Billy Bragg Ruining Ska

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

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[tachosomoza]

This is not ska. I...I don't know what this is.

[Futility Personified]

I haven't heard this in yonks.... Been riding high on the nostalgia train recently, thanks for posting this. As for ruining ska? I assume the title is joking ;) Billy boy does good with his voice. Lovely song.

[#FF0000]

that isn't fair all of third wave deserves some credit too

[Futility Personified]

What actually qualifies as third wave? All 90s American ska?

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

that isn't fair all of third wave deserves some credit too

Yea I should have made myself clear because this thread isn't just about hate. I'm trying to make a point here. ska is my favorite genre and I love third wave stuff. I made this thread just to highlight how absurd lefty music is. Billy Bragg is the perfect metaphor for leftism, an aging social democrat whose music is stuck in the muck of 1920's folk that was getting kinda old back then. All he can do is cling to some nostalgic concept of "workerism" and worker's music that has nothing to do with what the world really is like but what he thinks his childhood was and what he wishes it was. It's all just sing songy bullshit that is increasingly out of touch with reality. Take this for example

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all in perfect meter and with nursery school rhymes, whining about how those darn kids aren't as good and wholesome as they were in the old days back when they had a worker's movement to fight all this propaganda! (even though shit was never like that). This whole song is just some moralizing about how American consumer culture is corrupting our youth and how we need to put it down on our activist schedule as "The Next Thing We Need To Hold A Protest About Once We Are Done Protesting Other Shit On The Other Half Of The World That We Have No Control Over" It's just lefty activist bullshit that removes any political agency from the working people while simultaneously glorifying a non existent past when those heroic muscular white blue collar construction men followed the leaders of the Holy and Sacred Workers Movement (you know, hippies, white boys, students and trust fund kiddies, the vanguard of the proletariat)

Or at least that's what I'm pretty sure it is, I remember trying to listen to it a couple years back and stopping half way through because it was just so obnoxiously bad.

Now compare it to this

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This shit fucking speaks to me. God all of those days wondering alone on the sidewalk, waiting for a ride, or just fucking bored out of my mind, wandering into the city, not able to stand another minute in the cookie cutter suburbs, thinking is this the world, was it always like this, will it always be like this, is this the end, the beginning, or just the way it is. and that nagging suspicion in the back of your head that it's all just you, your just an idiot, that thought which cuts deeper than the pavement and the dull drab of the sidewalk. No sing songy bullshit, no cheap gimmicks, just a monologue and some great instrumentals. That kind of shit has got some real meaning, real punch. There's no agenda there, its just one of us living life and expressing it through music. That is folk. What billy bragg and other lefty nostalgists forget is that the whole point of folk was to be real through a medium that was familiar to people on a day to day basis. It wasn't about the shity rhyming and the cheesy meter or any bit of the actual form, it was the content and the context it existed in. And as long as these musicians cling to a form that has been dead since the 19th century and to a time when they were relevant, then they'll forever be out of touch with a world that is changing and evolving past them.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

P. Sure thar shit was already ruined by white dorks trying to "rock out" too hard.
Still we can blame Billy Bragg for ruining the Internationale.

[tallguy]

That's not ska.

This is ska:

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[ed miliband]

Lol billy Bragg isn't a workerist, he goes on on twitter about how the working class's doesn't exist anymore and voted lib dem in the last election. He's what he always was, a soft leftist and nothing more.

[tachosomoza]

Billy Bragg's alright, even though he's a bourgeois socialist at best. Waiting for the Great Leap Forward is one of my favorite songs.

[Futility Personified]

I think that's unfair to an extent, not all of Billy Bragg's songs are like that. A lot of his love songs are quite good, Tank Park Salute is extremely moving and To Have And To Have Not is a classic. His politics might be shitty, his folk paradigm might be antagonistic to the "relatable" factor of agit-prop, but in the lovely subjective field of music, i'd wager that more people turn leftwards through Billy Bragg popping up in some punk reference than they do from third wave ska bands.

EDIT: Also, Levi Stubbs Tears is powerful, my enthusiasm and thus knowledge of third wave (or what I understand it to be) is not high, but as a song with implications of domestic violence it provokes more thought about patriarchy than say, Date Rape.

[brigadista]

Billy Bragg is a little englander

[Skyhilist]

that isn't fair all of third wave deserves some credit too

Hey don't be hating on my guys in Streetlight Manifesto

[Sentinel]

Billy Bragg allways pissed me off for thinking he had the authority to rewrite the english version of The Internationale - with the result that people actually think those are the original lyrics now, and thus that is the only version which is abundantly available online.

I didn't know he had become a liberal now too. That's fucking brilliant if you think about it.

[Bostana]

Music now-a-days. The fucking Neon Trees are considered Alt. Rock! Ha! Music is dead

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Music now-a-days. The fucking Neon Trees are considered Alt. Rock! Ha! Music is dead

Yeah there is no golden age when pop-music was great or anything...
Dumb false nostalgia.

[Ele'ill]

ska is terrible anyways

[juljd]

Billy Bragg is a great musician. A lot of his stuff is incredible. He's funny as hell during his live performances too.

[human strike]

I remember when he visited a uni occupation we organised and gave us a patronising lecture on political activism; like we didn't know a million times more than him about that already. We invited him to play music and show solidarity, not to take the piss.