… and sometimes, you don't even have that. Because some times, or some places, or some head spaces, just aren't right or ready for dancing.

So. Ska + Hard Core Punk = Ska-Core

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones have a long, established career of slapping a bunch of different things together and coming up with something brilliant. Something that works. Something that inspires others and endures. Really, for me, nobody ever made ska-core quite the way they do. A few bands come close, for sure, here and there. But in the end, aside from, say, Rancid, they tend to leave me wanting to reach for another Bosstones album instead.

With The Killing of Georgie Part III, they pulled from a '70s Rod Stewart song on the tragic murder of a gay friend, a sampling of current attitudes & vibes across this country, Aeschylus, a ~500 BC Greek poet – attributed by some as the father of tragedy – quoted by RFK on the assassination of MLK, MLK himself, current events specifically the brutal killing of George Floyd, and a sincere desire for togetherness, hope, and justice in the face of  EVERYTHING .

They made something that – for those of us who "get" them – worked. More or less. It's not my favorite song on the album, but it's one of the ones that catches my ear. I don't think it among the best of their bestest work, but I like it quite a bit, and think it is pretty damned good, – the build up at the end is intensely good. I had, with some background worry in my gut, hoped people would "get it." It's hard to say how much background worry, because I have a long list of weighty worries both old and new that tend to reside in my gut most of the time.

I spent my previous post getting into some details. Feel free to take a moment and get acclimated through that.

Regardless of the song or whether the video was appropriate for the material, my pandemic life really needed four and a half minutes of Ben Carr dancing through a mostly-empty Boston, with bonus appearances toward the end from members of the Doped-Up-Dollies. He could have danced to anything, even a song I hate from a band I can't stand, and I would have happily watched it repeatedly (tho' probably with some other song-of-choice playing over it), and it would have made my heart sing every time.

​But the world is very very very complicated, and nothing gets the luxury of being viewed only exactly as intended. 

Particularly these days.

Enter some who, at a glance, may have been little more than pot-stirrers with perhaps not fully honorable motives, add the general tendencies of the internet, and you get… some heavy misunderstanding and unnecessarily crude escalation. It's impossible to measure how much or little any of them actually know of the band, nor how much or little the desire to "trend" spurred them on.

Regardless of whether the intentions of the internets were legitimately noble, I can't say they didn't have a point about a certain angle of view.

On the surface, a white guy dancing to an up-beat sounding song that, among other things, references the brutal murder of a Black man by police … it's not great optics. Pretty dissonant, from a particular angle.

But most or even all of this combination of critics and trolls also – willfully – ignored the Bosstones' decades of genuine, hard, anti-racist work – both inside and outside their music – and the actual multi-racial composition of the band. I wonder if they bothered to check some details, like the credited co-authors of this song in particular, before dishing out the disingenuous half-baked hot-takes for all to see.

But The Inertnet cares not about those things, once it's been encouraged or directed to think about a particular thing in a particular way. As time goes on and "likes" mount and threads lengthen, it becomes much easier to keep the shoddy bandwagon rolling forward, informed poorly or well, right or a little right or kinda wrong or really wrong. And who cares about the extraneous little facts that might make their 'clever' tweet less relevant or consider shifting their position even a little?

Their music, dancing, ska, the Bosstones themselves… it's about bringing hope. Since ± February 2020, capital-h Hope has had a really really rough, falling-apart during an earthquake roller-coaster ride on fire, at the very least. And it had already had a really rough few years leading up to it.

Again, the band has a history of musically stapling, gluing, and duct-taping all sorts of things together to outstanding effect. On their last album, one single song "After the Music" starts out like a jazz-club jam, marches into an all-out rock anthem, then flips into a Bosstones ska-riffic celebration before dancing out the door and slamming it behind them. I fucking love it.

So, with The Killing of Georgie Part III, it feels odd, like slipping into another universe, to see them put something together to have it trip so hard over its own shoelaces in how it's received outside of its more-narrow-than-previously-thought context.

​Some flavors go really well together, some require a little culinary talent to get it to work, and some things should never be on the same plate together. Perhaps the recipe drew from related but ultimately mismatched incompatible resources, and they separated like oil and water when left alone without further stirring.

Once, at a party with my friend Mur, we discovered that gin and eggnog, as awesome as they are individually, do not go well together. Note: They also did not completely suck together either. It was not undrinkable. The two beverages somehow managed to negate the best qualities of each other without quite being something that had to be poured down the sink. We did vow never to do that again. This is a little tangental gift of wisdom I give to you.

So, this ambitious new recipe the Mighty Mighty Bosstones were trying to develop turned out to be the dish that blows up on the stove top, ruins pans, and gets someone booted off one of those Iron Chef type shows. Maybe, like a cake baked at high altitude, not enough consideration was given for the environmental pressure.

The whole thing makes me heartsick.

As a creative person, I know it can take a lot of courage to put something out into the world. Just imagining having nothing but the best of intentions, being proud of something and having it fall flat. It sits in the stomach like a cinder block. And I’ve never been in a position to have more than, say, a few dozen people not get something. And I certainly never tried putting together something with so many unusual ingredients.

The band knows that creations can take on a different meaning, a different life, once released into the world. Dicky has gone on record many times stating they do not want to take away anyone's personal interpretation of their songs. There's countless people who believe The Impression That I Get is about HIV or an STD test or a pregnancy scare. But if you want to dig a little, that's not where its inspiration originated.

I won't presume or guess what reasonings got the Mighty Mighty Bosstones to the decision, but they pulled the video quickly, without fanfare and, so far, without comment.

And, honestly, I think it was the right decision.

Interpreting a song differently from its initial conception is one thing. Without context, this music video had the potential to bring more pain rather than help bring hope. And its contexts are too numerous, varied, and / or obscure to expect a clear reception of its intended message. The alternate interpretations summoned by the internet are too opposite its intention, and too potentially painful for communities and people already hurting.

This country has shambled and is still shambling through some truly escalated challenges, facing yet again moments-of-truth that have very long been there but never been fully acknowledged. Black communities in particular are angry, hurting, and sick & tired of it.  Beyond that, the pandemic and the early handing of it has strained sooo many to the breaking point. The election and months leading up to the January 6 insurrection were inconceivably mind-boggling.

People need hope, waaaaaay more than usual.

The Bosstones aim to bring messages of hope and togetherness in difficult times. Music can bring hope. And dance can bring hope. Dancing can be a form of protest, even. "Sometimes, dancing is all you've got," particularly if you're the band member who dances in a band who's stated "Our Only Weapon Is This Song." But, apparently and unsurprisingly, the country is far from the head-space where it's ok to staple all these worrying ingredients together into one song & music video, Bosstones style.

Again, heartsick.

Please, for fuck's sake, go listen to the rest of the album. It's stunning. So much of it is perfectly made for summer-weather windows-down car-listening. Skip that song if you need to. Or try to unhook it from what others have said to think about it, and decide its meaning for yourself. Because that intense build-up to the end, wowz. Seriously good music.

I do hope to review When God Was Great in full sometime soon. I don't love love every single piece of it, but even the parts that don't quite gel for me are full of genius and style. And that stuff still might gel - some of their songs had to grow on me, and I look back and wonder what took me so long to "get it." I love so much about this album already, and I hope these guys keep stapling, gluing, taping, and nailing stuff together for many mighty years to come.

Make of it what you will, and go in peace with it. Love one another. We're all we've got, when we get to a point where we don't even have dancing.

Please enjoy this, one of my favorite fun, fast, & clever Mighty Mighty Bosstones tunes, 1-2-8:

(lyrics)

They made something, they played something
Brand new a baby blue machine
Brass tacks, duct tape for the great escape
Packed in there like sardines

Back and forth, East, South, West, North
Shred the atlas, burn the map
Often lost and paths criss-crossed, wake me up I need a nap

1, 2 what's in the stew?
3, 4 no one's really sure
5, 6 what's in the mix?
7, 8 this stuff tastes

They did something, which meant something and that got them some attention
(Eyes wide)
A roller coaster ride, great pride in this invention

I think they're selling snake oil at the dog and pony show
And in the garden gee, would you pardon me?
And by the way how does it grow?

1, 2 what's in the stew?
3, 4 no one's really sure
5, 6 what's in the mix?
7, 8 this stuff tastes

Yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

The explanation's unexplainable, holding onto something once dreamt unattainable
The course was never charted so don't look into the books
The secret's not the recipe, it's got to be the cooks

They made something, they played something
Blood, sweat, and elbow grease
Well, if you can't stand the heat in the kitchen
Get out it will increase

Last train to where? Hey get out of here
Nothing's measured and nothing's weighed
A dash of honesty in the recipe and that's the first mistake you've made

1, 2 what's in the stew?
3, 4 no one's really sure
5, 6 what's in the mix?
7, 8 hey this stuff tastes

1, 2 what's in the stew?
3, 4 (3, 4) no one's really sure
5, 6 (5, 6) what's in the mix?
7, 8 this stuff tastes

(Great)

(1-2-8 by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones)

 So instead of thinking about a post and getting it mostly squared in my head then never getting around to it, or having it all go stale or irrelevant by the time I can sit down to it, or letting enough time pass that I can't recall all the inspired blurts that I wanted to write in the first place…

… here goes.

I have been wanting to write up a review or individual song reviews of the new Mighty Mighty Bosstones release, When God Was Great. Hell, I still want to do that for their 2018 release, While We're At It, and still might. I wasn't sure if I would really get around to either, because all the reasons, but then Internet Stuff Happened and brought me here.

Twitter and I have been in a sort of trial separation, so I was hesitant to even go look when I caught wind of some strong opinions being tweeted about one of their songs/ videos – The Killing of Georgie (Part III), on the heels of a magazine article. But I did. 

​

I tend to listen/ watch things a few times before I can figure out what I might think of something, and more than a few before I might commit some words to it. Some of that is the Fine Arts Bachelor's & Master's degrees, all the Art Theory & Art Criticism classes (If only I could give you some idea of how many times we devolved into passionate discussions of whether or not Thomas Kincaid qualified as an Artist…). Some of it is the brain since it got hit. Context is harder, holding all the factors in mind at once, connecting dots, seeing the whole picture, all that – I'm still a computer with wonky RAM. MUCH less wonky than the worst of it, but still work to be done if I can ever get to pre-accident brain. There's more to it than those factors, but in the interest of brevity and relevance, moving on…

When I first saw the video & listened to the song, my gut suspected some people might react this way, to how it appears on the surface. I gave it a few more views & listens (and many more since). I didn't know at first but learned early on that the title referred to a Rod Stewart song about a gay friend of his back who was murdered in the 70s. It was clear among the tweets that most had no idea of that detail, and when given the information (a few others brought it up) didn't care to explore or weigh it further for context relevance. 

It was also pretty clear that many reactionaries had little or no knowledge of the band and their background. And I wonder how much knowledge of ska history weighed in on the "snappy" limited-character digs and take-downs? Ska takes peppy & upbeat, and, historically & often, mixes it up with the political. And, hey, didja know dancing can be a form of protest?

Context. Has it become optional? Hm. There have been situations where "context" and "nuance" have been all but weaponized. So even discussions of context are subject to context.

Maybe full context wouldn't help enough anyway, not for some. 

How about metaphor? How many still consider complex notions like hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism, artists' other works, potential intent & all the angles, etc… when evaluating a work of art — whether it be a movie, a painting, or a 4.5-minute music video? Let's go out on a limb here: Could "the nicest man in the world," as I've heard Ben Carr called by those who know him, dancing through empty streets actually symbolize something? Like the attitudes of many people in the face of the challenges of this country and world? Or maybe it's a declaration of "sometimes, dancing is all you've got." 

Or perhaps both? 

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones have made plenty of songs with unclear or double meanings. "The Impression That I Get" was not written about an HIV test or a pregnancy scare, but Dicky lets people make of it what they will. ((Great Chris DeMakes podcast interview with Dicky Barrett & Joe Gittleman about how "that knock on wood" song did come together, at iheart.com, or through iTunes))

They've also made plenty of songs that make a very clear stance: Mighty Mighty Bosstones on ‘Let’s Face It’ becoming an anti-racism anthem 20 years after its release. 
​
The Bosstones have always stood for humanity, community, friendship, respect.


​




The thing about some online magazine "thinkpieces" is sometimes they don't do as much of the thinking as they think they do, or as much as they appear or pretend to do. And then some others read it & think the writer's taken in all the factors, done all the thinking, and then take those words as informed analysis, the full gospel.

Context. Metaphor. Subtlety. Symbolism. Dual meanings. Something created specifically to make people think about it. Dance can be a form of protest, and sometimes — like in a pandemic — dancing is all you've got. The Bosstones said it 28 years ago: "Our Only Weapon is This Song." Given that, what is the guy who dances supposed to do?

Those factors & considerations may still not make a difference for some to rethink the song and/or the video. And that's ok. Sometimes great creatives put things together that the intent gets lost, or some people just don't get, or just don't like. We don't have to all come to the same conclusions about things. I can't make anyone "get" anything in the way it fits together for me. From the other side, I also try not to 'yuck' anyone else's 'yum' (assuming that 'yum' respects humanity, rights, boundaries, etc…).

Could be I've thought too much on it. Could be I'm wrong all around. Wouldn't be the first time on either possibility. "The stars were not aligned." We could all use more wisdom, and could use less of it coming "through the awful grace of god."

So make of it what you will, & go in peace with whatever that is. Love one another. 

I'm done & gonna go put "When God Was Great" on for another play (I can't write while listening to wordsy music). Because even with a few debatedly wobbly spots (hey, even I don't fall head-over-heels love-at-first-listen with every single word they sing), this album blows my fucking mind. This band, after more than three decades, still rocks. Hard. Knowing it was coming played a significant role in me getting through the past year. If this song / video keeps anyone from checking the rest of it out, then it's a damned shame.

I'll leave you with my last live view of the Bosstones: The close of the third night of the  Hometown Throwdown, December 2019.