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Today's Song: The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

dolphonchatter linked this song in a reply to my posting of Amii Stewart's Knock On Wood, saying that I could do a mix tape/song list of "knock on wood" songs. (Actually, if I included all of the different covers of the song Knock On Wood itself, that wouldn't be too hard at all. Sonny & Cher covered it, for example.)

Anyway for me at least, this is one of those songs that I'm familiar with and like quite a bit, but I would never have remembered it without watching the video again. I didn't know the name and hadn't heard it in years, since it was first popular. It's a ska song (because the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are a ska band, naturally) and this got me to thinking. Ska is a music style that probably everyone is a little familiar with but most people don't know that much about. For example, I knew it was related to reggae, but I didn't realize it predates reggae by quite a few years, arising in Jamaica in the 1950's. It's a musical genre that has a very long life and continues to reinvent itself (there have been several "generations" of ska -- "2 Tone" ska arose in the 1970's in England, "Third Wave" ska arose in the United States and elsewhere in the late 1980's), but has somehow remained largely an underground musical movement. Ska bands have had hits here and there over the years, but there's never been a time when ska music dominated the airwaves.

Ska is a jumpy, upbeat style of music that sounds a bit like reggae on fast forward, borrowing from Carribean mento and calypso and American jazz and rhythm and blues. Often there's a horn section, as you hear in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The Bosstones are considered a "third wave" ska band. They're an American band that mixes punk rock and ska, and they were most popular in the mid to late 1990's at the height of the popularity of "third wave" ska.

Even if you don't know what ska is, you're familiar with ska songs from the Bosstones to songs by the Police, No Doubt, Madness, The English Beat, Sublime, and others. Ska has kind of faded from view since the late 1990's, but there are still ska bands around, the same as always.

I only own a few cds by ska bands. I don't own anything by No Doubt or The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (although I probably should) but I own Sublime's most popular cd (although they really are a cross-genre group and can't be shoehorned into just one music style) and I have a couple of cds by the Dance Hall Crashers. For a lot of people, me included, ska starts to all sound the same after a while, but the creme of the crop is always worth listening to. I'm going to feature several more ska songs the rest of this week.

The Impression That I Get - Mighty Mighty Bosstones

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