The song resonated with the band's hometown of Long Beach, California (LBC), with familiar lyrics about the struggle of being in the working class, and utilizing local landmarks in the audio and video recordings.

[3][4] For LBC locals in the historically blue-collar industrial port city, where Nowell grew up, the metaphors of the experience resonated as a hard-times poetry, contrary to Sublime's typical straight-forward lyrics, allowing them to tout future lyrics like they were "Well Qualified to Represent the LBC" on their 1996 self-titled album.

[14][15][16][17] Bud Gaugh developed a heroin addiction around the time the song was first recorded in 1989, eventually falling into homelessness.

to Freedom and before they wrote and recorded Robbin' the Hood,[3][9][11][18] when heroin quickly became a central part of Sublime's image.

[4][11][19] Reportedly devoted to maintaining an image representative of the local culture and their music,[4] Nowell started a four-year battle with heroin in 1992.

[9][20] His widow, Troy Nowell, said he tried heroin because "it would be a cool rock-star thing to do," his father said that he wanted to be more creative and said that he needed to maintain a persona,[4] Gaugh said he argued "the needle" was safer than smoking,[9] and others have reported it was because other rock stars were doing it.

[3] Lyrics like "Tying up the dinosaur, tonight/It used to be so cool/Now I’ve got the needle/I can shake but I can’t breathe/Take it away and I want more, more/One day I’m gonna lose the war,"[19] speak directly to Nowell's use of clonidine, an opioid withdrawal medication,[8] heroin usage and withdrawals,[14][19] and his inability to give up the idea that heroin gave him a cool mystique.

to Freedom, the reviewer did not care for the album, rating it a 5.6/10 and referring to it as a "flawed artifact of [the] '90s" with "burly, beer-gut ideal masculinity", but countered it with an affection for the combination of "Badfish" and its writer and vocalist, Nowell, as a "honey-voiced" "gentle soul".

[50][51] All of the profits from the sale of the album go to the foundation, which provides addiction recovery services, and will be used to open a rehabilitation center named Bradley's House.

[52] A number of other bands have also covered the song: After "Date Rape" blew up, we went to Catalina and made a video for "Badfish".

After the success of the single "Date Rape" from 1992-1994, a song the band says they all hated, Sublime tried to get "Badfish" to catch on in its place.

[9][11] Instead of sending the cassette to local radio stations, which were playing "Date Rape" non-stop, the band decided to try soliciting MTV and set out to make a music video instead.

The setting matches the narrative and allegory of the song, referring to "big blue whale", "the reef", and swimming in the water.