Ska Music is NOT Dead
For much of his professional life, San Diego musician Christopher Bloom used to listen to ska, a distinct, Jamaican-inspired style of music. Bloom, now 34, even incorporated ska into his own band, Blue Crossed Eyes.
But then ska seemed to disappear.
“I thought ska music started dying out in the late 1990s and by the 2000s, I hadn’t heard a new band,” he said recently. “It wasn’t until I heard my teenage sister playing ska music {in her room} last year that I realized it started coming back. I was excited.”
Bloom may have good reason to be excited. By many accounts, ska is on the comeback trail, and a growing number of bands like Streetlight Manifesto, The Skints, Easy Star All-Stars, and The King Blues, are now incorporating it into their own music.
Ska is thought to have originated in the 1950s after World War II. While U.S. military forces were occupying Jamaica during the war, they brought radios that played a good amount of American music, including jazz and rhythm & blues. Many Jamaicans were attracted to the new sounds and soon entrepreneurs like Prince Buster, Coxsone Dodd, and Duke Reid were recording their own songs that combined American sounds with Caribbean music like mento and calypso.
What makes ska unique is the distinctive way in which its instruments are played.
Classic ska music combines bars made up of four triplets; it’s distinguished by a guitar chop that comes on the “off-beat,” and which came to be known as an upstroke or “skank” because of its distinctive guitar sound. But classic ska is also unique because of distinctive horn sounds that typically follow the off-beat. Sometimes a piano comes into play too, emphasizing the bass line and, again, following the skank.
In the 1980s, ska rhythms began to appear in music genres like punk rock and ska became popular worldwide, especially in countries like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
“Going to a punk-ska show (then) was probably my favorite thing to do,” Bloom said. “It was so upbeat and live, and you know these punks were fighting for a cause. It was the ultimate way someone could be educated in this culture.”
During the 1980s, a number of bands helped create a second wave of interest in ska. One especially influential band was Sublime, a California-based band whose songs combined punk, reggae, and ska. Sublime first gained popularity in the late 1980s on the West Coast, but then interest picked up worldwide, partly because the band’s songs, presented in both English and Spanish, helped listeners in other countries relate to the lyrics.
In the 1980s, another popular ska band was called Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Because members of this particular band didn’t mix ska with other music genres like punk, jazz or reggae, they produced a sound that closely resembles the early ska music that first came from the Caribbean.
Mighty Mighty Bosstones was formed in 1983, but the band’s music can still be heard on the radio today. And that’s also true for No Doubt, another popular 1980s ska band.
Lately, interest in the ska performed by No Doubt has been helped by the connection the band once had with singer Gwen Stefani; she used to be the band’s lead singer until breaking away in 2004 to focus on more mainstream pop songs. Still, Stefani’s connection to ska has already formed a bridge that is now helping bring in a younger crowd of listeners.
At one recent punk-ska concert, in Brooklyn at the end of October, the audience was clearly made up of different age groups. The headliner for this particular concert was Choking Victim, an American punk-ska band that first played during the 1990s.
At the Choking Victim concert, one audience member was 31-year- old Jared Bailey, who lives in Toronto, Canada. Bailey comes to the U.S for both punk and ska concerts.
“For me, ska music never actually died,” he said. “Even though there was a break from new bands, I consistently would listen to bands like Madness, the Beats, and Leftover Crack. I am very happy that there are finally more bands to listen to now.”
While waiting in line to see Choking Victim, Bailey shared some thoughts on both ska’s appeal and its influence on culture and fashion.
“This isn’t just a trend, it’s a lifestyle,” he said.
Felipe Rodriguez is another ska supporter who went to the Choking Victim concert. He is now a 23-year-old student at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y.
“I always liked ska because my older brother showed me at a young age, but I know that in high school, if I even mentioned the genre, no one would know what I was talking about,” Rodriguez said. “I’m content that I can go to a punk-ska concert now and see many people my age here. It gives me hope that ska music isn’t completely dead.”
In San Diego, musician Christopher Bloom went to see Streetlight Manifesto perform in San Francisco in mid-December. As a new fan of the group, he didn’t recognize every song, but he could feel the excitement and fun in everything he heard.
“I definitely want to see more ska shows,” he said, adding that one of his old band mates now feels the same. “I’m keeping my eye out for the next one in California. Some of these songs just make you happy to be alive.”
