Ska is one of those perennial bubbling-under-the-surface music genres. "Ska is dead" has the same valence (none) as "punk is dead"; it's never been true, it will never be true. Ska, like punk, is not dead, it's lying in ambush, and will strike when you least expect.

Ska is on an upswing right now, and tedious people have been calling for a "fourth wave" for a few years. Meanwhile, diehards like We Are The Union, and Reel Big Fish, and even (until Terry died in 2022) The Specials carried on skanking like they always did, Jer of Skatune Network dragged ska into the future by the hair, and a whole raft of new bands (none of whom I know much about, but check out literally everyone on Bad Time Records) cropped up without much caring what Billboard thought about it.

But let's jump back a minute and look at one of those diehard third-wave bands that're still out there doing it: Catch 22, and their first album, "Keasbey Nights".

Tomas Kalnoky, Catch 22's first singer, hated "Keasbey Nights". He hated it so much that he completely redid it with Streetlight Manifesto, the band he formed after he left Catch 22. The reasons he hated it had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with capitalism: underfunded production, Victory Records' desire to milk it and their listeners to death, and a basic desire to have made something that, to Tomas' mind, was actually worth thirteen bucks to someone for whom that might be a lot of money.

So the Streetlight Manifesto version of "Keasbey Nights" is the superior version, better than the original in every respect, and everyone agrees on this point except for everyone who doesn't. But I want to talk about the first iteration.

I've been trying to write this post for weeks, because as usual I don't really know what to say about it. I've never been a ska guy, which I tried to make clear; Catch 22 and Operation Ivy were the only ska bands I ever really got into back in the day. I got into Op Ivy because I loved Rancid, and I got into Catch 22 after hearing the title track. It's a fun, bouncy, upbeat little number about never giving up without a fight:

When they come for me, I'll be sitting at my desk
With a gun in my hand, wearing a bulletproof vest
Singing, "My my my, how the time does fly,
When you know you're gonna die by the end of the night."

Cheery stuff! This is the tone for the entire album, laughing in the face of destruction and remembering when you felt like you were immortal. It's not nostalgia, not exactly. Catch 22 wants you to know how much it fucking sucked to be a kid, how growing up poor and hard-scrabble was and is shit, but also how it's okay not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Getting older and getting a better idea of your place in the world doesn't mean you have to accept it. You don't have to give up. And being an adult can fucking suck too, and life is hard, and we all deal with it, but you don't have to give up, right up until the lights finally go out. Don't wait for me, I got a lot to do.

And in the end maybe I'll see you there.