Songs of '83: "Our House"

Ska! I'm sure I didn't know the word when I first heard this delightfully bonkers song by the great two-tone band Madness on the radio sometime in 1983 (it first arrived on the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week), but for a short time around 10 years later, no musical label would mean more to me.

Insofar as my grand thesis regarding the watershed year of 1983 in finally getting American pop radio to wake up to (and perhaps uncomfortably respond to) the multi-racial and sexually fluid character of the club music of urban centers across Europe and the U.S., disco and its aftermath definitely comes first--but ska is a close second. The path which Jamaican ska and reggae made their way to England and infected the post-punk stylings of many mid- to late-70s British bands is hard to ignore; the Police titled their second album, released in 1979, Reggatta de Blanc (essentially, "White Reggae"), and The Pretenders's Chrissie Hynde that same year sang about have "a new skank" in "Brass in Pocket." The two-tone ska revival fused the bass lines of rocksteady with punk and pop guitars, with a lot of horns along the way. Not much of it made it on to American radio--though the reggae band UB40 would, in 1988, find a suprise number 1 American hit on their hands with their cover of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine," a track off the album Labour of Love, which as also released in 1983. But in the meantime, the influence of mixed-race bands like Selector, English Beat, the Specials, and of course Madness, became a go-to soundtrack for parties for certain small group of 1980s American hipsters...

...which, weirdly enough, by the very early 1990s, suddenly because almost mainstream in Provo, Utah, where I arrived back to continue my schooling at Brigham Young University after a couple of years as a missionary in South Korea. Perhaps the local ska obsession had been building through the late 1980s, but I was either stuck on campus or gone during those years, and so can't speak to that. But it didn't take me long to discover upon returning to Happy Valley that ska was what all the honors kids and underground newspaper writers and troublemakers at BYU were listening to: two-tone stuff, but also reaching back to the Skatalites, and searching out the latest ska-punk stuff from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt, The Pietasters, and others as well. I'd go to see local bands like Stretch Armstrong or Swim Herschel Swim, or later Special Beat (a combined tour of English Beat and The Specials jamming together that came to Utah) or the late, great Crazy 8s, and they'd play plenty of original stuff--but in my head, echoes of a ska sound that I'd been introduced to close to a decade before, and had never had a name for, was all I heard.