Ack! What the hell is going on with Blogger? This is really confusing!



Anyway, some more thoughts on the collapse of the NYC Ska Scebe from someone who left way to early to really justify voicing them:



Something that always frustrated me was the elitist ignorance towards other musics. I got this sense from lots of self-described ska kids that you couldn't listen to anything else. Had to be jamaican or jamaican influenced. This was really ridiculous, since hip hop wouldn't exist without the sounds systems pioneered by people like Duke Reid and the deejaying techniques - and particularly the whole idea behind Dub and Dub Poetry of people like U-Roy, I-Roy, Big Youth, Linton Kwesi Johnson et al. The electronic music many of us thought ska was an alternative to (Noah Wildman certainly carried on about this rather frequently) owed a great deal to a lot of people who cut their chops on Clue J and the Blues Blasters records or versions of Tommy McCook and the Supersonics 45s. Its a shame that those of us who got into ska in the mid 1990s turned off other sounds, because we missed some great music - from Pavement to Outkast to The Coup to Yo La Tengo to Odelay AND Mutations and a bunch of other albums which were ultimately much, much better than about 98% of any ska produced between 1994 and 1998. Maybe the US ska scene could have actually evolved into something creative and sustainable (where the adjusters and skinnerbox were arguably trying to take it -- pretty much anything vic rice had his hands on from '98 on was the most important ska music being made in the US at least at that point) had bands and fans listened to other stuff instead of dismissing it out of hand if it didn't involve some schmuck doing a walt jabsco impression on the front cover, instead of the incestuous, bloated, self-cannibalizing exploitative dead husk of a movement which it had inarguably become by the time vultures like the Cherry Poppin Daddies smelled the change on the winds and began moving on to greener pastures. I used to blame it all on California. In particular, i used to blame it all on Orange County and L.A. Jump With Joey were wildly overrated, Hepcat was overhyped if still a pretty damn good band, but for me the real offenders were bands like well, Cousin Oliver, obviously, but also The Edge, the O.C. Supertones, that other weird christian band - Five Iron Frenzy, i think, and god knows how many others. I don't anymore. The NYC, DC, and Boston scenes had enough problems of their own, and i think this elitism and insularity was a genre-killer.