Lost in Translation Vol. 17 REVEALED
For the second week in a row a midweek hint helped one of our readers find the correct answer.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there; whether you’re a father by blood or by choice, I hope you’ve had (or are having) a wonderful day. And if you’ve been able to spend all or part of the day enjoying time with family, all the better! I’ve been trying to think of the last time that I didn’t see my father in person on Father’s Day and I’m not sure it’s ever actually happened. Until today. While I’ll be talking to “Pops” later, it certainly won’t be the same as enjoying a meal together on the day as we normally would. Obviously there will be more of these missed family events over the course of this first transitional year and I suppose that’s one of the big adjustments that comes with a relocation. As I look out my office window onto a gray and dreary day, I’m feeling somewhat melancholy and finding myself a little more reflective than usual.
While I’m grateful for my current relationship with my father, it’s taken a fair bit of work from both of us to get to where we are today. As is often the case between fathers and sons, our relationship has had its challenges over the years. For a variety of reasons, when I was a kid I never felt good enough for my dad. Much of this came down to the fact that I was always getting in trouble at school; my undiagnosed ADHD caused an awful lot of havoc, both for me and my classmates and teachers. Invariably my dad would ask why I’d done something ridiculous in school, a question for which I could rarely produce a good answer. Whatever excuse I conjured up, his response was almost always the same: “Well that’s not good enough!” It didn’t take long for me to feel that it was me who wasn’t good enough. I also learned early on that the consequences for my misbehavior would be less severe if I communicated my misdeeds through my mom. The result—something only gleaned during years of therapy—was that I learned not to speak directly with my dad, instead opting for a triangular communication that leveraged my mom as the mediator.
As I began to self-medicate my ADHD and my low self-esteem with alcohol and drugs in my early teens, my relationship with my father deteriorated further. While I don’t believe he ever truly gave up on me, I know that eventually he was “done” with me and my behavior and the impact it was having on my mom and my sister. At the end, before I hit my rock bottom and got sober, I know that my mom was the only thing between me having a place to stay and being out on the street. Thankfully, I did finally hit bottom, reached out for help, and managed to get sober. After a year or two of working on one one with an addictions counselor in early sobriety, we moved on to family therapy and began to repair the individual relationships and fix the family dynamics.
Back in my late teens and early twenties, I had felt so distant from my father. As our relationship was approaching its nadir, I remember feeling so judged and so misunderstood. During this time I felt a strong connection with the Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam song “Father and Son”, particularly when he sang:
How can I try to explain?
When I do he turns away again
It’s always been the same
Same old story
From the moment I could talk
I was ordered to listen, now there’s a way
And I know that I have to go away
Looking back now I can recognize that most of those feelings had no basis in reality. They were the selfish and self-centered musings of an arrogant and immature young man, someone who had received so much yet given so little in return.
Thankfully, by my mid twenties, when I was a couple of years into sobriety, and the family counseling was beginning to bear fruit, things did improve between me and my dad; but even then our relationship still felt stilted and awkward. Much of this was down to my inability to let go of the the past; my father, for his part, had done so much work in closing the gulf between us. Ultimately, it took my participation in a week-long personal growth residential retreat—The Hoffman Process—in November 2010 for me to get to a place where I could begin to move our relationship forward. I returned from that experience a completely changed human being, willing to embark on a journey that would finally heal all of the rifts from our past and allow us to move forward on an equal basis as two adult men. That journey culminated when I surprised my dad with a father-son trip to New York City during which we took in a few Broadway shows and watched the NY Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. We grew so close over those few days and my dad later shared with me that he’d remember that long weekend as one of the fondest memories of his entire life.
For the last fifteen years I’ve had the privilege of having a fulfilling and rewarding relationship with my Dad. It’s such a gift to know that there remains nothing unsaid or unresolved between us and that, although we won’t be together in person today, we’ll at least have the opportunity to share a bit of quality time together on video chat.
Update: shortly after talking with my Dad earlier today, he WhatsApp’d me this photo from that weekend in NYC along with the message “Remember when? 🤗🤗🥰”:
Not surprising on this first Father’s Day apart that both of our memories drifted back to that special weekend.
And now what you’ve been waiting for! It’s time to provide the answer to Monday’s Lost in Translation.
The Translated Lyric
Here’s the lyric I provided:
It's up to you, you deserve it and you will get it.
Try it, you will get excellent service.
Love is everything to me, don't exaggerate.
I get excited when the dance sounds.
The Original Lyric
And here’s the original lyric as it was before being passed through half a dozen languages:
It all comes back to you, you're bound to get what you deserve
Try and test that, you're bound to get served
Love's what I got, don't start a riot
You'll feel it when the dance gets hot
Are you enjoying Joy in the Journey? Why not hit the button above to automagically receive new posts in your inbox every time I publish!
The Song
I was particularly cagey when introducing this week’s song, writing that “We’re heading to the late 90s for this week’s song, a track that performed well on the alternative rock charts in North America while becoming the band’s biggest radio hit.” I purposely left the genre quite vague, going with the ever-elusive and all-encompassing “alternative” moniker. I’m pretty sure that if I’d narrowed the genre down on day one we’d have had an answer in fairly short order. On Thursday, I added the following hint on Notes: “The album on which this week’s song appeared was one of a handful of albums from within the ska (or ska-adjacent) genre that made an appearance on the Billboard 200 album chart in the second half of the 90s.” While this significantly narrowed down the musical universe, it still left multiple artists (Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Rancid, Goldfinger, No Doubt, Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris, Less Than Jake) for readers to choose from.
It was long-time reader Kristin DeMarr, author of the All the Things She Said Substack, who popped into the comments with the correct artist and a couple song choices. And not much later she was back with both the correct song and the original lyric. Kristin has been so close to being the first in with the correct answer a couple times on prior LIT installments and it was fun to see her pull this one out of the hat!
For those that didn’t see the responses in the comments or weren’t able to figure out the correct song, the lyrics come from the Sublime track “What I Got”, from their self-titled third album released in 1996. To me, the story of Sublime has always been a sad case of a band realizing their massive potential at the very moment that their future as a band had already been demolished. After building a loyal local and regional following on the back of their first album, 40oz to Freedom (1992), the band took a step backwards on the commercially unsuccessful Robbin’ The Hood (1994). But between February and May 1996 Sublime managed to capture lightning in a bottle during the recording sessions for the self-titled third album, their major label debut on MCA Records. But less than two months before the album’s release, lead singer Bradley Nowell was found dead of a heroin overdose in the Ocean View Motel in San Francisco. He was 28 years old.
Despite the inability of the band to tour the album, it became enormously successful on the back of numerous hit singles. The album peaked at number 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart and attained 5x platinum certification in the US. Both Spin and Rolling Stone included the album on their lists of top albums from the nineties, at number 48 and 25 respectively. With Nowell’s death it was all over for the band. Their manager was quoted as saying that the surviving members had no interest in continuing to record under the Sublime name: “Just like Nirvana, Sublime died when Brad died”. Recently, however, Sublime has begun performing again, with Nowell’s son Jakob on lead vocals, and there are reports of a new album in the works with production by Blink-182’s Travis Barker. The first single is expected later this summer.
Here’s the music video, cued up at the start of the lyric:
Feel free to jump into the comments with your thoughts:
How did you do? Were you close? Or completely stumped?
Did you know this song already?
Would you have been able to name the song from the original lyrics?
We’ll see you again tomorrow with a new installment of Lost in Translation. Until then, happy listening!!
This was beautiful. As someone who is feel a bit distant from his own family of origin today, I was happy to read it and know that there is hope.
What a lovely post Mark. A much appreciated read. C