SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)
By:
November 4, 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.
While I respect the noble history of novelty songs, I’ve always been pretty allergic to music that sells itself as wacky and goofball. Unfortunately, that whoopie-cushion whiff has lingered around many ska-revival bands. Early exposure to Madness’s version of “One Step Beyond” was a prime mover for me to write off much of the genre. It was a short hop from this song’s lager-mouthed, grunt-spoken intro about the “heavy heavy monster sound” and images of a bunch of big grimacing dudes doing the “nutty train” to thinking, “Well, I’m sure as hell never gonna listen to some band called the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.”
I assume a lot of other white 1980s kids were, like me, unaware that the original ska was a pre-reggae Jamaican form. Madness was a tetch more popular here in Canada than in the U.S., like a lot of English imports, but I was in a small town in southern Ontario, stumbling across things on music-video shows with minimal context. Reggae shadings in rock were extremely familiar, thanks to the large Jamaican diaspora in the Toronto area, but Two Tone was not a concept that made its way to me. I didn’t grasp that there was a connection between Madness and the English Beat, who I liked much better, or the Specials, though I didn’t hear them till “Free Nelson Mandela.” Both those bands were multiracial, which made their sounds seem way more grounded than the jockish, white-lout mugging of Madness, especially in the “One Step Beyond” video. By contrast I liked “Our House,” which sounded more like XTC or something, and didn’t feature the confounding racially tinged playacting.
It was a long time before I learned that “One Step Beyond” was a cover. And not only was the group’s theme song a version of the B-side of the 1964 hit “Al Capone” by Prince Buster (Cecil Bustamente Campbell), one of the founders of ska. Madness took its very name from another Prince Buster song, which they also covered. Their first single, an original called “The Prince,” was about Prince Buster. When Stiff Records co-owner Dave Robinson wanted to put “One Step Beyond” out as the lead single from their first album, the band objected, worrying that they’d come off as just a Prince Buster tribute band. Likewise Chas Smith’s now-famous intro was inspired/cobbled together from the toasting intros to another Buster song, 1968’s “Scorcher” (“don’t watch that, watch this!”) as well as two cuts by the 1970s duo Dave and Ansel Collins, “Monkey Wrenching” (“this is the heavy, heavy monster sound!”) and “Funky Funky Reggae” (“don’t watch that, watch this!” again).
Which is to say, Madness knew their stuff. On the spectrum defined in the title of Eric Lott’s classic 1993 book about minstrelsy, Love and Theft, they definitely had the love, which they came by naturally growing up in multicultural 1970s London alongside many Caribbean immigrants. As for the theft, while I can’t find any clear statement of how much they returned in royalties to Buster and their other sources (no doubt not enough), he joined them on stage at least once and never seemed to feel the need to sue. So they did better by their sources than many white blues rockers like Led Zeppelin — and even as pure-intentioned an artist as Pete Seeger, who helped make the South African composer Solomon Linda’s “Wimoweh”/“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (originally “Mbube”) a hit in the 1950s, without credit or compensation. Linda died in poverty and the family won a settlement only in the 2000s.
Credit and payment are the first things I look for when evaluating the damages done by cultural appropriation, the things that make it cultural expropriation. If we police the simple crossover of sounds and styles too tightly, we start to choke off the possibility of inspiration, and enforce a kind of segregation. Solomon Linda was making a kind of pop rather than just traditional Zulu music, precisely because he was borrowing from Western vaudeville and, yes, minstrelsy. Prince Buster’s ska generation adored American R&B, another hybrid like pretty much all U.S. commercial music. The original ska had its crossover scares too; witness Annette Funicello recording Byron Lee’s “Jamaican Ska” on her Pyjama Party album in 1964 and trying to teach the dance to Bob Hope on TV.
But sloppy mistranslation still can raise sore spots. Listen to Buster’s “One Step Beyond” again. It’s fun, but it isn’t goofy. It’s laid back and jazzy, not “nutty.” It’s full of this awesome mouth percussion that appeared in places in 1960s Jamaican music that now reads as a clear antecedent to beat boxing. You might say that Madness’s version is pushier simply because of its punk attitude. It’s also much less considered than some of Madness’s other ska covers, because it had really just been used live as a kind of entrance fanfare; to make it into a single, the 1:10 instrumental had to be looped, with a harmonizer used the second time through, to make the repetition sound fresh. But the exaggeration can also feel, however unintentionally, like caricature. Like it comes from a nation in which the two-decade BBC-TV run of the grotesque Black and White Minstrel Show had ended only one year earlier. One where the National Front was sending provocateurs into Two-Tone shows not only to pick fights but to convert some confused fans into racist skinheads, even as Rock Against Racism was trying to pull them the other way.
Artistically all borders need to be porous, but that also makes them high-risk zones. Madness backed away from the ska influence, in fact, as their pop career matured, and realized that what they most essentially shared with their West Indian neighbours was their working-class politics. But the monstrous part of that monster sound still lurks under the floorboards where the white kids skank and mosh, their laughter entangled with its roars.
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) | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | 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 | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | 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!