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| The Selecter. Photo courtesy of Neol Davies. |
It was the summer of 1979 and I was thirteen. Marc, a friend of my brother's, had been to England for the summer and brought back a cassette from a band called The Selecter on the 2-Tone label. I had recently discovered 2 Tone and was working my way though their catalog as my summer project. My first 2-Tone single was "The Prince" by Madness, an homage to Prince Buster, the Jamaican musician of 50's fame. I had found my people. Not only did I listen to Marc's cassette, but I "borrowed" it and somehow conveniently forgot to return it (sorry, Marc). I listened to The Selecter cassette so much that none of the songs could be played properly by the end of that summer.
2-Tone was an important record label founded in the late 1970s in Coventry, England. The two "tones" were black and white musicians who were influenced by Jamaican dancehall, ska, and punk music. Jerry Dammers, keyboardist for The Specials, invented the term. 2-Tone bands included The Specials, The English Beat, The Bodysnatchers, The Special AKA, and even Elvis Costello and The Attractions.
The Selecter's lead singer was Pauline Black. I knew who she was before I saw her photo staring out from the cover page of an issue of England's New Musical Express (NME). The music papers all talked about her as a "mixed race singer." Black was wearing a man's fedora and the classic 2-Tone outfit: men's slacks, white polo neck shirt, black loafers, and a seriously aloof yet menacing scowl. Most thrilling of all was her skin tone: she was brown like me. More specifically, biracial. A biracial woman fronting a 2-Tone band? I was giddy. I would save my allowance to buy issues of the seminal music/design magazine The Face and would wait weeks for outdated issues of NME to appear at my local magazine shop in downtown Montreal, yellowed from age, but I didn't care. I tried desperately to keep up with the endless wave of music pouring out of England at the time.
I took all of the 2-Tone songs to heart, taking on the causes of unemployment-rife 1970's England as my own: naively, I actually believed that racist National Front skinheads would somehow make their way from the Brixton race riots to my safe Montreal neighborhood and I would have to be ready to take them on single-handedly, armed with little more than my familiarity with every single Specials lyric.
Music was my comforter. I felt I had found a spiritual big sister in Pauline Black, someone I didn't know but who I could look up to, a young woman who was living my values: she was making music and fronting a band, she was a strong feminist, and she seemed completely fearless. I was a biracial teenaged girl living in a mostly white, privileged Montreal neighborhood. As a daughter of white mother and a black father, I never felt as if I belonged to any community. Black became my role model: a strong, confident, beautiful, fearless woman, unafraid to express anger and grief and joy and elation in the space of a three minute song. She was awe-inspiring and a bit terrifying to me, with her expressive eyes, her rocking stance, and her total confidence. She was everything I wanted to be.
The world of ska and punk music was where I gained my strength; the words and tunes bolstered my own belief that I would be able to get through adolescence, even when sometimes I felt it would never be possible. I wasn't any different from any other teenager; musicians were my saints and their music my daily prayers, played over and over on my Walkman as I took the Metro daily to and from school. Don't all teenagers feel like aliens?
You have to listen to the harshly beautiful and lesser-known "Celebrate The Bullet," (1981) to get a feel for the depth, melancholy, and sheer loveliness of Black's voice and the accompanying music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLZtTvxgyGE
The deep bass (Norman Watt-Roy of Ian Dury and the Blockheads) and echoing horns (Barry Jones) are like boxers mimicking shadow play with imaginary punches, surrounded by hovering rhythm guitar. Black's voice dances in and out of the dark and light, creating a song that is tragic and haunting. This song highlights the range of her voice in a way not heard on the earlier recordings. It is easy to see how so many of us fell in love with Pauline Black, including Gwen Stefani, who cites her as a major influence.
Black has a fascinating life story as child born of a white Jewish mother and a black Nigerian father in England in the 1950's. She was adopted by a white family in Essex and in her recent much-lauded autobiography, Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir, Black talks openly about always feeling like an outsider. As an adult she decided to look for her birth mother and trace her family roots. Not only had she become the lead singer of one of the most influential ska bands, she also became an actress and writer, and has received recognition for her writing as well as her acting. She continues to tour with The Selecter and her voice is still as powerful and mesmerizing as it always was. Her message is still strong and relevant.
Sources:
www.paulineblack.com
http://www.theselecter.net/
http://www.neoldavies.net
http://2-tone.info/index.html
Read an excerpt of Pauline Black's Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir courtesy of NPR: http://tinyurl.com/baaymmv
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