The Smooths Wrote One of the Best Political Songs of the ’90s (Even If They Don’t Really Like It Now)
The Baltimore ska band's other songs are fantastic, too.
The latter half of the ’90s wasn’t the most obvious time for American guitar bands to get political. The Cold War was done. The economy was hot. The Internet still seemed like it might be a positive force in our lives. The president’s impeachable offenses were threats to his marriage, not to the fabric of democracy.
For the generation of middle-class kids reaching adolescence as the dot-com bubble minted millionaires and the biggest thing on TV was, tellingly, a “show about nothing,” there was no defining struggle—nothing to rally around or rage against.
Or, as Baltimore ska greats the Smooths put it: “You’ve got no one to fight, no anomaly / This generation doesn’t know its enemy.”
That line comes from the song “Enemy,” originally released on Elevator Music’s 1996 compilation Skanarchy 2 and included on the Smooths’ debut album, Very Own Vegas, later that year. Of all the brilliant songs the Smooths released during their career—a remarkable run that included two secret-classic albums and tours across the U.S. and Europe—none captured the spirit of the high Clinton years better than “Enemy.” It’s one of the most cogent and insightful songs of ska’s third wave—even if it now makes Smooths frontman Tom Gilhuley cringe.
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The Smooths formed at Loyola University in 1993 after Gilhuley met trombonist Tim Doscher during freshman orientation. Both had mentioned Pearl Jam on a survey meant to pair like-minded students, but when Gilhuley saw Doscher’s Scofflaws T-shirt, they immediately formed a deeper connection. Gilhuley had grown up in the same Long Island town that birthed the Scofflaws, and more importantly, he’d been getting into Jamaican music.
Gilhuley actually didn’t know much about ska when he arrived at Loyola. He was better acquainted with reggae and dancehall, which he picked up from some Jamaican friends in high school. But he and Doscher soon decided they should start a ska band. They spent freshman year recruiting members and absorbing Jamaican ska and 2 Tone. Gilhuley initially played drums but soon moved to auxiliary percussion and secondary vocals.
“We were a bunch of people just trying to write music that we didn't really know much about,” says Gilhuley. “I had all this percussion stuff at the start of the band. I had congas and bongos and timbales. We did everything. We incorporated disco beats in our music. All kinds of stuff. It was a real mess.”
Eventually, Gilhuley bagged the bongos and became a co-singer with James Stillwaggon, a philosophy major who would leave the band to study in Europe during sessions for Very Own Vegas. Early on, the Smooths experimented with silly outfits and funny song interludes—standard stuff for ’90s ska bands—but they soon decided to avoid the goofiness that was infiltrating the scene.
“That became a core element of the band,” says Gilhuley. “We didn’t want to be thought of as a jokey ska band.”
The Smooths chanced upon a straight-faced, fleet-footed brand of ska flecked with soul, jazz, rock, reggae, and pop. They sounded like nobody else in the third wave. In 1996—with a lineup that included bassist Brodie Ruland, drummer Jamie Robertson, guitarist Ben Treat, keyboardist Jeb Crandall, and sax players Tim Hoenig and Jenny Stillwaggon (James’ sister)—the Smooths made a number of trips to Philadelphia to record their debut album. James Stillwaggon left the band before they finished but stuck around long enough to sing all of his parts.
“Enemy” was very much a collaboration between James Stillwaggon and Gilhuley. Its power lies in the tension between Stillwaggon’s punky, anthemic choruses (“Your eyes are wide / They’re burned out by TV / This generation doesn’t know its enemy”) and Gilhuley’s dancehall-style verses. If the choruses suggest America’s youth have no World War II or Vietnam—no clear challenge to overcome—Gilhulely’s part is a reminder that America is still facing the fundamental threat that’s plagued it since the beginning: racism.
Gilhuley opens the first verse with: “We live in the same society, but still you want to spit on me / You carry your guns, you carry your knives, your bullet tries to take our lives.” He’s presumably addressing the KKK or some other white supremacist group, though it’s clear he doesn’t believe this problem exists solely on the fringes of society. “Enemy” feels like a fusion of two different songs whose voices combine to deliver a crucial message: America is its own worst enemy.
“I’ll hand it to James, because he’s a much smarter person than I am and probably a lot better with words than I am,” says Gilhuley. “The fact he wrote those choruses the way he did really summed it up.” (Stillwaggon is now a professor of philosophy.)
Gilhuley remembers starting “Enemy” off by bringing some handwritten lyrics to band practice. He knew he wanted to write something with a dancehall delivery, and that likely pushed him toward the kind of social issues often addressed in reggae songs. It helped that he was a history minor learning more about America’s ugly racist past.
“Getting into Jamaican music—and a lot of music derived from there—one of the things I was drawn to was that there was a big antiracist side to it,” Gilhuley says. “It was the first time I had ever encountered white, Black, and brown kids going to the same shows, and kids wearing shirts and jackets and patches and stickers against racism. I grew up listening to a lot of metal. I didn’t go to a lot of metal shows and see that happening.”
At the time, Gilhuley thought the dancehall cadence of “Enemy” was a perfectly reasonable way to honor the music that inspired him. In hindsight, he wishes he hadn’t done the faux-Jamaican thing. “I thought it was good, but it’s really terrible,” he says. “If people dig it, that’s fine. But in retrospect, I feel like there was another way to do that lyrical part.” His distaste for the song—though not the evergreen message—is such that the Smooths instantly rejected “Enemy” when compiling their setlist for a 2017 reunion show.
After Very Own Vegas, the Smooths signed with the L.A. indie label SideOneDummy and toured the U.S. and Europe on the 1998 Warped Tour. That year, they released their sophomore LP, the bigger and brighter No Brakes, produced by Mighty Mighty Bosstones bassist Joe Gittleman. Spanning pro-tolerance songs (“Take a Look”) to boozy laments (“One More”), No Brakes should’ve been their ticket to the next level, but the Smooths soon fell victim to infighting. At one point, as half the band grew tired of life on the road, they turned down a massive tour with L.A. swing kings Royal Crown Revue. That cost them the support of SideOneDummy.
Another factor in the Smooths’ decline was the rapid demise of the national ska scene toward the end of the decade. Gilhuley suddenly had trouble booking the Smooths at clubs they’d played for years. Venues still willing to book ska shows would offer crummy “door deals” with no guarantees. After six years in the game, the Smooths weren’t ready to start back at square one.
“I didn’t even think that would be a thing,” says Gilhuley. “But it’s clearly a thing. You see the way trends in music and fashion come and go. It should’ve dawned on me then: ‘Yeah, it’s called the third wave of ska. That means there were two previous waves that disappeared.”
The Smooths called it quits in 1999. For years, Gilhuley was angry at some of his bandmates for squandering opportunities and letting a good thing die. A reunion seemed unlikely, but then Joe Gittleman hollered at Gilhuley in 2017 and asked if the Smooths would be interested in supporting the Bosstones when they stopped in Baltimore on a tour commemorating the 20th anniversary of their 1997 breakthrough album Let’s Face It. To Gilhuley’s surprise, his bandmates were game. As the YouTube clips attest, the Smooths played a fantastic set, the absence of “Enemy” notwithstanding.
Looking back on the late ’90s, Gilhuley (now a member of the punk band Panic Problem) agrees that the day’s relative peace and prosperity created the right environment for third-wave ska to flourish. But the man who wrote half of “Enemy” also knows the decade wasn’t as idyllic as it may have seemed.
“There's always been bad shit happening to a lot of people, but what was covered in the news was portrayed as a lot less stressful back then,” Gilhuley says. “Part of that, I’m sure, was that we were younger, and we weren’t as in tune with the bad stuff that was happening. It was one of those moments in American history where there was this little bit of—I’m not talking Roaring ’20s–esque—but this little snap of history where it felt a little less pressured. You could be more into having fun.”
For more great stories about ’90s ska, check out my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing, out September 21, 2021, on Penn State University Press. Preorder here.