring down civilization, eighteen-year-old college dropout Shawn Fanning released the first iteration of a digital song-sharing program called Napster (a reference to the white Fanning’s “nappy” dreads he had in high school). Perhaps this platform’s greatest innovation: everything was free. Before the advent of Napster, music consumption involved an unavoidable cost-benefit analysis. You walked through the doors of a Sam Goody with $20 in your hand, you walked out with one album, and maybe a hot new single, in exchange. Music was an investment, but moreover a signifier of who you were and what you valued. “Browsing through someone’s album collection,” Klosterman reminisces, “was a low-level Rorschach test. Limitations and scarcity made subjective distinctions meaningful.”10 But in the brave new world made possible by Napster, such choices were no longer necessary. Anyone and everyone could now be into anything and everything. The de-materialization of music made it possible to access any song ever recorded throughout all of human history without even leaving one’s front door.
“Brad was never all in on anything,” producer Miguel Happoldt laughingly recounts. “You’d ask him if he liked an artist, and he’d just be like, ‘I like that one tune.’” Brad might not have been a Deadhead, but he loved “Scarlet Begonias;” he was no opera aficionado, but he would bump Gershwin’s “Summertime.” As Nowell would joke to Happoldt, “That’s what the future is!” And indeed in the new millennium, post-genre musical engagement has become the norm. In an ironic twist of historical fate, the apotheosis of bourgeois rationalism (the internet) brought bohemian openness to the masses. As the basic elements of Fanning’s illegal streaming mechanism were appropriated by corporate interests, the unified artistic vision of the album was replaced by the personal playlist. This in turn eliminated the stark categorization of individuals based on collective musical commitments. There are no more boxes left outside of which it is possible to think. Difference simply is now. From a certain perspective, this could be seen as a positive development—it has revealed the fact that no set of abstractions can fully capture the multitudes each of us contain. Yet this relentless project of deconstruction has left us at a cultural impasse: the end of history as we know it.
4- Roots of Creation
“I don’t know, I’m just not happy anymore,” Nowell confessed one day to drummer Bud Gaugh while recording their second album Robbin’ the Hood at Brad’s “Secret Tweaker Pad” (his nickname for the crackhouse he was then living in). Something seemed to be eating away at him that he just couldn’t put his finger on. All he knew was that he wanted it to go away. “He looked to get rid of that feeling with drugs,” Bud surmises. Despite his boundless proclivity for partying, Brad had always refused to try heroin. But as two seemingly contradictory movements came together in his life, he finally gave in: The more knowledge he acquired, the more disillusioned he became; and the more success his music attained, the more he felt the need to embody the rockstar persona—which in the Nineties meant the needle.
As his wife Troy, married only seven days before his overdose, relates, “Brad could never give up the illusion that heroin was indelibly cool.” He unquestioningly bought into the myth of the artist addict, believing that opiates fuel creativity by opening us up to new levels of reality. Brad also saw himself as a sort of superman. Mention others who had ODed and he’d dismiss them as stupid and weak, whereas he was strong and smart—even while shitting his pants from five clonodine patches in yet another failed attempt to stay clean. The countercultural mystique surrounding opiates has a long pedigree stretching back at least to the romantics through the jazz clubs of the 1940s and writers like Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. But by ’96, it had become almost an artistic necessity, with Spin declaring heroin “Ugly Trend of the Year.” Something cataclysmic seems to have occurred that was inducing rock musicians to seek escape—upward into the sublime; downward into oblivion.
As Brad entered the university in 1988, an unexpected bestselling indictment of higher education by Fukuyama’s mentor Allan Bloom was stirring up controversy throughout the nation. Called The Closing of the American Mind, and dubbed “the first shot in the culture war,” its author charged that the university’s embrace of “postmodern” openness was resulting in the closing of its pupils’ minds—closing them, that is, to the possibility of uncovering real meaning. In the second section of the book, we are given a brief, but synoptic intellectual history of the postwar university, which Bloom describes as “Nihilism (American Style)”—i.e. nihilism with a smiley face. The tale he unfolds is essentially of the university’s gradual takeover by bohemian category rejection and the resulting relativism he found pervasive amongst his students. However, unlike his GOP boosters, “It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling,” he confesses. What most disturbed him was “the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives.”11 For how is one to live in the knowledge that ultimately nothing is anything?
As a counterculture, the project of deconstruction could make for a life of exciting—and seemingly meaningful—rebellion, transgression, and experimentation. It has never been clear, however, how this ideology could ever rebuild on the ruins it creates. With the realization of the ’89 Vision, there were no more monsters to fight and the opposition party found itself in the seats of power. But the End of History had not brought about the promised overthrow of the bourgeoisie, it had just made them slightly less revolting. For those who could not sustain themselves on the noxious fumes of irony and cynicism, heroin supplied an alternative exit strategy.
This situation would have been even more intolerable for someone like Nowell, whose constant immersion in other times and places had revealed to him the true meaning of the différance his contemporaries were always blathering on about. “Someone who embraces heroin that much,” band manager John Phillips theorizes, “would've had to have embraced life equally as much.” Brad’s personal disregard for genre, though, was never guided by a desire for deconstruction, but re-creation. He didn’t need categories because he was hooked directly into the main vein of life.
WHEN IT CAME TIME to choose a band name, Brad the bookworm naturally reached for a dictionary in the expectation that something worthy would reveal itself. Their selection is an intriguing one for at least two reasons: first, because of its philosophic pedigree—there are countless treatises speculating on the nature of the sublime; secondly, as an elevated form of hiphop braggadocio: we are the most excellent, grand, beautiful—we are Sublime. And indeed, I can think of few other instances where signifier and signified so closely align. Likewise, the name of this essay (“At the End of History, Everything is Sublime”) has a dual meaning. There is of course the parallel between the band’s rejection of categories and our own; but I also have in mind, its dictionary definition of “exalted” or “elevated.”
Simply by virtue of our later historical position, we liberals see ourselves as necessarily possessing greater knowledge than our benighted forebears, thus feel justified to look down upon the past from our supposedly sublime position. We possess a truth they did not—there is no Truth. Consequently, we see ourselves as more just than our ancestors (Epistemological modesty as moral superiority). Yet, for all our supposed openness, a band like Sublime could not exist today—for the same reason that made them great: Brad was just too good at what he did.
As has been revealed by the ever-expanding list of identifiers employed today, it seems impossible for us humans to simply exist without giving an account of ourselves. In a last ditch effort to escape the logic of History, new walls are being erected in an attempt to stop its oppressive determinism. But the ramshackle barricades constructed from whatever we happen to find at hand in the bargain bin of history will never be strong enough to hold back its flow. As Fukuyama shows, these calls for recognition only further the logic of liberalism by further expanding and universalizing its base. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Nor can politics rescue us from the abyss. Today’s agitations are only a minor speed bump on what Nietzsche’s opponent David Strauss acclaimed “the universal highway of the future.”12
By today’s standards, it would be considered unseemly for a middle class white boy to embrace hiphop and island culture as unabashedly as Brad did. Yet despite having discovered ska and reggae while on vacation as a young lad in the Virgin Islands, Brad was no tourist. He had genuine respect and adoration for every note, phrase, nuance, and attitude he sampled and remixed. It was not some politicized and neutered multiculturalism that led him to embrace these other traditions and perspectives, but his fervent love of life in all its manifold splendor. Brad really is one of the most unlikely geniuses the Muses have ever produced. As ex-girlfriend Cat Rodriguez testifies in Crazy Fool, “You don't really hear that many singers who have it coming straight from their soul, but you could actually see it in him. You could tell he was so into it, and he wanted you to feel it too. The music was real, and people responded to it.” It is as simple as that.
AFTER SHOWS, Nowell would always sit-down on the edge of the stage and chat with whoever was still hanging around. “He was intrigued with human nature,” Bud recollects wistfully. “He loved people. He wanted to know what made people click.” It was this longing that also drove his voracious consumption of history and ideas. But as Bud concludes, “There wasn’t enough life in the world for him. He was always searching for more.” If I wanted to play the ideologue, I would blame this all on his uncritical embrace of modern decadence and relativism. “If only he had stayed true to the tradition he so clearly loved,” I’d intone, “all would have been sunshine and rainbows.” But I don’t actually believe that—and neither would you.
Brad’s reluctance to commit to any one way of life could just as easily have been fallout from his parent’s divorce, or revulsion at his mother’s Christian fundamentalism, or the early childhood Ritalin he blamed for his addictions, or his father’s womanizing and partying, or latent white guilt because of his cushy middle class conditions as it was a product of larger historical forces. In the end, it is impossible to know what truly makes someone who they are. Why did he feel such an indomitable desire to do heroin: escape, empowerment, pleasure, pain, transcendence? Likely, all of the above. Each of us are an irreducible confluence of personal psychology, biography, history, chance, and fortuna. There are no easy answers to such questions. There are unfortunately no easy answers to any of life’s most vital questions.
Philosophy (i.e. the asking of such questions) is said to have originated when a distinction was first made between what is natural, on the one hand, and what is conventional or manmade, on the other—what the ancient Greeks called physis and nomos. Once upon a time, the tradition tells us, some individual wandering about the Mediterranean world began wondering why, despite all being of the same species and fundamentally similar in nature, we humans have devised so many differing and contradictory beliefs and ways of life: some drive on the right side of the road, others on the left; some value honor, others value money; some bury their dead, others eat them; some believe the world to be six thousand years old, others eternal. In a similar fashion, I first became interested in philosophy through punk rock’s bohemian questioning of bourgeois norms. From the moment those dissonant downbeats invaded my consciousness, all the values and categories I had inherited became suspect. In the footsteps of this first philosopher, I too was forced to directly confront the question how ought I to live?
The Greek word nomos is instructive because in addition to meaning “law” or “convention,” it also means song. The makers of that language seem to have intuited some hidden analogue between these outwardly unrelated phenomenon. Perhaps in part the connection they saw is how both unify us in something larger than ourselves: whereas shared conventions transform an unruly collective into a community, music has the power to dissolve our individuality in some sort of higher unity. But though there is undoubtedly something universal and primordial in humans that music taps into, songs—like laws—also separate us into distinct groups. Whether it be national anthems, fight songs, folk songs, or genres, music delineates as much as it unites. We seem forever stuck in this in-between, participating both in our universal nature, but requiring the comfort and confidence given by a particular way of life. If the End of History means anything, it is not the resolution of this conflict, but the laying of responsibility for learning how to navigate this discrepancy upon each of our shoulders.
There seems to be something both perverse and completely apropos about rock music being the source of my alienation from bourgeois emptiness and induction into the roots of creation. While I do agree with the modern chauvinist that our age is undeniably different than all that preceded it, I deny its supposedly sublime character. Our dismantling of all intelligible, articulable forms is not progress—it is anti-human and it is anti-life. But perhaps Bradley, ironically enough, can help illuminate a path for us to recovery and rehabilitation. If we do in fact seek a true postmodernism, we must find a way to write new nomoi together: new laws and new songs that regenerate rather than destroy. To realize this, I believe we must be willing to re-open ourselves to whatever it is that Brad had access. But just as instructive are his songs. Each is a masterclass on how to unite precision with playfulness, strength with weakness, mastery with freedom, intention with chaos. And what else is life beside the seemingly impossible attempt to do just this?
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 161.
Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book, (Penguin Press, 2022), 41.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upperclass and How They Got There, (Simon and Schuster 2000), 10.
Nietzsche, 83.
cf. The Gay Science, 1
cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan VI
cf. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.1.2
cf. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 4
Machiavelli, The Prince, 15
Klosterman, 156
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, (Simon and Schuster 1987), 239
Nietzsche, 15