The Rascal King

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones built their whole identity on a kind of joyful defiance — Boston working-class swagger filtered through ska rhythms and hardcore aggression — and "The Rascal King" is one of the most concentrated expressions of that identity ever committed to tape. The horns hit immediately, declarative and brash, establishing that this song is not interested in easing you in gently. Dicky Barrett's voice is genuinely singular, a gravel-and-thunder instrument that operates somewhere between speech and singing, and here it conveys the compressed energy of a story being told at high volume over loud music, which is essentially what it is. The rhythm section underneath is tight and punishing, the ska elements present but never soft — there's a muscularity to everything, the snare hitting like a door being slammed. Lyrically the song sketches a character, the rascal king himself, a figure who inhabits the margins of society with full confidence, someone whose relationship to the rules is creative rather than destructive. There's admiration in the portrait, a recognition of a certain kind of street intelligence and local legend. This is music that comes from a specific geography — the working neighborhoods of Boston, the club circuits of the late eighties and early nineties — and it carries that geography in its bones. It belongs in a basement show, in a car with all the windows down, at any moment when you need to feel like the particular kind of reckless that has principles underneath it.