various artists - The 2 Tone Collection: A Checkered Past

This is an all-timer of a comp, a collection of every released A-side on 2 Tone, and just about every double AA-side as well. And what a set of performers and songs these are: the Specials, Madness, the Beat, the Selecter, the Bodysnatchers, Rico Rodriguez. It's clearly not full encompassing everything from the second wave of ska, but this is the sort of thing that, 30 years ago, you would have put into your younger sibling's hands so they had something great to listen to.

I did not have an older brother or sister to get this from. Truth be told, I can't even remember my first exposure to the Specials. It would have come around this time, that period of later in high school when one crosses over from mainstream radio into the underground out of curiosity or provocation or some combination of the two. But i can say there was rarely an episode of my radio show where I didn't play something off this collection. It was as intrinsic to my identity as Fugazi or Issac Hayes or Public Enemy.

So it kinda freaked me out when, at some point last year, I went to put it on my phone and I couldn't find my copy. Not ripped to digital, not present in physicality. Many of these songs were present elsewhere in my collection, but I really wanted to listen to the Bodysnatchers, having been inspired by Belle Stars' 7"s I had downloaded from a TwilightZone! post. No cobbled-together playlist would do, and I wasn't going to give in to Spotify for this. I dashed off to Discogs and, within a week, I could scratch my itch.

I had been sitting on this download for a minute, just waiting for the right moment to share some thoughts. It's springtime now, when my JA tastes always shift from dub to ska. This is a good soundtrack for this time of year, when the grey disappears from the sky and good things seem imminently possible.

Discogs

Click here to download.