My daughter announced that my husband is the most embarrasing father in the whole wide world because of his earrings and that 80's music is very scary.
My brother burned two CD's for her, one of contemporary music (Usher, Sean Paul, MisTeeq etc.) and one 80's CD which she thought was horrible, except Can You Feel The Beat by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. We listened to the CD on the way home and jammed. Rob Base, Whodini, Jody Whatley, Shannon, UB40-it was a lot of fun, but man did it make us feel old! I think my daughter almost melted in terror right then and there.
No matter how young you are when you first become parents, there is always that generation gap.
Wanna know what makes me feel old? The fact that you refer to today's music as "contemporary" and 80's music as just that. Any time someone uses a five-syllable word to describe mostly (imho) crappy music, it makes me feel old ;)
(my biggest beef with "contemporary" music is that these kids can't spell - or choose not to, in order to be "cool" - and they're making millions because of it)
Yikes! I thought the point of surviving the 1980's was that one didn't have to listen to Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam anymore!
I like UB40, though only through Geoffrey Morgan (OK, Rat in the Kitchen was kind of cool, too), but as someone who played professionally in a ska/reggae band, I earned my right to be snobby about that.
My votes for best non-ska/punk/reggae pop music of the 80's:
Culture Club (yes, I know, Boy George is hardly a role model, but their music was really quite good)
Duran Duran (they defined the DX-7 as a pop instrument)
Cyndi Lauper
The Police
Depeche Mode (I can't believe I am admitting to liking them)
Howard Jones (too bad he was only a three hit wonder - quite a talented lad)
Ma..Ma...no, I can't admit to liking her through "La Isla Bonita" It was really the producers who were good. She never could sing that well
Bananarama (yes, I know, they should probably fall under my ska list, as they were a Two Tone backup group, but their solo stuff was definitely not ska, and they were a good pop band)
Dire Straits
INXS
Elvis Costello
I am not going to get into the various sub-genres that were good in the eighties, just the mainstream pop.
Erik,
You played in a reggae band? Will the wonders never cease!
I don't care about Boy George's role modelness, he looked way too ridiculous for anyone to take him seriously, but they made good music.
Lisa Lisa was a lot of fun. The reason why my brother dug her up is because there is a current song by Nina Skye (spelling) that samples Lisa Lisa and it is terrible and non-creative. She needed to hear the real thing.
Pansy,
Yes, about 14 years ago. We were mostly a ska band, but we would venture into rocksteady and reggae (it helped us get gigs. By having a few straight ahead reggae songs we could get hired to open up for touring acts). We were pretty much Two Tone focused, though. No dreads. We wore black suits for the most part.
Once in awhile I miss it. I don't miss the constant low-paying gigs, driving three hours afterwards, etc. The music was great fun. There just aren't any good ska bands anymore, although there are good post-punk Mexican bands that draw heavily from ska.
Come to think of it, the Mexican post-punk bands are about the only pop acts worth listening to these days.
Two things, first one is for Erik;
1.What gets me is these "alternative" radio stations that make claims that bands like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana,Green Day,etc led the "musical revolution that continues today". Excuse me?? All they are doing is imitating bands like Black Flag,Bad Brains,English Beat and Husker Du!
2. Has anyone actually seen the reto-80's trend yet? We were at the mall the other week and there were these two teenage girls dressed to the nines in these big fur lined soft leather boots,HUGE belts frilly lace Madonna styled miniskirts and the shirt off the shoulder thing. I about died! I told my wife I really had never seen anyone in the 80's (that I can recall)dressed like that except in maybe a John Hughes movie! But I was a punk rocker and spent a great deal of time drinking, making my hair stand straight up and hating the government, so what do I know? ahhhh, youth.
My husband was in a ska band that played jazzy stuff in the style of the Skatalites, for example. Anyway, what's with the comment boxes today?? I scrolled too fast and I can't even see the beginning of the ska band comment exchange that I'm sort of replying to here.
Husker Du!
My eldest daughter had a radio show where she played the 70s at 7 and the 80s at 8 (KRVM-FM, Eugene OR). It was followed by a heavy metal show at 9. Her dad kept threatening to make her play "Heavy Metal Poisoning" as her outro.
Having met Erik, I can easily picture him in a reggae/ska band. What I can't picture is Melanie going along with that.
I wonder if the Wiggles do any ska stylings.
Husker Du did a brilliant version of The Byrds "8 miles high", I absolutely loved that song.
I based about two months of my high school years on Husker Du's version of "8 miles high" ... for me, though, it is still all about the Minutemen ...
I am soooooo lost. I have never heard of "ska" music, Husker Du or the Skatellites. I had to ask my brother this morning what ska is and the best answer we came up with was rock music with a touch of reggae influence.
I have always listened to reggae, and it is like my favourite type of music. I think Bob Marley is one of the best artists in modern times. But I always preferred what we used to call "dancehall reggae"-Shabba Ranks, Supercat, Cutty Ranks, Chaka Demus, Whorl-A-Girl and the latest-Sean Paul.
I also used to love Maxi Priest which was just always reggae.
But just in tthe 80's in general, I never listened to Depeche Mode, Howard Jones, Duran Duran. I knew some of the music because that was all they played on MTV/VH-1, but I found it dreary. I was a big KRS-1 (Boogie Down Productions), EPMD, Run DMC,Lisa Lisa, Rob Base, Kid n Play,Dougie Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew, Slick Rick, LL Cool J, etc. In 89 I loved SoulII Soul, Caron Wheeler, D-Nice, Deee-lite but we are drifting into the 90's there. If I was not listening to hip hop or reggae, I was listening to house music or plain old R and B.
Ska is a faster Jamaican music that was one of the predecessors of reggae. I believe Bob Marley started out recording ska music. It also uses the off-beat and stuff... took forever for me to understand what the off-beat is, even though I could always hear it!
Anyway, I guess "first-wave" ska was Jamaican stuff, "second-wave" was a (mostly?) British revival -- ever heard of the Specials? Strangely, even though my husband ... uh ... I think played in a "third-wave" ska band, I'm having the most trouble defining it, unless it just means "the '90s revival that made it briefly popular in America." My husband was no fan of ska-punk and his band recorded and performed covers of Jamaican ska, well-known jazz tunes (Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker) in a ska style, and originals in a similar vein, as well as a handful of other stuff.
MO-
When I asked my brother what ska was and part of his description seemed like rock with reggae influence, but he said "that's what it is now, but it wasn't before..." but we still were not sure what it was.
I do know Bob Marley basically changed what reggae was. But I was born in 1972 and that's the very start of his career. What was before then is somewhat of a mystery to me. I am pretty sure it was not very mainstream prior to Marley and that was one way in which he changed reggae.
Before ska was mento, a fairly relaxed style of music that was pretty strictly indigenous to Jamaica, as Calypso was to Trinidad.
Two things happened to change Jamaican music. First, you had extremely talented musicians learning the jazz and early rock hits to play for the tourists in resorts (and subsequently developing an amazing musical vocabulary). Second you had sound system operators who would go to the United States to buy records, mostly soul and R and B. These influences combined with mento were the birth of ska. The Skatalites, with Don Drummond and Roland Alphonso were the premier ska band. They (or other combinations of more or less the same musicians) were the studio band for Sir Coxone Dodd's Studio One where a young vocal band, known as the Wailing Wailers, featuring Peter MacIntosh, got a start. When their charismatic singer, Robert Nesta Marley (later Sir Robert Nesta Marley, OBE or one of those orders), took more of a lead in forming the sound, reggae was born.
The ska that most Americans know was the Two Tone ska of the 1980's, named for the English label (the two tones being black and white, as these bands were always integrated). Some of them, like the Specials, came to ska trying to combine punk and reggae and stumbled on the older style of ska.
Other Two Tone bands would be The Selector, Madness, and The Beat (known in America as The English Beat).
In California we had a fairly major ska revival in the late 1980's, early 1990's, fueled, in part, by Mexican American trumpet players, who had amazing chops, were interested in punk-related music, and found something simpatico in the off-beat (sort of like what you find in the bandas of the musica tambora style from Sinaloa).
The only band of that revival to make it big was No Doubt, a bunch of suburban white kids from Orange County with a good looking girl singer named Gwen Stefani. When they crossed over, they pretty much dropped the ska, which was sensible, since they were never a very good ska band, drawing crowds mostly because of the good looking Stefani (they used to open for us).
The Dance Hall reggae that Pansy refers to came out of a style called "slack" which owes a lot of its sound to a strange, mysoginistic albino named Yellowman (he really was yellow - I have no idea if he is still alive). There are purists who claim that it is something else entirely, and not really reggae. Purists tend to stay up late at night worrying about this sort of thing. I am not a purist (at least in these matters).
For a good history of ska, reggae and the like, I highly recommend Dick Hebdige's Cut-n-Mix, which is well researched and an entertaining read.
For a good introduction to early ska, check out Proper Music's incredibly cheap (around $20), Deep Ska, a 4 CD collection of essentials. Good stuff.
For Steve, I would say that these boring late-80's bands DID begin a musical revolution, one of pale imitation, insipid lyrics, lousy songwriting, and so forth. They were the ones who digested the real trailblazers and made it safe for the countless drek bands out there. They are why there is essentially no pop music anymore (notice how the very notion of Top 40 is meaningless?).
By the way, Pansy, one of the best shows I ever saw was the Beastie Boys opening for Run DMC. That was sometime in the mid-1980's. Great show.
The Dance Hall reggae that Pansy refers to came out of a style called "slack" which owes a lot of its sound to a strange, mysoginistic albino named Yellowman (he really was yellow - I have no idea if he is still alive). Finally a name I am familiar with.
Wow Erik, thanks for taking the time to explain that history because I was really baffled.
Besides that yucky 80's British stuff that was very depressing, the second revival you mention on the West Coast-I am thinking it was not a trend over here-hence my utter cluelessness. But again, while that revival was going on we were doing Dance Hall in The Village.
I have also heard the whole Dance Hall not pure argument, but those 3 people were sitting at home by themselves with that other one guy I knew who insisted on smoking marijuana only rolled in corn husk blunts because it was healthier for you while the other 97% of young adult Jamaicans I knew were jamming at clubs to Dance Hall-LOL. Maybe we were sell outs-all of us-but thems were the days.
Beastie Boys and Run DMC, I remember that tour. I was not allowed to go because I was too young.