A pleasant part of the recent... renewal... of interest... in ska? (trying my hardest to not say revival) is that a lot of new media about ska has accompanied it. I was a message board rat during the 2000s, which I would say was the height of that culture, and during that time it felt like there was a lot of cool internet stuff and communities focused on ska that were both fun to read and helped really expand my understanding of the genre. As the 00s moved into the 10s, it felt like there was a lot less of that, though I guess I could also chalk that up to me becoming more focused on exploring other genres of music for a little while.
On one hand, I agree with the current view that saying ska died from like 2007-2019 unfairly glosses over the contributions of bands like the Fad, We Are the Union, and labels like Community Records.* On the other hand though, I think the generalization that the vast majority of ska shows were either headlined by Less Than Jake (still making good records then!), Reel Big Fish (vomit emoji, especially in 2010), or Streetlight Manifesto (opinion changes daily), or featured bands trying to be them, was correct. As sad as it is to say, I think that it's also fair to add the Johnstones to that list, specifically in Canada. I kept trying to find new bands, and I never got tired of listening to the genre, but shit did get pretty dark there for a bit and there was slim pickings.
*An interesting wrinkle is that this is also when Bomb the Music Industry's popularity began to really take off, but also when they began to feature less and less ska on their records, which I don't think is unrelated.
This is all to say that I am once again writing about happy I am with the current generation of new ska bands, all creating interesting music and none dressing like a caricature of a 90s cartoon character the way white kids from the suburbs did in 2012. Along with these new bands have come a bunch of new internet stuff around that, and I'm thinking of the In Defense of Ska podcast in particular. It's not always great, but I really appreciate that it always focuses on the bands and how important they are, which is not something that often happens with ska. More so than any genre of music I can think, ska bands seem to be subservient to the genre norms.
A recent episode of In Defense of Ska featured Dave McWane from Big D and the Kids Table, who were one of the most influential bands on me during my adolescence and legitimately played a gigantic role in shaping both me as a person and my outlook on the world. I've written about them and their effect on me before on here and I was about to say that I won't do that again, even though that's exactly what I'm about to do.
I haven't actually read that many interviews with Dave, who seems to be the main creative force in the band and is (I think) the only remaining original member, so I found his take on the history of the band interesting. In particular, McWane mentioned antagonism as a key part of the early days of the band, which was something I was always trying to name, but never really could. He mentioned that they never really enjoyed headlining shows because that generally meant that the audience was already on their side and was there to see them, whereas when they opened for other bands, whether that was the Dropkick Murphys or even bigger, but less punk ska bands, their was more of a friction with the crowd that the band thrived off of.
That sense of antagonism was palpable and was also a huge part of what drew me into the band. As much as they were still a ska band, they really did push back against other bands, labels, and trends in a way that, in my eyes, legitimated them as a punk band too. It felt like everyone in the band were actually punks, so that when they played fast parts or hardcore parts, it seemed completely natural, as opposed to the hackneyed "clean verse, kick on distortion pedal for the chorus" model that all bad ska-punk followed. A big part of that was me being young and impressionable and this being the first time I had heard the "fuck everyone else" message given in such an emphatic way. But even though I was a naïve teen who was inspired to take on the world from this record, that still matters.
A memory that sticks with me that kind of sums this sense of connection up is something that happened to my friend Pat in high school, who was just as into Big D as I was. It was definitely not cool to like ska at the height of third wave emo and Pat was wearing a Big D hoodie to school that had a checkerboard pattern across the front. In the halls, a guy we knew who was a hardcore kid, without even acknowledging or speaking to Pat, just said "ska sucks" under his breath. It felt like all the people who were into punk, in whatever way, hated ska, but Big D made it feel cool to say "Fuck them anyways."
Because Big D were "My Band" for a stretch of like three years, Good Luck, The Gypsy Hill EP, and How It Goes were all in my walkman on the way to and from school, something that seemed like a gigantic deal to me in like 2007 was the band starting to get a little bigger and also changing their sound slightly. From my perspective, on the band's new album Strictly Rude, which was released on the comparatively bigger punk label Side One Dummy, it felt like the antagonism was now clearly gone, though others didn't find the change as jarring as I did.
My take on the changes in the band's sound were that it was partly due to member changes. The liner notes to How It Goes featured notes from the members about the writing process of each of the songs (the best) and something I noticed was that saxophonist Dave Bush, who left the band between How It Goes and Strictly Rude, had lots of notes and seemed to figure into the writing process in a major way. When the band left their harsher ska-core sound for something that sounded a lot closer to regular ska-punk on Strictly Rude, my take was that Bush's absence was the reason for less interesting music. I've never heard anyone else mention this, but it's one of those takes that I'll probably carry for the rest of my life.*
*Another note on member changes: Guitarist Sean P. Rogen, who is maybe my favourite ska-punk guitarist, left the band somewhere after Strictly Rude. I think he was similarly integral to the band making good music and I feel like his absence is glaringly obvious on later stuff.
I had never heard the band, or I guess more accurately McWane, talk about this period of the band, aside from the usual puff pieces in music publications that always come out during an album promotion cycle, so when he started discussing the writing period of Strictly Rude, my ears perked up and I was eager to hear about it. He actually did echo what I thought about the songs, saying that they're happier or more positive compared to their earlier stuff, but he attributed that to the fact that it was a generally happy time in the band's existence. They were signing to a bigger label, touring all the time, and were still young enough to just bask in the fun of being a band and fucking around. When he phrased it that way, it made a lot of sense to me and softened the record a bit to me.
In hindsight, they didn't really sell out in the way I thought they did, but I also think it's fair to say that they did a little. There was a tone of political hope on the record, as I guess they were now done being morose about the Bush administration, but even then (and more so now) that type of political outlook didn't jive with me. Getting the band's perspective on the record made the context of the record a little more in focus, but I still think that 17-year-old me picked up on something real, so I've got to commend myself for that.
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