The end of the summer of 1995 marked a new beginning for dad’s old formalwear.
"Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac—yeah!" sing the boys from Rancid on "Time Bomb", a standout track from their excellent third album, …And Out Come the Wolves, released 20 years ago last week. They’re talking about a tattooed hoodlum headed for disaster, but the wardrobe they describe—and the perky, jerky music replacing their usual Cali street-punk—nods to Walt Jabsco, the cartoon mascot of Britain’s legendary 2 Tone ska label. Old Walty even turns up in the video.
If the success of "Time Bomb" (No. 8 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart) sparked renewed interest in all things 2 Tone, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom sent even more American teens rummaging through closets for old sports coats and ties. As Gwen Stefani and her bandmates promoted that breakthrough effort—released weeks after Wolves, on October 10—they gave props to 2 Tone heroes like Madness and the Specials. They even one-upped Rancid by putting Specials lead singer Terry Hall in their "Sunday Morning" video.
The 2 Tone imprint and the early-'80s UK working-class youth movement it spawned had a tremendous influence on Stefani, Rancid founder Tim Armstrong, and the handful of other American kids who formed ska bands during the Reagan years. (Before Rancid, Armstrong had Operation Ivy, ska-punk OGs who followed in the footsteps of pioneers like Fishbone and the Toasters.) Their attempts to emulate and update the 2 Tone sound—a punky English take on the Jamaican R&B variant that eventually became reggae—laid the groundwork for an unlikely American ska boom in the mid-'90s. For a few years there, a subset of Warped Tour kids and MTV viewers unmoved by post-grunge and nu-metal undertook the pre-broadband research needed to learn about the antiracist, pro-feminist, multiracial groups that made 2 Tone such a phenomenon.
Fast-forwarding to today, three of 2 Tone’s original heavyweights—the English Beat, the Selecter, and Bodysnatchers frontwoman Rhoda Dakar—are releasing new albums in the coming months. These LPs arrive at a time when race and gender issues dominate popular discourse like they haven’t in years, and yet the timeliness or timelessness of 2 Tone’s messages isn’t even a discussion. If anyone’s clamoring for another ska resurgence, they’re clamoring very quietly. The silence speaks volumes about how this music tends to manifest itself in the U.S.
When ska bum-rushed the MTV Beach House in the '90s, bands like No Doubt and the similarly long-running Mighty Mighty Bosstones were unique in their roots reverence and relative lack of goofiness. They played fast and loose with genre constraints yet never played the music for laughs. This bears mentioning because ska can easily devolve into circus music. It’s inherently upbeat, with up-stroked, offbeat, quick-tempo guitars that pair nicely with trumpets and trombones. Originally the soundtrack to Jamaica’s independence, it’s danceable even when deadly serious, and it’s no accident that punk-tinged party bands like Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake were the biggest '90s breakouts.
In fairness, there were more traditional 2 Tone- and Jamaican-style ska acts hitting '90s listeners with potent messages. But as the "third wave" movement drew converts from the punk scene, politics weren’t necessarily central to the plot. When bands did sing about racism, they often came across as self-congratulatory and ran the risk of preaching to the choir. (According to a Chicago Reader article, the Ska Against Racism tour organized in 1998 by Skankin’ Pickle founder Mike Park attracted predominantly white, apolitical audiences and raised a mere $23,000 for antiracist charities.)
In places like suburban Connecticut, where a robust ska scene warranted a 1999 compilation called, naturally, Welcome to Skannecticut, there was nothing like the racial and gender diversity that had characterized 2 Tone. Many bands had black and female members, and the scene was probably more inclusive than the hardcore, metal, or jam-band communities, but a big part of 2 Tone’s legacy was its ability to unite black and white British youth on a large-scale level. Between July 1979 and August 1980, the label’s first seven singles went Top 20 in the UK, and it wasn’t just white kids buying those records. It was people like Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, then a young woman of Indian descent finding her place in London.
"For my coming of age, it really was the first time there was something around I felt a part of," Chadha says in the excellent 2004 documentary 2 Tone Britain. "It was a part of Britishness I could definitely buy into."
And she wasn’t being sucked in by savvy marketing. In launching 2 Tone, Specials keyboardist and mastermind Jerry Dammers was simply responding to what he saw: a nation grappling with racial tensions and the rise of right-wing political groups. The mere act of hitting the stage with a half-black, half-white band and singing "A Message to You, Rudy"—the title and lyric a reference to the troublemaking Jamaican "rude boys" whose gangster duds inspired the label’s logo and aesthetic—was nothing short of revolutionary.
This gets at why America can’t really be blamed for getting ska wrong. When the Specials were issuing frantic urban battle reports like "Concrete Jungle" and plainspoken pleas for tolerance like "Doesn’t Make It Alright", it had only been 30 years since a wave of West Indian immigration brought Jamaican culture to Britain’s cities, challenging traditional notions of Englishness. Thanks to newcomers from Kingston, ska and reggae were known quantities—sounds that sometimes went pop but mostly fueled underground dance parties. Some of the first whites to champion the music were members of the skinhead subculture—a working-class movement that, before becoming tainted by white supremacists, borrowed its look and listening habits from Jamaican immigrants.
In America, youth cults like skinhead, rude boy, and mod—all fashionable in Britain during 2 Tone—have never really translated. More crucially, the racial dynamics in the States have always been very different than those that begat 2 Tone. Here, tensions between blacks and whites stem from centuries of slavery and institutional racism. To the extent this ugliness helped birth beautiful music, it’s been in the form of jazz, blues, rock, and soul—not reggae or ska, which by 1980 had really only reached mainstream America via Bob Marley and The Harder They Come.
That history helps to explain why the Specials, the English Beat, and Madness were one- or two-hit wonders in the U.S. Their lack of success might also have had to do with poor marketing, bad luck, or that old criticism about being "too British." Regardless, Americans not hip to New Wave or college radio missed some vibrant artists whose black-and-white contradictions informed everything from their outfits and album art to their songwriting. They were joyous and pissed, hopeless and idealistic, nostalgic and innovative. These contrasts made for some of the most unforgettable records of the post-punk era.
And some of these artists are still suiting up and doing it. On October 2, the Selecter return with Subculture, the third studio album since singer Pauline Black rebooted the band with fellow original vocalist Arthur "Gaps" Hendrickson in 2011. Compared to their stark early records—the tense, trebly Too Much Pressure (1980) and mellower, moodier Celebrate the Bullet (1981)—Subculture is vibrant and colorful. Black no longer sings like the doomsday clock is hanging on the studio wall, but she’s still got that proud, not-quite-pretty voice. She’s part soul blaster, part bobby siren, and she’s still fighting 2 Tone’s battles.
After wiping the slate clean on hopeful Subculture opener "Box Fresh", a bubbly skanker with an ABBA-worthy piano lick, Black gets down to business. On "Breakdown", a doomy trombone-laced reggae cut reminiscent of the 1981 Specials classic "Ghost Town", Gaps includes Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in a list of young people killed by racial violence. On brave misstep "Babble On", the band uses twisty Middle Eastern horn sounds to underscore Black’s takedown of Israeli-Palestinian violence. "Walk the Walk"—featuring peppy interpolations of "A Message to You, Rudy" and the Blondie-approved Jamaican favorite "The Tide Is High"—is sunnier and more empowering. "If you want to win the fight," Black sings, "make up your own rules."
Offstage, that’s precisely what Black is doing. Born 61 years ago to mixed-race parents (Jewish mother, Nigerian father) and raised by a white working-class adopted family, she’s the embodiment of 2 Tone’s values. Black doesn’t just front the Selecter—she co-writes most of the songs and manages the band. And she’s added a new "ism," ageism, to the list of 2 Tone foes. In a recent interview for The Guardian’s Women In Leadership series, Black spoke openly about the challenges.
After Black, the most notable female figure in 2 Tone was Rhoda Dakar, lead singer for the label’s only all-female band, the Bodysnatchers. The group found fame with a series of terrific singles but split up in 1981 before it could record a full-length. Due out November 6, the aptly titled Rhoda Dakar Sings the Bodysnatchers is billed as the album the septet would’ve made—even though it features an all-male band. Initially funded via PledgeMusic and recorded in a single day, the collection includes five covers, among them "Too Experienced", a soulful Bob Andy reggae tune the ‘Snatchers turned into a kind of feminist anthem.
Like Black, Dakar doesn’t have the prettiest voice, but her warble has a certain '60s-girl-group charm. When her sweetness comes with sarcastic social commentary, as on "Easy Life", Dakar is especially effective: "Hey girls, it's not too late/ To stay home and vegetate/ Just like mamma says you should do/ Like society says you should do."
It’s too bad Dakar didn’t re-do the 1980 single "Ruder Than You", a playful rallying call for young women featuring the warning, "Rude girls, you better watch out/ Rude girls, there’s more of us about." She also nixed "The Boiler", the utterly fearless song about date rape she co-wrote with the Bodysnatchers and recorded with the Special A.K.A. for 1982 release. A terrifying account of sexual assault set to a creepy disco-muzak-ska beat, "The Boiler" ends in horrific screams that somehow didn’t stop the tune from reaching No. 35 on the UK charts. It’s 2 Tone’s most courageous, audacious moment, and even if it could be replicated, there’d be no need.
Slated for early 2016, Here We Go Love, the first new album from New Wave crossover faves the English Beat since 1982, will also be the product of a PledgeMusic drive. Preliminary samples suggest frontman and lone original member Dave Wakeling has toured enough behind the band’s '80s material to know what fans expect: a mix of love and politics smoothed out over blue-eyed soul, punkish guitar-pop, chipper reggae, and of course, ska. With luck, Wakeling will play some new ones when the Beat open for Rancid as part of the East Bay band’s three-day New Year’s Eve bash.
Wakeling and Black are among the artists interviewed in the episode on 2 Tone made for Noisey’s new Under the Influence series, narrated by Armstrong of Rancid. It’s a thoughtful look at the movement and its legacy, but by highlighting the persistence of underground ska acts around the globe—especially the more trad-minded ones—the filmmakers arguably miss the larger lesson of 2 Tone. It’s not just that punk and ska are two great tastes that taste great together, regardless of decade or hemisphere. It’s that two cultures forced to coexist can find common ground and make revolutionary art that actually changes society.
In 1995, if Rancid or Mike Park or anyone were really going to create an American 2 Tone—incendiary, commercially viable music that black and white kids could define themselves by, and that would still yield worthwhile records 35 years later—they wouldn’t have used ska. They’d have done something homegrown and current, probably with rock and hip-hop, and they’d have needed to be a whole lot cleverer than Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine. If it wasn’t impossible then—before the Internet changed everything, and before this latest rash of racial violence reminded us how some things never change—it probably is now.
In any case, black suits and white shoes alone won’t get you there. In 2 Tone Britain, the clothes didn’t make the bands. They made ratchet-sharp messages that much sharper.