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.

Rolling Like a Cel-eh-bri-tay!

Early last Friday evening I found out that I won tickets to Riot Fest in Toronto. The lineup featured some things that I really wanted to see and some that I just didn't care at all about. Since I got the tickets for free I figured it would be worth to head down for the Sunday of the festival, since I was already committed to watching the Blue Jays play the Red Sox at 4 PM on Saturday (A disappointing game featuring a rare blow-up from Roberto Osuna resulting in a 7-6 loss).

I've become pretty disenfranchised with large music festivals. Before things like Riot Fest and Osheaga and Wayhome and Veld were things, artists used to tour a lot more. A band who were signed would tour Canada in the summer, bringing maybe a smaller labelmate along for the ride to go with a few local acts to fill out the bill. This kind of set up was great because it let me see my favourite bands in a more intimate atmosphere (I mean, even the Kool Haus was more intimate than Downsview Park), but also because it gave smaller bands crucial exposure and allowed them to grow. Nowadays many bands just run a circuit of festivals, Riot Fest ->The Fest->Groezrock->Soundwave->etc, and playing large tours has pretty much become a thing of the past. Though I'm sure that most bands, especially the older ones, love this because it lets them have more down time, for me it sucks and has taken away one of my favourite parts of the summer.

With the influx of large music festivals, a weird (at least to me) culture of people who go to these festivals has popped up. It seems like there are people who buy a ticket to most, if not all, big festivals and make being a "festival-goer" a part of their identity. I've noticed people on facebook who seem to have a new picture of themselves in front of a large banner for each new music fest. Google "Music Festival Guide" if you don't believe me. For every girl in a flower crown or bro in a tank top, there are 5 BuzzFeed lists telling what to wear/eat/drink/do wherever they are.

And whatever, people are going to do what they want/like and I have no control over that, so I shouldn't let it get to me, but something I've noticed is that they people who go to these things don't seem to give much of a shit about who they're seeing. They don't even care about the artists there and that really rubs me the wrong way. They are just there to be at the festival, not to see anybody, if that makes any sense.

Case in point, on the Sunday at Riot Fest was headlined by 6/9 (RIP ODB) of Wu Tang Clan. There were a ton of die-hard Wu fans to see the set. For example, my friend Erik, the drummer of my first two bands, is a huge Wu fan, so seeing the set was of paramount importance to him. But for every one of those, there were two people there who didn't really know anything about Wu Tang Clan. Sure they have the "W" shirt and know that "Wu Tang Clan ain't nothin' ta fuck with" or that "Cash Rules Everything Around Me", but I bet they couldn't name a single album. I bet they couldn't name a single member. They love the brand of Wu Tang Clan and they like the idea of being a person who likes Wu Tang Clan, but they don't really do. Logically, a Wu Tang fan probably would have also been interested in seeing Atmosphere's set earlier in the day, yet his crowd was 1/5 the size. With how much people seemingly have to advertise their interests and themselves over social media now, it seems like having a visual signifier is now more important than the signified, and that's just fucked to me.

Instead of watching Wu Tang, I decided to watch Weezer, who were playing all of Blue (Do I italicize "Blue Album"? I mean, it's really self-titled and wasn't called "Blue" until "Green" came out. Hard to say.). Their crowd was also huge. I expected this and tried to not worry so much about how shitty they crowd was around me, though it was monumentally shitty. I will limit myself to one complaint: A large number of extremely drunk bros doing a "Rosanne singing the national anthem at Wrigley"-level rendition of the falsetto "Hoo-ooh"s during the pre-chorus in "Buddy Holly". Fuck off guys, you actually completely ruined it for me. 

Some assholes aside, everyone seemed to actually be pretty into the set. But the dumb part came in the second half. The singles that Blue is known for, "Buddy Holly", "Undone - The Sweater Song" and "Say It Ain't So", all come early, so as soon as "Say It Ain't So" ended, THOUSANDS of people left the crowd. Guys, the three best songs on the album are left! A first I was annoyed, but I was coming down from a few red wines and uh..., which, combined with the really nice sunset made me really relaxed. The fact that all of the bros and drunks were leaving during the nerdiest song on an already nerdy album made me feel kind of good too. Rivers singing "I've got Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler too, waiting there for me" during an exodus of assholes made me sort of realize that I was who this song was meant for and that made me feel really good.

That didn't last long though, as some dick started yelling "'Beverley Hills'! Play 'Beverley Hills'!" behind me while Weezer played "Susanne". THEY PLAYED FUCKING "SUSANNE"!

After this I walked over to catch my friends Like Pacific and upon realizing that their set had been moved up and I had unknowingly missed it, watched the last two songs of Wu Tang. The crowd was maybe 1/5 of what it had been earlier which I can only imagine was a result of all the poseurs leaving once they realized that they don't even know the songs they thought they did. The being said, everyone who was still there was super into it and there was a giant crowd of people worshipping the stage with the "Wu" gesture.

I hate being right sometimes.