In Defense of Ska

On April 23, ska-punk band We Are The Union, released one of its greatest singles of the band’s career: A catchy ska-punk tune called “Morbid Obsessions.” The song was also released alongside a huge announcement: We Are The Union’s lead singer Reade Wolcott was coming out as a trans woman. And the song “Morbid Obsessions” spoke to this journey openly, directly, and with plenty of emotion. And so f...

Has there been an 80s movie more iconic than The Lost Boys? Has there ever been a scene as legendary as the Boardwalk scene, where an oiled-up, muscular sax man wails through The Call’s “I Still Believe”?  No, there has not.  The sax man in question, Tim Cappello has become a cult icon. Synthwave bands invite him to play on their tracks, and TV shows, like The Break with Michelle Wolf, invite him...

Patrick Stump is used to playing for huge crowds. His band Fall Out Boy plays massive venues. But when he was younger, he was quite shy. So in order to go see Reel Big Fish , a band he loved dearly, he had to work through his social anxiety. Once there, he found an unassuming spot in the back of the venue and danced to his favorite genre of music: ska.  During the 90s, Patrick loved ska quite a bi...

In 1989, east bay punk musician and booker Kamala Lyn Parks was getting a ton of calls from bands asking if she’d book a tour for them. She didn’t even know most of them! She was so fed up with the unsolicited calls, she vented about it to Maximum RocknRoll founder Tim Yohannan: “I want to tell these bands to go book their own f*****g tour.” Tim, amused by her outburst, suggested she write an arti...

In 2016 some group calling themselves Skankral Ska Hotel released an all ska version of Neutral Milk Hotel’s indie opus In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Interesting concept, terrible execution—deliberately so—with ska being the punchline. But imagine if a band made an all ska version of a classic album, but did it well. This is exactly what Jeff Rosenstock did. And the brilliant album he turned into...

Ska-hating punk rockers will permit a few ska bands in their playlist. Operation Ivy, of course, is fine. Also, Chicago’s Slapstick is a perfectly fine ska band. Like Operation Ivy, they were a short-lived, gritty punk band that also happened to play ska. But in the case of Slapstick, it was in the mid-90s during the ska-boom, and they had a raging horn section.  Slapstick could have been huge. Th...

In December 2016, multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Hunter got bored and decided to record a ska cover of “Feliz Navidad,” calling it “Feliz NaviSKA.” This silly idea got a lot of eyeballs, way more than they anticipated, so Jeremy kept recording ska covers of songs by Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Blink 182 and other groups. The views continued to grow. This was the birth of SkaTune Network, a YouTu...

“I’m new and improved. So much better than I used to be. I was an awful alcoholic. I was a shitty drunk, and fucked up on drugs.” These are Duck’s words from the song “Rinse and Repeat” off the new Joystick album, I Can’t Take It Anymore (release date April 16). It, the band’s 4th full length, is a great skacore album, with a heavy dose of hardcore, mixed with an almost jazzy style of ska. If ther...

A decade ago, the idea of crowd-funding a record was still somewhat novel. One of the earliest successes was, in 2011, when Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy used Kickstarter to raise over $200,000 for a new album—their goal was $30,000. For a lot of people, this seemed out of nowhere. Who was still listening to—not just ska—but Christian ska? A lot of people were.  But Five Iron Frenzy was not...

For the last fifteen years, Louisiana doom metal band Thou has filled eardrums with unsettling noise, and guttural screams. They are a magnificent group, one of the few sludge metal bands that gets accolades from music critics at typically-tame venues like NPR. However great this attention has been, the critics at NPR have failed to ask Thou one specific, but incredibly important question: Do they...

Los Angeles has one of the best ska scenes in the country. A huge part of that is because, in LA’s Latino neighborhoods, ska is really popular. Over the past decade, festivals like Los Angeles Skawars & L.A. Skacore Invasion have brought thousands of kids out to local parks and underground spaces to skank with all their might and sing along to their favorite bands. These festivals are strictly...

The late ’90s were a busy time for Steve Choi. While he was playing drums in the punk band The Blockheads—a band that Lookout Records were considering signing— Mike Park invited him to join his new all-Asian ska-punk group The Chinkees. At the same time, he moved to Santa Cruz and filled in on various instruments with Slow Gherkin . Oh and somewhere in there, he played keyboards with The Specials...

In 1999, Long Island ska band Edna’s Goldfish got a few plays on MTV with the video for their ultra-catchy song “Veronica Sawyer.” Behind the scenes, the group was being courted by major labels wanting to “take them to the next level.” But the band’s indifference to label support and the changing tides away from ska in the mainstream ultimately flat-lined any of these plans. They broke up in 2000...

Touring as an indie musician often leads to playing unexpected spaces. When my band, Flat Planet, toured the US in the mid-90s, we played skate parks, backyards, public parks, recording studios, trailer parks, and one time we played in the middle of the desert, thirty miles from Las Vegas with nothing but a generator and a few lights. Adam Davis , co-host of this podcast, also played a ton of DIY...

Brent Lawrence Friedman has seen all sides of the music industry. He’s booked tours and done marketing for various ska and punk band (MxPx, Goldfinger, Five Iron Frenzy , Mr. T. Experience). His current gig is “merch fulfillment” for Skatune Network , Kill Lincoln , and other ska groups. He also plays drums in the group We Are The Union . When he’s not doing any of those things, he’s frantically p...

Music critics love Joyce Manor’s blend of Jawbreaker, The Smiths, Guided By Voices and Weezer—and cite these influences with delight. But in every conversation music bloggers have about the band, they fail to mention the role that ska has had on Joyce Manor singer-songwriter Barry Johnson.  Skaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!! As a teenager, Barry fell in love with ska. His introduction to indie rock even came fro...

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin was a founding member of East Bay ska-core band Link 80. The band members started playing together in 1993 while they were young teens. Their first album, 17 Reasons, was released in 1997 on Asian Man Records —the first official release on the label not including albums that were brought over from Dill Records. 17 Reasons is a truly unique ska-punk record that blends hardcore...

Santa Cruz, California is best known for its primo surf spots and as the location of the classic 80s horror-comedy The Lost Boys. You can still hear reverberations of “sexy sax man” Tim Cappello singing “I still believe” right there on the outdoor stage at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. But during the 90s, ask any local what band best defined the city, and they would without a doubt say Slow Gher...

I met comedian Keith Lowell Jensen shortly after I moved to Sacramento in 2013. We first got to know each other when I interviewed him for the local newspaper, Sacramento News and Review, but soon became friends. Before the pandemic, we were getting wieners on a regular basis. (It technically started as hot dogs for lunch, but soon wieners became synonymous with hanging out) Of the many things we...

Raise your hand if you’ve never been in a ska band. I don’t see many hands up. That’s because most of us have been in a ska band at one point in our lives. And no matter how big (or small) that band was, it was really important. To you, at least. My band, Flat Planet, went on three DIY tours, released 2 demo tapes, and recorded a full-length album that was never released. If you’re not from Gilroy...