all the news that print will fit.
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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005 np: whiskeytown - pneumonia time to do a bit of admitting: i really like those "i love the (INSERT DECADE HERE)" shows on VH1. well, that deserves a qualification. i loved both of the "i love the 80s" shows. the "i love the 70s" didn't do it for me 'cos, well, i wasn't alive then. and i didn't care much for the first go-round of the "i love the 90s" shows. it felt way too soon to be looking back on them. especially for a decade that has yet to give us an easy, generalizing way to pin it down. but this new run-through of the 90s has had me eagerly lapping it up. mostly because it's downright hilarious. so why have the 90s yet to give us a defining theme? it even complicates inside jokes. my roomate and i adopted the phrase "ocean" to describe anything that is very uniquely 80s. that in itself is a long story, but to make a long story short, it more or less goes back to this cartoon. read it and understand. our term for 90s things gets a bit more complex. we sat down one evening and tried to come up with some sort of trend or eggregiously 90s thing. what we came up with is "ska." now, i can hear music geeks chomping at the bit, and don't worry, as one of you myself i hear your concerns. ska as a music style has existed since roughly the 1950s and its commercial peak on american 'alternative' radio in the 90s is hardly representative of the genre as a whole. true. however, third-wave ska was so omni-present for those years (and then so omni-missing) that it was the perfect choice to represent the 90s. but then again we had a problem. things didn't fit very neatly into the decade as a whole. it seemed that early, mid and late 90s all had separate styles. and that's where the true genius of selecting the catch-all word "ska" came in. ska has had, roughly, three major movements in its storied history. there is first-wave ska (this is the ska of the 60s like the skatellites), second-wave or two-tone ska (this is the 80s version, best represented by the brilliant british band the specials) and then finally third-wave ska (which ran from the mighty mighty bosstones to the voodoo glow skulls to truly abhorrent commercial nadirs like save ferris. sorry jeremy). and so, each branch of ska came to represent a different section of the decade. por ejemple: J: "So, I was watching American Movie Classics and House Party came on." J^2: *laughs* "Oh, man, House Party is so first-wave ska." and so forth and so on. now you may think that this sounds like the vapid meanderings of 20-somethings who sit around drinking imported beers and reminiscing about pop-culture of their youth too much and. but i assure you there is a step-by-step answer to... oh, man! step-by-step is so two-tone ska. i wonder where sasha mitchell is now a days. posted by J. Neas | 1/19/2005 10:11:00 PM
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