50s Ska

Ska is an easily recognisable style, with an offbeat rythem called an upstroke or ‘skank’. It’s quick and exciting and if you’re not tapping your feet, you will be dancing. Horns lead and follow the skank, as well as piano or keyboard that emphasises the bass line.

It was the precursor sound to music styles steadybeat and reggae and ska spread out from Jamaica when the country gained independence from Britain. Because American radio stations could be picked up in Jamaica, this is how Jazz and R&B influenced ska.

A Jamaican DJ called Clement Dodd spread the new ska over the airwaves having identified a style that helped towards a new cultural identity in the wake of the British. He established Studio One where many legendary ska tracks were laid down.

Most originating artists or ‘Skaartists’ such as Desmond Dekker and Bob Marley transitioned to Reggae music as it developed out of Jamaica. For instance in the film The Bank Job (2008) there is a scene in a night club and in the background a reggae track plays.

The film is well reseached because at that time reggae was new and swept into London clubs. In particular the artist Anthony Johnson who worked from the same Jamaican studios as Bob Marley and whose track ‘Gunshot’ was one of the first reggae sounds to arrive on the international scene.

Anthony Johnson

It is this track ‘Gunshot’ that is used in The Bank Job film and is about the daily gun crime that errupted in Jamaica in those times. To this day the author is known as Anthony ‘Gunshot’ Johnson such was the success of his song and reggae music. Today he remains a modest artist and is more established in Italy where he continues to visit every year to entertain packed venues of fans.

London in the 1950s was a time when many Jamaican families emigrated after the Jamaican independence and if you had lived through those times a racial tension would have been felt and reggae was the Jamaican cultural music.

So one can imagine that a new music genre breaking into fashionable London may have been exciting for music oficionados but not altogether desired by the wider observer that viewed immigrants much the same as they are viewed today in the current European situation.

‘Rude’ was a term denoting an impoverished Jamaican teen and the youth formed into gangs with their own dress code designed to mock the more well off folk. Members were seen as nobodys and they became known as ‘rudeboys’ and subsequently the source of much material for ska lyrics.

Reggae music came out of ska. Reggae was slower and the lyrics more politically geared.

So, when you hear talk of third wave ska you know it refers to ska interpretation out of American. Operation Ivy, sometimes called ‘Op Ivy’ was an American Ska band from Berkeley, California formed in May 1987 and who were a significnat influence on that version of ska music.

Some bands that influenced Op Ivy were: The Clash, The Specials, The Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers, The Uptones, Public Enemy, among others. However, I fail to find any resemblance and Op Ivy for me are what can only be described as an American punk band, and what that music would sound like if the punk movement had come out of American sub-culture, which of course it did not.

Punk culture in London was being formed at the end of the so-called swinging 60s while in America the remnants of the hippie movement were still being played out. Punk was about pushing aside the free-love and shabby fashioned 60s and re-inventing the smart and respectable 50s.

So instead of going along with 70s fashion which followed the shabby and loose hippie fashion in the form of wide bottom trousers wide collars and freaky shirts; punk stuck with jeans, T-shirts, and leather jackets worn by rockers before the 50s.

Punks eventually drew on the influences of Teddy Boys, Mods, skinheads and even glam rockers and became slightly more colourful than the black attire of the 50s. This black attire that had come from rockers and to punk would later give ska a dress identity.

Although the ska third wave is music from America in the 80s, it originated from the punk subculture and you can often tell it from 50s-60s Jamaican ska, particularly because of its large horn pieces that dominate.

Some other bands that were making third wave ska include The Untouchables, The Toasters, Less Than Jake, Mustard Plug and Goldfinger.

Ska bands formed in America from the early 80s but were not mainstream until the 90s when bands formed like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Operation Ivy that set ska apart from the original mixes and set it to a faster tempo suited to punk, and so ‘ska punk’ was created, or ‘post third wave’ ska.

By 1993 The Mighty Mighty Bosstones became the first American ska punk band to find mainstream commercial success. Thereafter followed a rise in popularity for ska as a music genre so that by 1996 it was among the most popular in America.