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Ska Mix For Q

by Various Artists

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about

Hey Quintron, before I get into this (mostly) underground ska music history lesson I wanted to say… this is the most time I think I have ever spent working on a mix tape for anyone ever and it’s because ska music is so big, expansive, interesting and important to me, it was so difficult to leave out so many different artists and sounds. I started by creating a google spreadsheet with all the “essentials” broke those down decade by decade, then expanded beyond my personal knowledge and I won’t get into everything I did after that but I ended up with a list of over 150 artists and almost a week worth of non-stop music that I had to narrow down to this 90 minute cassette tape. I remembered you saying you wanted to know more about the “weirder” side of ska music so I kept that in mind when selecting these songs and since you are an organ player, I tried to include songs with prominent organ in them. I eventually ended up cutting out most of the essentials to just focus on underground artists (or at least recordings of them when they were underground – like NO DOUBT) Anyway, let’s get into this…

The mix starts out with 4 tracks from authentic traditional ska artists from 1960’s Jamaica. I made a point to have 3 out of the 5 artists featured on these tracks for this time period be female because history has mostly erased or over looked the female musicians that made these early years of the genre so incredible. MILLIE SMALL is probably the biggest name here, best known for her hit “My Boy Lollipop” which was the first Ska song to gain international radio play. She is my favorite female ska singer and this track with ROY PANTON is one of my favorites. SYMARIP had some pretty big success in the 70s (especially in the UK) for their song “Skinhead Moonstomp” which is definite “ska essential” but I decided to include their song “Fung Shu” which is much more fun and playful and often overlooked in their catalog.

In the late 1960’s/early 1970s a bunch of ska musicians (like DERRICK MORGAN and PRINCE BUSTER) moved to the UK and that helped make the genre blow up exponentially. One of the first ska singles to come out of the UK was from JUDGE DREAD who was also the first white person to sing ska music (as far I am aware of anyway) If you’re unfamiliar with his back story, you should dig into it because its super funny and interesting. He was a wrestler, bodyguard, sex addict, holds world record for highest number of banned songs of all time and died on stage from a heart attack after saying “Let’s hear it for the band!”

MARI ELLIOT (aka Polysterene of the band X-RAY SPEX) sang ska music before seeing THE SEX PISTOLS live and realizing she could do punk music a million times better than those posers. To my knowledge though there is only recordings of 2 songs during her short ska music career, but I think it rules and had to include it.

By the mid 1970s a bunch of younger punk groups started making ska music (most well-known being THE CLASH but you already know about them) and new ska groups started forming made up of a lot of these formerly punk musicians and the most notable (and ambitious) group was THE SPECIALS who formed the 2-Tone record label and put out a ton of great music for different ska groups (mostly based out the UK) only a few of these bands ended up becoming big or more well known, while a most of the artists ended up fading into obscurity after a year or two. The only one of those artists featured on this mix is THE SWINGING CATS. I wanted to show how the 2-tone movement reached many other parts of the world though, so I included some of my favorites THE ALLNITERS and STRANGE TENANTS (from Australia) and THE B-SIDES (from Canada).

THE DELTONES were based out of the UK but came about 10 years after the 2-Tone movement really had its “hey day” and was made up of members of 2-Tone group THE BODYSNATCHERS and new wave/pop group THE BELLE STARS. And while there are a ton of USA 2-tone bands I could have used who even though they became pretty successful for a while (yet still remained underground, like THE TOASTERS and BIM SKALA BIM…etc) I wanted to share one of my all-time favorites NO DOUBT.

Now I know you already know NO DOUBT from their success of pop and ska-tinged music in the 90s+2000’s but most people don’t know they were a 9-12 piece ska band for 6 whole years before recording their first full length. And they were heavily influenced by MADNESS and FISHBONE (and if you aren’t familiar with these two bands, stop this tape and listen to both of their debut albums now!)

In the 80’s (especially late 80’s) there was another big resurgence of punk musicians wanting to play ska, and most articles and people that talk about ska music history will credit pretty much everything to OPERATION IVY (and again THE CLASH) and while OP IVY is amazing, there were two bands I wanted to focus on in this comp that never got the credit they deserved. First is THE OFFS from the San Francisco they were a 4-6 piece, multi-racial punk band that formed in 1976 (that’s 2-3 years before anything on 2-Tone records was released and around the same time as THE CLASH started) The second is KORTATU from Spain who formed 3-4 years before OPERATION IVY and if you look at old live footage of the band on youtube, they look just as wild and fun (and even more political, which fucking rules!)

Skapunk really exploded in the USA in the early 90s and evolved a lot. Some bands got real dumb about it and some bands got real smart about it, but it’s all really fun and easily the type of Ska music most Americans are familiar with today. I thought about including some of the originators of the 1990s USA skapunk sound on this mix like THE NUCKLE BROTHERS, SKANKIN PICKLE or maybe an early/deep cut from THE MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSSTONES, but I decided to just give you what I consider the most enjoyable. An all Asian ska-punk band fronted by legendary ska musician MIKE PARK called THE CHINKEES (who formed in 1997) and Santa Cruz heart throbs SLOW GHERKIN (who formed in 1993) both of these bands have flawless discographies that I highly encourage anyone to take a deep dive into. I also included a track from INSPECTOR who formed in 1995? 96? In Mexico to show how these talented US skapunk bands influenced other parts of the world in the 90s.

While skapunk can be dated back to the mid 1970’s, Ska-Core is something started in the early 1990s, a lot of it in my opinion is pretty unbearable and dumb, but important to highlight for a history lesson on Ska Music. I included just two 90s ska-core bands JANITORS AGAINST APARTHEID from the US and DISTEMPER from Russia.

A big part of why I included some ska-core is to help bridge the gap between skapunk and (one of my favorite underground genres) PSYCHO-SKA. The term was originated by MU330 from Saint Louis who formed in the early 1990s around the same time as THE BLUE MEANIES (from Chicago) who later adopted the same name to describe their spin on ska music. I also wanted to include THE ARROGANT SONS OF BITCHES because they are a late 90’s-early 2000’s psycho-ska band fronted by (now legendary ska/indie/punk musician) JEFF ROSENSTOCK.

In the 1990s we all know ska music (especially in the USA) became insanely popular and a lot of it was obnoxious and kind of embarrassing (but no more embarrassing as Emo, Noise or Hardcore in my opinion.) One of the most obnoxious things about it during this period of time for me is how polished the recordings for some of these major label ska bands releases became. Horns and organs just don’t sound that good when recorded digitally and music in general doesn’t feel as honest or good to me when it’s not recorded live. But it wasn’t all bad, if you were willing to dig deep you could find some really amazing independent and underground ska bands like the ones I included here. THE ADJUSTERS were a communist ska/rocksteady group from Chicago (active from 95-2003), THE GADJITS from Missouri (active as a ska band from 1995-2001 then they are one of the many ska bands that abandoned the genre completely and just played Garage Rock from 2002-2004) and THE AMPHETAMEANIES from Glasgow (active from 1997-2014 and featuring members of BELLE AND SEBASTIAN, FRANZ FERDINAND and more)

In 1999-2002 a lot of ska bands either broke up or ditched ska entirely and most of the ska music being made was by fans of the genre that didn’t really have a lot of experience being in a band before this and a lot of those bands were awful. I did not include any of those though, I stuck to just a few that I really dig from all the different sub-genres of ska. THE KNOW HOW from Gainesville, Florida started in 1998 and toured a ton between 2001-2005 which was when I was running the ska scene website www.azska.com and booking (mostly) ska shows, so I got to see these guys a lot and they were always so much fun. THE PEPPER POTS are a 10-piece band from Spain that play a mix of Ska, Rocksteady and Soul. I saw them play a show in Phoenix, in 2008 at the Rhythm Room and it was one of the best sounding live shows I’ve ever been too. THE BUSTER SHUFFLE are from the UK and I just got into them over the last year but I’m obsessed, them and RAZIKA (from Norway) do such an amazing job of mixing ska with pop music and are super addictive. They make records that you wanna listen to on repeat and I love that.

Something else I wanted to mention about ska music in the early 2000’s is despite the music industry turning its back on the genre, the ska music scene was still huge, these shows I used to book would bring sometimes 300-500 people, and there was the SKA IS DEAD tours that happened during this time where big name ska bands like BIG D AND THE KIDS TABLE, THE TOASTERS, MUSTARD PLUG, MU330, STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO, THE PLANET SMASHERS…etc toured together. Also, how could I forget the SKA SUMMIT that happened in 2003 which brought over 12,000 ska music fans from all over the world to Las Vegas.

By the 2010’s there was a really great underground scene in the US, largely in part by the independent ska record labels that popped up. BAD TIME RECORDS and COMMUNITY RECORDS put out amazing records all the time by (mostly skapunk) bands and then you got JUMP UP! RECORDS, LIQUIDATOR and ASIANMAN RECORDS who have all been around since the 1990’s but in the 2010s+ they have all had some really big heavy hitter ska releases. I included a couple of those in this mix (BRUCE LEE BAND from Northern CA and BAD OPERATION from New Orleans, LA) but also wanted to include 2 truly deep underground/unsigned ska artists MATT WIXSON (one of the handful of recent TLGBQIA+ ska artists) from Michigan and SKASUCKS from South Korea.

In the 2000’s there was also a big Rocksteady revival especially in the Latin communities/countries that is still active today. So this mix ends with two of my favorites THE DELIRIANS and TRAVELERS ALLSTARS who are both pretty organ heavy and probably most importantly for ska music - fun to dance to.

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released May 7, 2021

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