Originally published at: Dick Clark asks Johnny the Snitch to explain ska | Boing Boing
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Interesting. Johnny the Snitch got it wrong, though. Ska is not an offshoot of reggae. Ska predates reggae. Now, since this was in 1982 and it’s Dick Clark asking, they were probably talking about the style of Ska made popular in the UK by bands like Madness. And that was an offshoot of the original Jamaican ska, but it still wasn’t an offshoot of reggae. It would be more accurate to say they were cousins.
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with the highly underrated Rocksteady as the transition.
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William Duell!
Known for character acting in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Airplane!, and The Hustler!
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These days, there’s numerous acts that don’t seem to care about the difference between the eras. The Skints, for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Izy6y2eEA
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Was Johnny the Snitch kind of an inverted version of the Batman window gag?
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You know the old prison saying, “Snitches get their Jamaican musical subgenres confused”.
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Hah, I heard this many times at the start of “99 Paid” but didn’t know where it was from. I’d always assumed it was from some kind of interview or something. Were The Suspects well known? They were from Houston and so was I so I saw them a lot but I never knew if they were just a local band.
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Interesting, I remember this gag from when it aired, but mainly the “secret formula youth cream” part.
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great stuff!
I’m middle aged and out of it, but I’m a big Slackers fan and used to go to their shows. another blurry category. their sax man’s side project is David Hilliard and the Rocksteady Seven, but you probably knew that.
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The running gag was that Detective Frank Drebin would slip Johnny some cash to get word on the street regarding some ongoing criminal activity, then as soon as he’d leave some other figure would sit down in the shoeshine booth to get intel on a completely different subject. Sometimes it would be a celebrity guest star like Dick Clark but not always. For example, a surgeon in full scrubs sitting down to get advice on the next step in a critical procedure.
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But Ska was invented by these guys: The Skatalites. Dig the season-appropriate tune!
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I know many things, but cannot know all things, and did not know that. Thanks for sharing.
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Look at you, shoehorning in a reference to Binky an an otherwise unrelated topic.
I fully approve!
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And all he needed was an angle grinder, a TIG welder, some etch primer, and a couple of brackets!
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