RIP Annette Funicello, ska artist

She recorded "Jamaican Ska" on her 1964 album, Annette at Bikini Beach.

Here she is on TV, doing it with Bob Hope (!).

She reprised it in the 1987 film, Back to the Beach, with Fishbone (!).



I prefer the first, the more innocent, version.

Jamaican dancehall kufiyas

I'm lucky to have a few readers who kufiyaspot for me. Thanks to Wayne (of the invaluable wayne&wax) who alerted me to this one--from Jamaica, with Wacky French Prince and Ding Dong introducing new dance moves, Nuh Linga and Ho mi look. You can't miss the kufiyas on a couple of the dancers. The kufiya presence can't simply be read as Jamaicans slavishly borrowing from US hipsters, although US rappers might be a source. But it's just as, and maybe even more, likely that thirdworldist solidarity with the Palestinians could be a motivation. Read wayne's post on this, and other dance move videos. He notes that this one bears a marked resemblance to voguing.

This makes me nostalgic for the good old days of the b-boys in South Bronx in the seventies. (Not that I was there, by any means.) And it calls to mind the heavy Caribbean influence on the foundational hip-hop scene. The three most important early hip-hop DJs all had a Caribbean foundation. DJ Kool Herc, who essentially invented sratching, immigrated to the US from Jamaica in 1967. (And Herc hung around with the Five Percenters.) Afrika Bambaata's parents were from the West Indies, and Grandmaster Flash's parents were from Barbados.