Never Say Goodbye

Something about I, Musical Genius that is interesting to me is that I'm able to interact with past versions of myself by looking at what I was writing on the internet. In addition to the many awful posts that exist in the archive, there's also a pile of drafts that sit in the platform and haven't materialized into anything. As much as there's many swings and misses from when I was trying to process breakups online, most of these drafts didn't even make that cut.

One of the things that comes up a bunch in the drafts, that I may have mentioned on IMU in the past, was a series called Under the Radar in which I would talk about bands I thought were underappreciated. How did I not name that name was corny and hackneyed as fuck?! The drafts are all from September 2013, so my only excuse is that I was wired on coffee in my office at Guelph and trying to come up with ideas to write about to get my chops back up as I entered academia again. Folks, it was a moment of weakness and I will never use a title that bad ever again, promise!

Pretty much all of the bands that I chose for the project were ska bands where I was the only listener I knew of among my friends.* I guess some people would say "Wow, glad you dodged that bullet!", but TBH, I still like all of the bands I chose, even if I don't listen and relate to some of them as much as I used to. Anyways, one of the bands was The Impossibles, and all of this was the intro for the following.

*Turns out I ended up finishing one, on The Stereo, in October 2013. Funny that the only one I did was on the only non-ska band, right?!



The Impossibles are now more of a signpost for true power pop heads to me than anything else. There will be times when the discography still appeals to me, but for the most part I find that I don't turn to ska-punk music from the late-90s as readily. I still love all of it, but it's so nostalgic for me and the more I age, the less I want to indulge nostalgic feelings. They can be a bit of a trap that keeps you living in the past and not moving on from things. There's proper ways to go about it, of course, but having all your main interests be nostalgic is a little poisonous, is what I'm saying.

That all being said, whenever I hear someone from a band mention that they love The Impossibles (and loving The Stereo often goes along with that), my ears perk up and I become way more interested. In fact, what kind of inspired me to come back to this post was Barry Johnson from Joyce Manor mentioning in an interview that he loves the Impossibles and that was why he got Rory Phillips to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me.* They never ascended to the top of the genre in the way that a Mighty Mighty BossTones or Reel Big Fish did, so they occupy this interesting space for me, as an invested ska fan in 2019, of having been around and put out lots of material and having toured, but not being a band that most punks know, in my experience.

*Bud, there's a huge fucking Rory stink (especially Three Hundred by the Stereo) all over that album. I love it.

I guess, what I'm interested in is why does the discography hold weight with people nearly 20 years later? Why does this album still kick around and allow the band to do reunion shows, while pretty much all of their contemporaries from the late-90s don't get the same treatment? People aren't exactly knocking down the door to demand Animal Chin and Hippos reunions.

My theory is that it's because the Impossibles' music (and especially the contributions from Rory Phillips, who went on do similar work in the Stereo) is indebted to a certain tradition of pop-rock songwriting that gives their music more staying power than some others. Most of the verses on Anthology are fairly standard fast ska-punk, but they build around that with huge chorus hooks and distorted intros that elevate the songs from being just "genre". There's nuance in the way the songs' parts flow into each other that for me recalls power-pop of the early 80's or album-oriented rock. Knowingly copping the tricks of hook-centric rock bands is an easy way to beef up your music, and the Impossibles were smart to do it in a genre where most other bands didn't focus on song-writing. This was further emphasized on their farewell album Return, which was entirely power-pop with no ska.

I think one of the first bands to really pastiche that late-70s and early-80s style of writing rock songs was Weezer, who did it perfectly on Blue and also managed to work the idea of bringing back that music into their lyrics (especially "Buddy Holly" and "In the Garage"). So much so, that now a band trying to put big overdriven riffs, catchy chorus melodies and guitar solos in their songs is now just referred to as "Weezer influence". That type of thing has gotten fairly common today, but I think that the Impossibles were one of the first to start doing it and the fact that they did so in a genre with pretty narrow sonic parameters, ska, is commendable.

As a musician, it's hard to stretch ska out and make it work in a variety of ways. A band like Reel Big Fish, who for better or for worse are a mainstay of the genre, hasn't changed its sound at all since its formation. The same can even be said of better ska bands, like the Slackers, who stick to a 1st-wave/reggae formula because it works and they can live in the subtleties and nuance.

When ska-punk bands are more song-writing focused than, for lack of a better term, "playing ska-focused", they inevitably move towards albums that downplay upstokes and dance-y parts in favour of better songs as a whole. Less Than Jake did this on Borders and Boundaries and Bomb the Music Industry! did this on Get Warmer. It's a jump that you need to make if you are part of the weird niche of loving ska, but also loving song songs. I guess that I just wish more people respected the Impossibles for making that jump.