So I Can Erase the Rat

I was recently reminded of the Long Island ska-core band The Fad after listening to their seminal track "Vinyl Paradise" on an old playlist of mine.* Their lone full-length record, Kill Punk Rock Stars was on constant rotation for me when it came out, is absolutely one of my favourite records of the 00s, and still stands as one of my favourite ska-punk albums, especially when you consider that it came out in a real fallow period for the genre. I had a great time listening to the record for the first time in a few years and found that this time, the track that really stuck with me was "Ska-boom!"

*This song was my profile song on MySpace for like half the time I used the website.

Obviously, when you read that title you assume the worst about it being a terrible ska-punk song with a terrible ska pun title, but that's a purposefully metatextual move. The song is about the singer being present for the ska boom of the late-90s and then watching people dump the genre like it was nothing and then act like they were never into. He then calls for others to "light the fuse" again and reinvigorate the genre, which, if you are thinking of the New Tone era of ska from 2018ish-2024ish, The Fad absolutely contributed to. Beyond loving that message, and I don't think I need to get into a comparison of being into ska and 00s scene metalcore for the hundredth time, I think there's a lot of value in the earnest message of saying that participated in the third wave ska boom and then never left and tried to keep that scene alive. The opening line of the song is "I was there," and I found that really resonated me as a beautiful statement about participating in a music scene. We all have traces of our participation in DIY music to varying degrees, the records and zines we made, the flyers of shows we played and attended, but ultimately "I was there" is the most important thing you can say about it. If you can say "I was there" it means that you did something and helped to build the scene instead of staying home.

While poking around on Discogs, I found out that Ricky from the Fad played in Backtrack for that band's whole existence. A fun discovery that I never made even as I listened to Backtrack the whole time they were active. This is also evidence that all of punk's independent music scenes are way closer than most want to admit. To me it's 1) obviously cool that the Fad and Backtrack share members, as it also explains why they were better than 95% of ska-core bands, and 2) not that weird! Kind of makes sense to me when you think about Long Island punk and hardcore! That led me to listen to his recent appearance on Toby Morse's One Life, One Chance podcast, interested to see if he mentioned the Fad. He touched on them a little bit, talking about joining the band and going on tour, and even more interestingly, mentioning that he started Backtrack after he and another member quit the Fad. So Backtrack is a Fad side project! Hmmm (I kid). 

Something that did bum me out a little bit was that he described the band as "more punk," instead of copping to the fact that he played in a ska band for multiple years and put out a full-length with them. Perhaps he didn't want to lose cred when talking to Matt Henderson, who was co-hosting the interview. I get it, but don't be ashamed to say "I was there."*

*For all I know, they could have talked about that extensively off-mic or something.

The Tubs have been one of my most-listened-to bands of the summer and they just put out a new record. I don't know if it surpasses their first one as my favourite of theirs, but it's great and I've really enjoyed having some new songs from the band to throw into the mix. "Stoop to Me" was the first single, but I found that with the rest of the album out too, it works for me in a way it didn't before. Just an absolutely wonderful band. Through them I've dug into the God Nation family of bands more and have found that most of it rocks (especially Spike and the TSG). This sounds like a diss, but I mean it very sincerely when I say it reminds me of the K-W scene in a good way. Kind of hard to articulate why, when I think it's around a lot of people doing a lot of completely different sounding things. Perhaps that's how I heal my own scene trauma.