Operation Ivy

Before the deluge of acts who copied Operation Ivy's blueprints came along, and before the genre began tirelessly retreading its own tracks, the idea of mixing Ska and Punk into a coherent whole was a pretty novel concept. Sure, the Specials and their 2-Tone gang had started the process less than a decade before, but they had tempered Punk's frenetic energy by weighing it down with Ska's mellow beats; Operation Ivy did precisely the opposite, hiding Ska in a thorny bush of blasted riffs and coarse vocals. They minimized the horns and turned up the speed, relying almost wholly on amps and tossing the stand-up basses out the window and into the street. By the time most diehard fans of original Ska had stopped grumbling, Operation Ivy had already become kings of a genre that was spawning less inspired offspring faster than anyone could keep count.