The Tokyo Concert Experience

  Less than a year before the pandemic started I saw Angelo Moore walking in Shibuya. I checked, it was May 2019, the last time Fishbone came to Japan. I was on my way to work and saw him in front of Don Quijote. He was wearing a red fez hat just like you will see him wear in a video. I thought about approaching him, asking for a picture, but I was too shy. Not only was I not going to their show that evening, the truth is that I was not at all familiar with his band's output. In the nineties MTV Latin America had their collaboration with Los Fabulosos Cadillacs on heavy rotation. That was the extent of my knowledge of that band’s music. For some reason I wrote them off due to what I felt was an overwhelming hyper expressive frontman. Was I wrong; probably not about the hyper expressive frontman, but about writing them off as a novelty act. I corrected this wrong during the lockdown. First with the self-titled EP and then with the documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbon...

  The seeds of what Bob Marley called rebel music were planted when ska first came to the scene. Most rock history recounts point to the sixties garage scene, bands like The Sonics and such, as the genesis of proto-punk. It could be argue that the steady fast pace of Jamaican ska, the upstroke strumming and beat that dates back to the late fifties, is an even earlier source. What is definitely a fact is that it inspired a reimagination of the traditional rock combo. Sly came first, but it was the British 2 Tone movement that in a way made popular bands integrated in terms of ethnicity (The Specials, The Beat) and gender (The Selecter). Ska was defying in an era of hardcore conservative policies. Something similar happened in Latin America in the mid-eighties, where ska flourished with iconic bands from Mexico (La Maldita Vecindad), Venezuela (Desorden Público) and Argentina (Los Fabulosos Cadillacs). The political aspects in a time of oppressive regimes were obvious, but the fact t...