Ska

Madness performing in 2005

Ska (/skɑː/; Jamaican Creole: skia, [skjæ]) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae.[1] It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs.[2] In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads.[3][4][5][6]

Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk; and third wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.[7]

  1. ^ "Ska". Encyclopædia Britannica. Hussey Dermot. pp. http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article–9118222.
  2. ^ "Ska Revival". Genre Listing. AllMusic. 2007. Archived from the original on 2019-03-26. Retrieved 2 February 2007.
  3. ^ Brown, Timothy S. (Fall 2004). "Subcultures, pop music and politics: skinheads and "Nazi rock" in England and Germany". Journal of Social History. 38: 157–178. doi:10.1353/jsh.2004.0079. Archived from the original on 28 June 2009.
  4. ^ "Smiling Smash: An Interview with Cathal Smyth, a.k.a Chas Smash, of Madness - Ska/Reggae - 08/16/99". 19 February 2001. Archived from the original on 19 February 2001. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  5. ^ Marshall, George (1991). Spirit of '69: A Skinhead Bible. Dunoon, Scotland: S.T. Publishing. ISBN 1-898927-10-3.
  6. ^ "Inspecter 7". Montreal Mirror. 14 January 1998. Archived from the original on 26 June 2002. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  7. ^ Selvin, Joel (23 March 2008). "A brief history of ska". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on 9 November 2011. Retrieved 28 October 2011.