Billy Johnson complained, “This trip was supposed to be Sublime.”
Photo by Jack Yang
In accordance with tradition, the infamous San Diegan family, the Johnsons, have completed their yearly trip to commemorate what many scholars consider to be “the only genre of real music: American ska punk from roughly the 90s until around the mid 2000s.” The 3481 mile trek in a refurbished ‘57 Bel Air convertible passed through a variety of famous locations including Yellowstone National Park, the St. Louis Arch, and M&M’s World in Times Square. The road trip was a celebration of the history of ska, so long as the history begins right before people got burnt out on it.
“You’d think they’d go to ska centric locations for the ska trip, but Billy, the father, explained to me that ‘ska is not a place, it’s in your heart, daddio,’” remarked their neighbor, Darrel Potter. “They keep doing this thing where they wear oversized suits and sunglasses indoors. They play what sounds like big band music from the 1920s except apparently it’s ironic because it’s also supposed to be the 1990s. I also told them it was a bad idea to go on a road trip during a pandemic, to which Billy replied, ‘the only disease we’re spreading is ska fever, daddio’ — I noticed he would always end sentences with ‘daddio’ whenever his actual point didn’t make any sense.”
Billy Johnson, a successful horse breeder and father of the Johnsons defended his family’s unusual tradition: “Look here, square, I’m just trying to chillax and take in my favorite ska acts: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Less Than Jake, The Toasters, The Close Shaves, The Socker Boppers, Al Capone’s Hat, Swordfish Toothpick, The Zimbardo Brothers, The Unstriped Bees, and The Red Robin. Is it too much to ask that I get to celebrate these great bands everyone loves with my two beloved sons and my wife Karen? Yeah, go ahead, make the joke, you’re the first one—not!” Johnson then made an “L” with his fingers.
The rest of the family privately disagrees, reported the older son, Jebediah. “It was through his arrogance that he ruined the once great tradition of the ska trip, which we’ve been doing every year since 2015, and skipped in 2017 and 2019 and 2020. Actually now that I think about it this isn’t really annual, is it? Anyway, it is a storied genre with great and lasting cultural impact, according to the world history textbooks written by my father. However, most people don’t want to listen to ska when it’s forced upon them.” Fact-checkers say that the last sentence is false because most people wouldn’t listen to ska anyway.
