Ryan McKern

In the last month I've been to two ska-punk shows with all-or-almost-all-cracker ska bands open­ing up, and one thing is abun­dantly clear to me:

There is a rea­son peo­ple say that white folks have no soul.

I've real­ized that gen­er­ally these cracker bands play ska too fast, too clean, and too mechan­i­cally. They're almost always lack­ing any sort of groove, and their drum­mers are sort of just keep­ing the beat, not con­tribut­ing towards the sound. Dorayne described them as music school stu­dents who dropped out before they learned how to break the music the­ory rules.

Exam­ples? The All­sto­ni­ans, The Agents, Easy Big Fella, Skavoovie and The Epi­tones
Excep­tions? The Pietasters, The Gad­jits, The Slack­ers
Hon­or­able men­tion: The Aggro­lites, who while not a ska band per se, have got more soul and groove than most any ska band out there that isn't Hep­cat.