a work in progress

The contradictions implicit in the "third wave" ska revival's constuction of "traditional" or "trad" ska can perhaps best be seen in the very real differences between The Mighty Diamonds' "Have Mercy" and the Bluebeats' rocksteady revival song of the same name, written by ex-Scofflaw Mike Drance and appearing on the group's debut album Dance With Me, which was released in 1997 (or was it '96) by Moon Ska Records NYC.



The Mighty Diamonds were and remain a classic roots reggae vocal trio. They formed in 1969 and rode to fame on tour with Toots and The Maytals. On "Have Mercy," lead singer Tabby Diamond asks for mercy for himself and as part of a collectivity (the postcolonial Jamaican diasporic subject.)



Drance was a founding member of The Long-Island based Scofflaws, a sort of bar-ska band and one of the early dominators of the New York ska scene. He left the Scofflaws after their second album (if i remember correctly) and fored the bluebeats, a rocksteady revival group who played a mixture of covers (Ken Boothe, Stranger Cole, The Wailers,) and originals. "Have Mercy" was on of the original tunes penned by Drance. In it, he dispenses with the politicized religious discourse of the rastafarian Diamonds and instead implores listeners to "have mercy" on the homeless, whom he constructs as an "other," but one with a fluid boundary between the other and the self. The negation of the boundary is easy to imagine and may one day dissappear, the song alleges. Yet the assumption of divinity here by the white male metropolitan subject, and the erasure of the subjectivity articulated by Tabby Diamond, reveals only some of the colonial dynamics present in the ways in which the "third wave" constructed the first.



(Gone were even the antiracist politics of the two-tone era - this was a music marketed to white youth, largely by white youth. There was a profound dehistoricization, particularly in the work of the most succesful bands and their marketers, and even the mastery of the knowledge of the "jamaican era," presumed static and dead, was a mastery intended for and by white consumers.)