Tell Me All Your Thoughts On Ska
note: This is a promotional post for Hard Mike's Bonnie Raitt ska band, Skannie Raitt
I was in a ska band in high school.
None of us particularly liked ska. Catch 22 and Reel Big Fish and Mad Caddies and Mighty Mighty Bosstones were basically a means to an end for us, because so many of our friends only played horns, and wanted to play shows now, without having to wait for Dave to get good at DJ scratching (it was 2001, and we discovered jazz about 9 months later but we had know way of knowing that was about to happen).
We mostly wrote our own songs, and we wore collared shirts and neckties when we played. The community agreed that we were ska enough to be called a ska band in public.
None of us were really aware of actual Jamaican music beyond Bob Marley's hits, because we were using all our internet hours Napstering songs by people like Deftones and Dr Dre instead of Phyllis Dillon and Prince Buster. So we were basically right, non-Operation-Ivy ska did suck, as far as we knew! (sorry, Rancid)
I remember being about 16 and staring out my foggy window at night, being almost able to hear a kind of ska I did like. It was mournful, maybe? Yearning. It had fuzzy guitar, a light bit of skanky backbeat, and vocals that were dreamy and subtle and didn't sound anything like the usual "Mountain Dew commercial" white boy ska frontman.
My highfalutin, mournful, Deftones-esque ska ideal became irrelevant by junior year, because Swank7 split up ("we're only 6 people, because the 7th member is the audience, man!"). It was all just a dumb fantasy, anyway. I had no practical plan for how to make any of it. I didn't even like ska anyway. Other things became cool and I latched onto them.
Bonnie Raitt and Genre
Most people would never describe Bonnie Raitt as playing "ska," and yet she recorded several times with Toots and the Maytals, and any of her records has a nonzero chance of featuring a straight-ahead reggae groove. So what "genre" is Bonnie Raitt? Blues? Rock n Roll? The dreaded label-for-idiots "Americana?"
The modern obsession with genre comes from your computer. People have been conditioned to expect that every document can be described with one option from a dropdown menu. This is not the worst way to approximate art, but it is one of the worst.
One of the keys to playing tastefully is to understand that everything is basically just R&B. Reggae, Rocksteady, Ska, and whatever else comes from Jamaica are flavors of Jamaican R&B. Similarly, The Blues, Rock & Roll, and James Taylor are flavors of American R&B. Get as deconstructy as you want (is My Bloody Valentine R&B?) and you'll keep finding evidence of "that groove," at the center of a big funky Venn Diagram.
Skannie Raitt and the 4th Wave
The 1st wave of ska came from Jamaica. The second came from Britain, and the third from Orange County.
The 4th wave is like Jesus: people disagree about what it sounds like, whether it happened, and a lot of Jewish motherfuckers are completely sure it hasn't happened yet.
Skannie Raitt is my personal 4th wave offering. In the decades since Swank7, I have taught myself how to make the music I used to dream about. It's this stuff.
Bonnie Raitt is perhaps the most tasteful of the great artists of our time. It's been a pleasure learning from her body of work, and trying to get to the meat of what it means to get to the meat. Pick it up.