Hippies vs. Punks: 2 Tone Ska

The Specials original lineup had already split by the time I got to the university, but their albums -- The Specials (1979) and More Specials (1980) -- were everywhere and widely played. I was in high school when the band appeared on Saturday Night Live. I remember thinking, "Wow! That's something new."

It appealed to me. It's what I felt. When I danced, if I danced, I did the pogo, not because I thought I was doing something; jumping up and down just felt intuitively like the only thing to be done. My friends and I weren't listening to The Specials in high school though; we were listening to Devo and The B-52s  and The Cars and Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. But once I was away at college in California my freshman classmates quickly turned me on to ska.

You couldn't go to a party without hearing "Concrete Jungle" or "A Message to You, Rudy." Even bigger than The Specials and The Selecter (another 2 Tone Records band) was The English Beat. Special Beat Service (1982) had recently come out and a friend who I had met in a political science survey course told me I should get a copy; I did, a cassette, and I played it religiously along with the two other English Beat albums, I Just Can't Stop It (1980) and Wha'ppen? (1981), that I picked up at Rasputin's on Telegraph.

These ska bands form at the tail end --1978 and 1979 -- of the period we've been looking at every Friday evening. By the end of the 1970's the Hippies have vacated the vanguard. A transformation has occurred. The Hippies are now mainstream. The Utopian ideals are gone, along with the Eastern myticism and the rejection of workaday rat race commercial Western culture. The long hair and "Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll" are all that remain. Bands like Blue Öyster Cult, Scorpions, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Def Leppard, AC/DC, and Van Halen -- one could go on and on -- rule the day. Arena rock. Heavy Metal, man. The This Is Spinal Tap descent into parody. Just when blue-collar work begins its decades-long process of bleeding out, the lumpenproletariat take up the Hippie's mantle. And lo and behold! The Hippie disappears, replaced by the Headbanger (or, as he was referred to in my high school, "Dirtbag").

This is really what Punk is a reaction to. Not the seminal Hippie bands from the 1960's -- The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, et al. -- and what they stood for. No, Punk is a response to the squalid teenage wasteland of the suburban 1970's captured so accurately in the 1979 film Over the Edge:

"Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll" -- Hippiedom without any belief in or hope for liberation. Punk was a reaction to this supine hedonism. Punk was a blast of pure energy purifying the wasteland. Ska as an integral part of the Post-Punk landscape of the late 1970's/early 1980's is proof that Punk was not consumed entirely with destruction; a positive program existed. Colorful, interracial, politically progressive, tolerant, inclusive, dance oriented -- ska of the late 1970's/early 1980's is the sound of a better future. That's what I thought a few years back when I had an English Beat compilation loaded on my iPod. "In 1982 this was to be our future, and it was a future so much brighter than anybody is imagining today." Our brightest future is always in the past.