SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
October 21, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… ska records! PLAYLIST HERE. Series edited by Josh Glenn.
My first instinct was to dive into the bassline of “On My Radio”: relentless, unforgettable. Or maybe the keyboards: vibrant enough to narrate the track themselves.
I was also tempted to unpack the visual language of the 2-Tone “Rude Boy” aesthetic: pork pie hat, sharp suits, razor-thin ties, checkerboard patterns, dark sunglasses, Doc Martens. It’s a fashion code dense with meaning, practically begging for its own thesis.
But I let those ideas go and, in a flicker of dialectical inspiration à la Hegel, took a third path: the lyrics.
“It’s just the same old show on my radio”
I imagined a theoretical roundtable with some heavyweight thinkers. In my mind, Adorno and Horkheimer pull up chairs, carrying the full gravity of Frankfurt School thinking. They’d likely argue that the song exposes radio as part of a larger system, one that transforms creativity into commodity and repetition into anesthesia. The loop is always the same: same songs, same narratives, same emotional cues. All circular.
Then, Louis Hjelmslev joins the conversation, slipping into an open seat. Calmly, he offers his classic distinction between the plane of content and the plane of expression. On the content level, the song speaks of alienation, emotion reduced to formula, melody flattened into jingle. But on the expression level, everything pulses. The arrangement is alive. It’s bright, ironic, almost celebratory. Much like what R.E.M. and Kate Pierson pulled off with “Shiny Happy People” in the early ’90s: a track that sounds joyful on the surface, while quietly smuggling irony beneath its glimmering gloss.
Still, lyrics don’t land with the same weight when just read. They gain power in the body and voice of the one who performs them. And that’s where Pauline Black steps in… and transforms everything. Her presence in “On My Radio” is magnetic: a blend of irony, sweetness, and laser-cut precision. More than performance, it’s embodiment.
That presence (and that clarity) haven’t faded. In 2024, the documentary Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, directed by Jane Mingay and inspired by her memoir Black by Design, traces her path and her rise in one of the most politically charged music movements of the era. In an interview promoting the film (see link below), around the 3:50 mark, she says it plainly: “Not too much has changed.” And that line lands like a quiet, resonant echo from “On My Radio.” *
The repetition the song once critiqued is still here, embedded in culture, in politics, in systems of power.
Because if, in the late ’70s, Pauline was calling out the “same old show” on the radio, today, the set’s been updated, but the plot of repetition hasn’t changed. Just rebranded, and streaming in high definition.
* Here’s an interview with Pauline Black during the release of her documentary.
SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ / Count Ossie’s OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!