SKA FRIDAY!

It’s Over - The Planets Smashers

If Southern California Ska is SNL, then Montreal is SCTV.

SKA FRIDAY

Hello, Goodnight - The Aquabats

As the horns begin to mute and the upbeats dissolve out forever, 2011 fades away into the foggy haze of future nostalgia, of what significance depends on how far the individual in question was with their education when Catch-22’s Keasbey Nights was released, and/or discovered. I’ll let the lyrics speak for me on this one.

Ska Friday #9 Skankin’ Pickle - Fakin’ Jamaican

In the vast catalog of ska hits, you’ll find that the most well-received contemporary songs are of a lighter tone than their socially conscious, sometimes politically charged brethren. A ska show is usually happy place where somewhat-nerdier teens wearing checkerboard socks and dudes in suits can skank with their buddies and make a new friend over a great trombone solo. Take for example, Fakin’ Jamaican, a fun, tongue in cheek song about one of the undeniable truths of ska music: we all wish were Jamaican. I like this song a lot because it addresses my mortal enemy: the white guy with dreadlocks.

But, with music comes social circles; a micro-environment of turbulent opinions and etiquette, dogma and pressure. Music will always be for the youth, and at times when we were the most confused or unsure of ourselves, we always looked to our heroes for guidance. As easy as it is to sing about beer, it’s rewarding to send a positive message to people in need. Admittedly, I did choose this song over a few great songs because it was funny, but you can’t hit skip at a show!

One thing I do really like about Skankin’ Pickle was their strong balance of fun songs and community responsibility. Shows were always all ages. Albums were always fiercely independent and low priced. Saxaphonist-turned-frontman, Mike Park, would later start Asian Man Records and run the Ska Against Racism Tour and The Plea for Peace Foundation, a non-profit organization that hopes to promote peace through music and art.

So next time you think about how Reel Big Fish are a bunch of jobless assholes with gnarly sideburns, remember: not everyone in ska is a douche nozzle.

SKA FRIDAY #6 The Prague Ska Conspiricy - Life on the Ropes

For some people, ska will always mean one thing: nostalgia. If you’ve read the past few Ska Fridays, it’s been pretty evident I am reminiscing. Skanking at 23 is much harder, both physically and socially. Ever get a black eye by accident from a 17 year-old? Shit sucks.

Well, fuck it, and fuck you! No more looking back. No time like the present, baby! Here is a crazy ska band I found out about only a few months ago, completely by accident—The Prague Ska Conspiracy.

The Prague Ska Conspiracy is exactly what it sounds like, a ska band, from Prague, with an element of mystery, but I don’t think their enigmatic qualities are on purpose as much as they are lost in translation. As far as I can tell, they are all from Prague, minus the lead singer, who either is actually from Africa or is a black girl from Europe who hired a Czech kid with a loose grasp of the English language to make the band’s Myspace.

The Prague Ska Conspiracy plays classic reggae/big band style Ska with charming lyrics and a soul influence that makes them very simple and accessible. Their album artwork all seems stolen from some place or another, from Shepard Fairey to Queen, and their music videos all seem like they were shot on iPhones. I personally find that endearing, as if they were some sort of Soviet satellite boot-leg of Amy Whinehouse. They’re like a plastic camera you can buy for cheap, which seems to steal every element of 60’s industrial design but was manufactured in 2007.

The entire band seems to speak English very well in the interviews I have seen on YouTube. Were it not for the name and website, I would have never known they were from The Czech Republic. Apparently, the singer, Mariana, gave birth recently, which caused the band to re-evaluate their presence in the music world, dropping their horn section as well “Ska” and “The” from their name. BOO!

Check them out, and show them to your Mom. I promise, she’ll love them.

Ska Friday #5 Big D and the Kids Table - My Girlfriend’s on Drugs

I don’t feel like typing a lot today, so here are some bullet points:

• hardworking band (200 days a year touring, minimum)
• David McWayne is one of the coolest frontmen ever
• and he wrote a book of short stories and poetry
• they are from boston
• I hate Boston
• they sing about girls, Frisbee, being from Boston, hating L.A, drinking
• and being from Boston
• but they’re good dudes
• with crazy girlfriends
• they also have a hip hop album
• and you should totally listen to How It Goes as soon as possible.

Ska Friday #4 The Flaming Tsunamis - Opus

It’s certainly been a while since my last Ska Friday, which might be a good thing for many—ska in high doses has been known to cause alienation from hip music circles, uncontrollable skanking and an urge to wear checkerboard print—but for those of you who were diggin’ it, more Ska Fridays means one thing: Drew is going to start posting the some weird shit.

Let’s go back to spring of 2006. I’m a confused 18 year-old, wearing my girlfriends pants, listening to a mix CD in my red Dodge Stratus just one day before my senior prom. On it are my favorite bands at the time: Streetlight Manifesto and other ska, of course, but there is also some At the Drive-In (Post-Hardcore, technically real Emo), Between the Burried and Me (Mathcore) and Job for a Cowboy (Deathcore). Part of me is confused because I am growing up, but the other part of me is confused because I feel as though I have to give up some of my old self.

In the last decade, there was an explosion of Post-Hardcore music, which is about a dozen different sub-genres influenced by Hardcore Punk, Heavy Metal, and the Emo movement of the 90s. I’ll go into the WTF-is-and-isn’t-Emo rant another day, but if you’ve seen a kid in tight jeans listening to heavy music with Cookie Monster vocals, that’s [mostly] modern hardcore. This music has as much in common with classic Hardcore Punk as modern Metal has in common with classical Heavy Metal. Try comparing Metalica to Led Zeppelin.

Around the time I started to get into Hardcore, a lot of my friends stopped listening to ska. I have a friend who still won’t admit that there was a time in his life that Aquabats DVD meant the world to him. Music genres create social scenes, which create archetypes and expectations; thus is life.

But music has always been very incestuous. Jazz and Soul beget Rock and Roll. The Blues and Rock and Roll beget Heavy Metal. Punk and Heavy Metal begat Thrash metal. If you have ever watched a skateboarding video from the 90’s, you have heard Thrash, and Ska, and Hardcore Punk. The differentiation of these sub-genres are hard to explain without musical example if you are unfamiliar with them, so I’m sorry if I lost you.

In the late eighties, Ska and Hardcore crossed over, creating… Ska-Core. Operation Ivy was the first band to be widely recognized as Ska-core, but you may be more familiar with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Less than Jake, or Sublime. The music of this genre was punctuated by a punk presence, while still remaining fundamentally ska.

Two days later, it’s the day after prom and I’m more confused than ever. Instead of going to the shore to fuck and get fucked, my good friend, Lennon, and myself are driving upstate to a huge ska festival called The Big Orange Bonanza. This event is hosted by local ska band, The Naked Citizens, whom I seen more times than I’ve eaten breakfast. I expected nothing and I got the world.

I saw my favorite band, Bomb the Music Industry! for the first time. Jeff was playing guitar and playing keyboard with his toes, performing with an iPod, some dude with a Dismemberment Plan tattoo on bass and John (their current bassist) on drums. I saw a lot of great ska bands that are no longer around, The Know How, High School Football Heroes, and many more I can’t even remember. The show closed with an amazing performance from the World Inferno/Friendship Society, who can only be described as Cabaret Punk.

This still remains one of the greatest shows I have ever seen. There were three stages going on simultaneously in a small Kiwanis Club meeting house. In one room, there’s ska, in another, hardcore, and upstairs is Anti-Folk. There was music outside, on every side of the house and people in their cars blasting music. Too often do we forget to be people when we join social circles. It was friendly reminder that the music we like is the music we like, and most of us like it because don’t we don’t fit in anywhere else. I felt like a part of something bigger than myself.

And then I saw the Flaming Tsunamis.

If you haven’t listened to the song yet, the Flaming Tsunamis were this amazingly energetic band from Connecticut that played real Ska-Core, as in, they would play ska and get balls-to-the-wall-metal out of nowhere. Holy shit! It was everything that made me uncomfortable, on one stage, making me comfortable! You can be both!

Their songs jump in and out of waltzes, ska songs, hardcore breakdowns, death metal, to keyboard driven funk like a weirdly streamlined Mr. Bungle. Months earlier, I had seen a band named Folly, which played hardcore songs with ska breakdowns (the breakdown is when the song slows down, generally this is when scene kids karate-mosh). Although I do love them, Folly seemed to be a magnet for wannabe tough guys to get their aggression out. The Flaming Tsunamis on the other hand did the opposite. They seemed to garner the attention of the nerdish kids, who couldn’t go to a good punk show because they were afraid some asshole would pick them up and throw them across the room (me seeing the Bled in March of ‘06). Hardcore kids skanked, ska kids in suits moshed. A rarity.

Then, they split the audience in half and gave everyone a fun noodle. Some were labeled Zombies, the others Robots, and during the breakdown the zombies were to attack the robots and vice versa. The ensuing maelstrom of foam beat downs was probably responsible ruining any hope I had left of enjoying a mainstream concert, where people don’t get weird or interact with strangers. I still have my neon green fun noodle at my parents house, along with the drum stick I got from Bomb the Music Industry!.

The band broke up a few years later, but you can actually download the majority of their catalog for free from Community Records, a donation based label out of Connecticut that produces some really great stuff, like A Billion Ernies and Fatter than Albert. If you check them out, please throw a buck or two to a label as independent as it gets.

Ska Friday #3 Streetlight Manifesto - Here’s to Life

My goal for Ska Friday has always been to give you a little history lesson along with a great band to listen too (read:torrent). My first two bands were a given, but now that we’ve reached Third Wave Ska I have too much a very large buffet to choose from. It’s sort of like how your high school history teacher always saved modern history for the last 3 weeks of school since there were too many relevant events to cover everything and the students would be too checked out to ask any questions .

In the 90’s, youth culture exploded with many different music scenes umbrellaed under the label Alternative Rock. The alternative rock movement was really nothing more than the underground, independent music that was brewing throughout the 80’s overflowing into the mainstream. Anyone who actually likes grunge music knows that Nirvana didn’t invent it, they just refined the sound enough to make it popular. And anyone who actually likes Ska knows that No Doubt didn’t invent it either.

Ska of the 90’s is mostly thought of as California skate/surf board-broheims pissing off the elderly because that is what MTV gave us to listen too. In fact, the scene had always been strong on the east coast, but still underground. By 1998 though, the ska-fad was starting to fade away in the the semi-punks were were taking it back. That was the year that New Jersey’s own Catch-22 released Keasby Nights.

It’s hard to create metaphors with ska bands for a few shitty reasons, so here is the best comparison I could think of: Keasbey Nights is the OK Computer of ska. If you like Ska, you like that album. In fact, it may be your favorite. If there was a Pitchfork for Ska (tidbit: Pitchfork originally rated California Ska band Save Ferris’ album It Means Everything a 9.5, but they deleted that review a few years after Wilco became cool), new artists would be compared to Keasbey Nights, and then fail because Keasbey Nights was the reason this new album was made in the first place. The acclaim was enjoyable, but lead singer/lyricist Tomas Kalnoky was a young guy at the time and wanted to go college, so he left the band on mostly bad terms. The rest of Catch-22 continued playing and recording lackluster albums, and still do. They’re all shit, except for Dinosaur Sounds, but it ain’t great.

Kalnoky, being an awesome dude with a great voice and a very broad knowledge of music started two musical projects after collage. First, Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution (called BOTAR by losers like myself) which is punk orchestra of sorts with classical influences. Secondly, Streetlight Manifesto, which is still one of my favorite bands of all time, ska or not. They’re so good, even my mom loves them.

This song, Here’s to Life, was the first Streetlight Manifesto song I ever heard. If Keasbey Nights is the OK Computer of Ska, then Streetlight Manifesto’s first album, Everything Went Numb, is the Pet Sounds of Ska. The lush layers of audio mix ska with big band and doo-wopp, and throw in bit of heavy metal guitar for good measure. The unconventional song structures, the solos, the changes in tempo; this is not your father’s ska.

And the lyrics! Just as Brian Wilson moved the Beach Boys away from cars and surfing, Streetlight Manifesto doesn’t sing about “picking it up” or how much playing ska sucks. Everything Went Numb is like a French new wave film with a horn section, full of allusions to criminals and writers. The losers, the liars, the bastards, the thieves, the cynacists, the pessimists, the ones who don’t believe in nothing.

In 2006, Victory Records (booooo!), who owned Keasbey Nights, decided they wanted to release a special edition of the famed album. Kalnoky, would not have it. Instead of scamming $13 off of fans for some slight re-mastering and new album art, he and Streetlight Manifesto re-recorded the entire album, mostly as a “fuck you” to the label who constantly fucked them over. I’m too attached to the original album to actually enjoy the rerecording, plus it sounds a little too digital for me. The last track, 1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4, originally had three minutes of the band talking and giving shout-outs as the song ends. On the re-recording, there is a text-to-speech robot explaining what they did what they did. You can read more about it here.

After this, Streetlight Manifesto released an album of all new material, Somewhere in Between, which is mostly about death, the afterlife, and having a good time before you die and find out if there is an afterlife or not. They also released the first of 10 albums in a series called 99 Songs of a Revolution, which will consist of… wait for it… COVERS! Yes, a ska band doing covers! Unheard of.

These are some pretty interesting covers done by a pretty interesting band. Why don’t you listen to their cover of the Postal Service’s hit, Such Great Heights?

Ska Friday #2  The Toasters - Two Tone Army

Last time, we talked about the birth of ska as a rock staple. Today, we’re looking at the beginning of modern, or Third Wave Ska. Obviously, the first wave was the original Jamaican dance hall ska. The second wave, British-rock influenced 2 tone. Third wave ska could be considered the revival of ska revival.  It’s an umbrella term for the punk-influenced ska to come out in North America (originally) over the past 30 years. You may be familiar with the Ska-boom of the mid-nineties, but ska revival has been around since the early eighties.

The Toasters are widely considered to be the first third wave ska band amongst ska experts (Skankstorians and Rude-fessors). Though their punk influence is not as prominent as the California Ska bands of the 90s, you can hear the start of the speed and drumming differences that would create the schism between second and third waves.

Americans my age will immediately recognize Two Tone Army as the theme song for the Nickelodeon show KaBlam, but with words! This, the ending credits song, Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down, and all of the Henry and June background music was performed by the Ska Moon Stompers, which was members of The Toasters and other bands on their label, Ska Moon Records.

Ska Moon Records even had their own store in 90’s located in New York’s alphabet city! If you wanted to buy some compilation vinyls of rare ska, you could just go there and PICK IT UP! PICK IT UP! PICK IT UP! PICK IT UP!