Holding Me in Wrongful Suspicion

When you are a newly christened punk and a beginner bass player, you are immediately drawn to Matt Freeman from Rancid. His playing is given a primacy in the band that's super uncommon in most cases. Bass, being a rhythmic instrument, is generally relegated to the background in most bands, playing the difficult role of being integral to songs and provide a base (lol) for others to build upon, but having to do so subtly and from the back of the stage.  You go about learning your introductory songs, realize that pretty much every punk songs' bass parts are a simple mimicking of the rhythm guitar part and curse yourself for having committed to such a boring existence.

Then you hear how loud and extra the bassline of "Maxwell Murder" is and a new world of fast chromatic runs and bass solos is opened up to you. The paradigm is shifted.



The thing about the bass solo in "Maxwell Murder" though, if I may put on my bass elitist hat for a moment, is that it sucks. It's real showy, which is the purpose, but it's more or less atonal. Once you learn the parts that make it up, you realize that it's really just "Show-offy lick A into show-offy lick B" and so forth. The song would actually be better, and the bassline would be cooler if the solo was removed entirely. There's plenty of cool riffs in there already!

This is the unfortunate truth about Matt Freeman. In principle, he is someone for bass players to dream on: He has a distinctive sound and style which drives the band, that is at once percussive and often a key melodic element. But he is more guilty of anyone of the dreaded term overplaying. He adds too many parts to most songs and things that don't contribute anything meaningful to the song as a whole.

However, there is a smaller niche within Rancid's songbook in which Freeman is absolutely perfect and does all of his best work. That is the parts he writes for their ska and reggae songs.

In properly played ska and reggae, there is no room for over playing. The genre's rhythms live on restraint and subtlety and you need to be at your best as a bassist or the song falls apart at the seams. Freeman, who is a first ballot ska hall of Famer due to his time in Operation Ivy, knows this and I've noticed that his playing on Rancid's ska songs, of which there are many, is pulled back and not as in your face.






These are masterfully written parts and, in  my opinion, his best stuff. Writing something as free-flowing and melodic as "Time Bomb" is infinitely harder than something as fast and crazy as "Axiom".

But if he's capable of this level of playing, then why doesn't he do it all the time. It's a common paradox in music: You are capable of perfection, but only when you're not trying. Harnessing that problem in order to create good art is so hard and everyone who creates things struggles with it. In this way, Freeman and his wild, all over the fretboard playing is part of a greater narrative in music about the struggle to create things that are good and worthy. For this reason, Freeman's bass playing, from the simpler parts that appeal to me to the loud and stupid parts that appeal to me in 8th trade, is perfect.