The Pioneers - "Let Your Yeah Be Yeah"
Desmond Dekker (and the Aces) - 007 (Shanty Town)
Phil Ochs - "Santo Domingo." ("There's been a drastic change in American foreign policy. Take the Dominican Republic. Which we did.") (cover)
Trinity Meets Dillinger - "Jesus Dread"
The Toasters - "Ploughshares into Guns"
U-Roy and the Paragons - "Tide is High." Here's the non-DJ version, sans U-roy.
Skatalites - "Lawless Street"
Shark Wilson & The Basement Heaters - "Make it Reggae" Cover of this, obviously.
Leonard Santic All Stars - "Santic Special"
Augustus Pablo - East of the River Nile Last night i dreamed of Melodicas.
Taught the "Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of Capitalism" chapter from There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack today. Went ok. I probably talked too much, brought in too much music, but it was fun to make them grapple with Linton Kwesi Johnson and "Israelites" and even "Ghost Town," which someone said something really funny about, though i don't remember what it was. Like it sounded science fictiony or something. I got more questions than i was expecting about the origins and implications of the 1990s ska revival in the U.S., given that my students were, on average, 10-12 years old in 1998, when that party, for most purposes, ended. In retrospect i think i forgot to get to talking about the implications - whitewashing the music, on one hand, fetishization of "roots" and racialized codification of expertise on another. In other words, i guess my instinct would have been to extend Gilroy's critique of Madness and Bad Manners to the Orange County ska-punk hordes and then drop some Bordieu on the self designated archons of "trad" cultural purity be they in L.A. or New York or whatever, though i suppose Skinnerbox kinda already did that (see "This a New York." I don't know if this is quite fair, since however absent the antiracism of the better two tone bands is in even the most politically committed ska-punk and ska core bands (Mike Park notwithstanding) Operation Ivy (although maybe "Take Warning" functions in much the same way as Gilroy describes "Ghost Town," with interscenester violence standing in for racialized antagonisms) and Against All Authority were a far cry from the imperialist minstrelsy of "Night Boat to Cairo" or Madness's failure to refute its more neo-nazi fans. And what happens if we take "Ska Against Racism" at its word? Or was it already compromised by the erasure of any jamaican referent, by the marketing of the "rude boy/girl" as fashion option rather than shanty town youth outlaw? (Or more precisely the commodification of shanty town youth outlaw as fashion option.)
Oh, by the way, Barack Obama is the president elect of the united states, and that's a good thing for a lot of reasons. And, putting aside the troubling exceptionalism and haste with which many have sought to cast the Obama victory as the redemption of the US from the blood-soaked Bush years and the whole long history of racial violence and subjigation, that a person of African descent will assume the presidency of a nation founded on plantation colonialism in a few short months is certainly more than noteworthy, and Obama's speech, with its deft allusions to Sam Cooke and Dr. King, was powerful for the ways it cast the election not as a culmination but instead as an inception, as a moment in a longerstruggle now inchoate. Such a discursive opening lays forth a wide rang of intriguing possibilities, and I say that as someone who still sort of considers himself an anarchist. But if Larry Summers really gets reappointed to the post of Treasury Secretary, one would have to start seriously questioning the priorities and progressive potential of such an administration. Even though the department of labor's always been compromised, an agent of state corporatist labor policy, it'll be interesting to see whom Obama names to the post. Hope it's someone less Daniel Bellish than Reich. I suppose it's up to us, then, to hold our new chief executive up to his Lincolnian "better angels?"
In the meantime
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