INTERVIEW: JER

MEANWHILE ON SKATUNE NETWORK

In the name of subcultural connection and understanding, we here at John’s Music Blog leave no stone unturned. Today we are talking about ska.

My first exposure to Skatune Network came in 2019, after the project’s YouTube channel uploaded a swinging ska cover of “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish. In the video, Skatune Network creator Jeremy Hunter—also known as the artist JER—is in a postered-up bedroom, dancing and singing and toggling between all sorts of instruments (guitar, bass, trumpet, trombone, sax) as their superior ska version of Eilish’s song plays overhead. In less than three minutes, the cover hits a few genre switches, starting on a more traditional ska tip before becoming distorted and finishing full-on metalcore. The track made me want to dive into Skatune Network’s whole world. It was exciting to see online youth energy interjected into a style of music that, at least in America, had laid somewhat dormant for a minute.

Since 2016, the Gainesville-based Hunter has made around 400 covers. There’s a rocksteady Blink-182 cover. There’s a cover of “The Impression That I Get” by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones that changes genres every 15 seconds and starts with some sort of faux-movie trailer dialogue. There’s a charged ska-punk cover of “Lucid Dreams” by Juice WRLD. If I had more time, I would keep going. JER is also an original ska project and a member of the ska band We Are The Union. In short, they are an ideal person with whom to talk ska, which is a genre that has forever been misunderstood, in my estimation. I wish I still had the bucket hat that I got signed by multiple members of The Specials in 1998. I wish I still had pictures of me at age 11, dressed up in a full suit.

What was the state of ska in 2023?

Ska’s been pretty good in 2023. In the last couple of years, there's been an upswing in the genre as a whole. There was a really big boom during Covid. And a lot more bands are on the road doing stuff, I want to say, this year than in previous years. Obviously, no one was really on the road in 2020 or 2021. But that's when everyone was dropping records. Ironically, it just worked out where most of the bands already had records ready to drop. 

Kill Lincoln entered the studio the day the world shut down to record their record and Catbite had already put out their record in 2019. And We Are The Union was already kind of writing a record around the beginning of Covid, too. Being ska bands, we all were already so online. So, I feel like it worked in our favor, paired up with other factors that allowed it to really explode and reach new audiences. And then Covid restrictions were lifted and touring returned in 2022. And now in 2023, we really hit the road a lot. That was a big focus for all the projects that I was in. 

Are the crowds younger? 

Yeah, there's some younger people. The age range of ska shows, especially going into the late 2010s, for a lot of larger artists, everyone was in their 40s. I remember when I first started going to shows, I was younger than everyone else by at least 10 years, but I was a teenager. As I grew older, I noticed that I was always the only person or one of few people in my age range. And as I entered my mid 20s, it was the same thing—I was like, How am I still 10 years younger than everyone else? 

I don't think that many younger people were getting into the music, aside from maybe Streetlight Manifesto, and maybe Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake, but anything beyond that you didn’t really see it. And I'm noticing with the upswing of bands you're seeing now, you're starting to get people who are in their 30s and 20s a little bit more. My crowd has been a lot younger, but also I don't exclusively play with ska bands. I’m going on the road with bands that are indie, emo, pop punk—you know, genres that kind of always have catered towards just younger folk in general. And I also believe heavily in making shows all-ages. And a lot of the time in ska, there are bands that don't really care to do that, or they prefer shows to be 21+. So, the result of that is you just don't have young people coming to shows because they can't. 

I remember when I was growing up, there was a divide between ska punk bands that would play all-ages shows, and then the more traditional bands that would play drinking shows. I don't know if that still happens. 

I really struggle and fight to make shows all-ages and everyone in my camp of people, we all do the same, we really see the value and importance of that. I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn't start going to shows when I was 16 or 17. And you know, a lot of the older like, ska elitists who play this traditional style, they are always like, Why are Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake the bands that everyone knows? Well, they're the bands playing the all-ages shows. And they're able to get fans when they're younger. I remember being in high school and I wanted to go see Mustard Plug, and I just couldn't because all their shows are 21+. And I never really got to check them out live until like, maybe a couple of years ago.

That's interesting, because that's definitely a band that would have played all-ages shows back in the day.

Yeah, that's definitely something a lot of bands have gone through as their fans from the ‘90s grew older. To them, it's like, why even make the effort to focus on that when no one even likes this music in the first place. I guess that could be the sentiment from that 2000s era when no one was really getting into the genre. And so you just had these bands growing older, and they think like, Oh, my audience is growing older too. And there's no room for growth from younger people. 

But it seems like now that's not the case from what I can tell. I saw 100 Gecs play a while ago. And it made me wonder if they've been an entry point to ska for some kids. 

I feel like a lot of younger people don't really care as much about labels and stuff because I've definitely made TikToks that have done well or gone viral, and people will go like, Oh yeah, this kind of reminds me of 100 Gecs. Which is funny because it doesn't really sound like 100 Gecs, but I get why they're saying that. 100 Gecs are kind of doing whatever the fuck they want and they're like, Yeah, we like ska, let's throw some ska parts in here, but then like, it's also going to be hyperpop and chaotic and all of that. 

I feel like younger people aren't really trying to form an identity—that's a big thing millennials and Gen X people did, they formed their entire identity around a thing, you know, like punk or goth or ska, but younger people, they don't really give a fuck and they're just like, Oh, this song sounds dope. I like it. I'm going to listen to that. But you're not getting people who are forming their entire personality around ska music and getting absolutely obsessed with the genre and honestly, I think that's okay. I think we just need more people to listen to ska bands, normally, the way they would listen to any other artist, you know? 

Yeah, take it out of its deep niche. What are some of your favorite releases of 2023? Do you feel like some of these new ska records are speaking a slightly different language?

There's a bunch of really dope stuff that came out this year. I haven't followed ska super closely this year, like I have in previous years. Flying Raccoon Suit suit dropped a record. It's very dope. They really dove into a lot of unique sounds and blends of different genres. Omnigone put out a record and that was very solid—Adam Davis, he was in the band Link 80 and that's his band now. I think he's 45 but he's a kid at heart. He has a very open mind. And I really love that he isn't afraid to speak out on what needs to be spoken out about. He sees the value in making sure that there is a space for the youth. 

Growing up, a lot of ska bands really put an emphasis and focus on alcohol. And that was something that, if that wasn't a space for you, then you really didn't have a space in ska. Now you have artists like Omnigon who are a straight edge band. And you have other artists who are not putting that first. And I feel like that alone is creating a more open space that's fresh in the genre. Bad Operation also put out Wavebreaker with Joe Gittleman from the Bosstones, which is a split that had songs from both artists. And that probably was one of my favorite releases in the genre from the States probably just ever. The Bad Operation songs are very, very solid and a very good representation of what ska is all about.

So going back, how did you get into ska in the first place? It was probably at a time when it wasn't all that visible—it was past the ‘90s boom, I assume, judging by your age?

Oh yeah, it was the late 2000s. I got into ska because I found out about The Bosstones and Less Than Jake through the Digimon movie soundtrack. And I was using LimeWire to find new bands and download songs. And I eventually stumbled upon Reel Big Fish. And then I just started to deep dive on those bands, and then I went to see them live. And I got into the support bands on the shows and I realized one of the bands who opened my first Less Than Jake show was also playing a house show that my friends told me about. And so I went to see them and then I discovered the local scene and DIY bands and from there I got really connected into local music. But that was like my entry way and for ska for sure. 

That's interesting. I saw a quote somewhere where you kind of said that you almost purposefully want your music to sound like the kind of ska that was played in ‘90s cartoons, which I think is cool because it's kind of reclaiming a form of the music that was sort of derided at the time. 

Yeah, I mean, the music just kind of slaps in TV shows. Yeah, “Clout Chasers” off my record was very much inspired by the Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide theme song, that main riff in the song. And people kind of say that like it's an insult. Like, Oh, it sounds like music from cartoons. I'm like, Yeah, but music in cartoons slaps. It’s just good. And people—I don't know, this is a little side tangent—I feel like people really dismiss animation because they don't want to take it seriously. But just because they don't want to take it seriously doesn't mean it's not something to be taken seriously. 

And I think that also goes with ska. People like to dismiss the genre because to them, they're like, Oh, it's silly and goofy. And when you make up your mind about something without properly listening, then you're never going to hear it for what it actually is. And I think that goes for ska, where people write it off before actually giving it a chance. And then they never give it a chance because they've already made up their mind about how much they hate it. 

With a lot of this stuff, it's just all about what your entry point is. Like, I think about all these people from Milwaukee who are a few generations above me and you know, they saw Fishbone in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. If you see that at a young age, then it's like, of course, the bar is so high and you're going to want to start a ska band. 

Yep. 

But by the time you hit the 2000s, it was a different landscape. 

Yeah. 

What was the band that you saw that sort of made you think, Okay, I want to start a band or I want to start playing? 

Unorthodox answer, but I just feel like it was seeing local bands for the first time. The first local show I went to was a house show in South Florida. And it was like 10 ska bands, all made up of kids who were around my age—15 all the way up to 20 or so, but they were all very young. Ever since I was younger, I'd wanted to play music. I knew that I wanted to play pop punk or rock or whatever, but I never really felt an attachment to anything that I had heard in that way where I'm like, Okay, I can see myself doing this. But going to a show and seeing, obviously I was a band kid, so seeing these kids playing trumpet, trombone, sax, instruments that I knew how to play a little bit, I was like, okay, I can do this. 

But also seeing kids who are maybe two years older than me—like, you're really just a kid who goes to the high school next to mine, and you're writing these songs and you're doing it because you want to do it and you're making it happen. So, like, why can't I do that? And that's what really drove me to be inspired to start a band. 

Were you in a band before you started Skatune Network?

Yeah, Skatune Network started in 2016. My first band that I started was in 2010, 2011, around that time, called Funkman’s Inferno, and we were one of the local ska bands in South Florida for a long time, we played up until 2015. I joined We Are The Union in 2015. I’ve played with Gouge Away—they're like a hardcore, kind of grungy band. I’ve played with Insignificant Other as well. So yeah, I've been playing music and I’ve been really wrapped up in the culture of DIY and playing shows pretty much since 2010. 

With Skatune Network, the process of deconstructing these songs and putting them back together into a ska container—that’s got to be so illuminating as a songwriter. Do you think that doing that over and over again has sharpened you when you make your own solo stuff?

Oh yeah, absolutely. It really becomes a challenge because I don't want to just cover a song and make it the same tempo as every other ska song and just play the chords and sing the words—anyone can do that. So to me, when I cover a song, I'm like, what makes the song work? I remember having trouble trying to cover “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” because that song has a vibe, and whenever I tried to make it very third wave ska, like, upbeat, faster, it lost to me what made the song special. So it was like, what else can I do that doesn't lose that vibe? It has a swing to it, that's really what it is, and so instead of making it faster I was like, what if I took a Hepcat approach and made it a traditional ska song and swung the upstroke really hard? I was able to keep the original vibe of the song, doing it that way didn't obstruct the main melodies of the song, the thing that's recognizable. 

And that's one example of many where I have to figure out a way to cover the song and keep the integrity of what made the song special intact, while also converting it to a completely different genre. And I think that really has challenged me to figure out what elements I can play around with in the genre of ska—you have a wider arsenal of instruments to play with and what you can do with them. And you can get really creative, after doing like 400 covers, on how to arrange stuff and make stuff work while also not making it all sound the same. 

What instrument do you not play? That seems like an easier question than the inverse. 

Most woodwinds that aren't saxophone, I don't play. I can make some sounds on the flute and I know some notes on the flute. Clarinet I’ve struggled with, I've made a sound once on it. I can't play bassoon or oboe and the double reeds. I can kind of play violin and viola, but honestly it sounds really bad, so I barely ever count that either. But yeah, I can at least figure stuff out enough and make a good enough sound on most other instruments. 

Alright, let's go deep: What is, to you, the most underrated ‘90s ska band?

I feel like there's a lot of answers I could give. As far as musicianship goes, and just pure… I understand why this band never popped off, because they're weird as fuck: The Blue Meanies.

I saw them live once, actually. 

That had to be crazy because you can just tell that they all know their shit—I think that's the most underrated horn section in ska. People love to rave about a lot of band’s horn sections, but just that one riff off “Smash The Magnavox” is very difficult and perfect. It takes a lot of proficiency and dexterity and control to play that, and as a horn player of both saxophone and trumpet, I'm just like, How the fuck do you guys do that and make it sound so good?

MU330, I feel like is a truly underrated band—they just hit the mark at the wrong time. Because they have bangers. Fishbone always gets a mention as well, but Fishbone has a legacy and it'd be unfair to say that they were unrecognized, but I definitely think that they deserved a lot more recognition for what they were doing. They're a band that was weird, but I think they were a little more palatable than Blue Meanies. 

Blue Meanies were almost adjacent to this other thing that was happening in Chicago at the time, with this label, Skin Graft Records—they had this noise rock, prog, jazz influence that almost took it completely out of ska.

At the end of the day, and at its fundamental roots, ska really is a dance genre, and it's a genre that people want to move to. So, if you're not doing that very basic thing, I feel like that's where you lose a lot of ska fans in particular, who really like the genre for that. But also you lose a lot of palatability with most people. Like, disco took off and was a phenomenon because it was a genre that, no matter how much you think you hate it, it will get you to at least tap your foot. It has that inherent groove. 

My friends who don't even like ska, if I put on a ska band that really fucks—like the Skatalites, the Specials, or Hepcat or something—they always start to move their head, and I'm like, Yeah, you're feeling the groove, you don't want to admit it, but you're feeling that groove. It's easier to get people to buy into something that makes them inherently move like that. Blue Meanies are one of those bands where the average person isn't going to start tapping their foot, but if you like that weird shit, like, I show them to my friends who love prog rock and they're just like, Holy shit, this is so fucking cool.

I feel like there was a sub-subgenre of ska in the ‘90s that was almost like, evil ska—Voodoo Glow Skulls and Blue Meanies and that satanic ska band Mephiskapheles. It wasn't an actual scene, but it was a collection of bands. 

Ska was a very diverse genre leading up to the ‘90s. When it was commercialized, they kind of tried to sell it as a package, like, this is what ska is, and the downside of that is a lot of people got into the genre thinking ska is one thing—it has to sound like Reel Big Fish or The Aquabats or Less Than Jake, and if you're not in that little window, a lot of people didn't really care to listen. And then people set up this expectation where they hear a ska band and they're like, Well this doesn't sound exactly like what I've been told this thing is. 

Punk is like that too, where a lot of people hear about punk through Green Day or Blink-182 and that's their idea of it. They go back and listen to a Black Flag record from the ‘80s and they're like, This production, what is this, it doesn't sound good, the vocals are rough. Well, that's what punk was back then, but you've been sold a certain thing. With ska, you have a lot of that, where people are sold a certain idea. So, when they hear something that is very different—even if on paper they're doing all of the things that constitute ska, like the rhythm, the offbeat—it's very jarring for them to hear, because a lot of people think of ska and they just think of really bubbly music. Which sucks, more ska is not that bubbly, Orange County sound, but people would never know because that's not what was marketed towards them. 

What do you find yourself listening to nowadays? The more contemporary stuff? The second wave stuff? The really early stuff? Do you listen to reggae? Rocksteady?

This year has been a lot more of me diving into rocksteady, reggae, and dub, and then 2-Tone and then newer stuff—those are the things that I listen to the most. The Skatalites never really leave rotation for me. I was listening to a lot of Peter Tosh as well; Trojan, the Trojan box collections with Desmond Decker and Jimmy Cliff and that type of stuff. I got into Pachyman this year, who is a contemporary dub artist—he basically records his own reggae and then dubs it, which is super dope and it sounds very, very authentic to the genre. Claude Fontaine is an indie singer who worked with a producer who does a lot of traditional ska, reggae as well, so it's kind of been all over the place. Then, Bad Operation is probably the newer ska band that I listen to the most. 

We started by looking back at 2023. What do you think 2024 is going to look like?

As long as bands are on the road and playing shows, you're going to continue to see a growth of that. The biggest thing that I hope happens is that bands and artists just continue to put in the work. Sometimes it feels like we're not really growing at the pace we should be or we're not growing at all, and a lot of that does come from making sure we're all putting in that work and getting on the road and finding ways to get in front of people. You know, this stuff doesn't just happen out of nowhere. People have an idea about the internet, that it is the way it was like 10 years ago, where something could go viral and then everyone knows it and then everyone will get into your band. I feel like a lot of people have this expectation where it's like, Well, if I have a post pop off everyone's going to listen to my band—like, there's so much information hitting us all the time. No one's going to find a band through a viral post and then they get like 20,000 fans. That's not how it works. 

Bands build up their fan bases by consistently touring, consistently being active on social media, doing marketing plans and stuff like that. A lot of people—and this isn't just ska, this is just music in general—will hit me up, like, Oh, can you share my band on your page. I don't do that because people DM me, I just see bands who are doing their thing and I fuck with them and it's very organic. If you're not going to go to a show unless you're playing, then I have no interest in that. If you're not going to show up for your community unless it benefits you, that’s not the type of community that I try to foster. So, that's just what I hope to see more of from people and artists. 

JER and Skatune Network on YouTube, Twitter, Instgram, TikTok