What Is Ska ?

Most musical genres come from humble beginnings but few have the immense impact of ska music. While you may have never heard of it, this style of music gets sampled for modern pop, punk, rock, hip hop, and dance songs. 

Ska became Jamaica’s first indigenous style of pop music. It blended the Cuban mambo with Jamaican dance music and the rhythm and blues styles of New Orleans. It fuses many unique musical elements to create its own genre that has defined major elements of 1960s music in Jamaica, 1970s dance music in Britain, and 1990s punk music in the United States. 

The ska chop is a technique typically reserved for the guitar used when playing reggae, ska, and rocksteady music. It’s used on the offbeat to add more or a jarring flavor to the rhythm. 
In total, ska combines the elements of Caribbean and Jamaican rhythms with punk rock energy and horns that help drive the beat. The main goal of the genre is to provide uptempo, high-energy music that’s easy to get up and dance to. 

Almost every ska song you’ll hear keeps a 4/4 beat and is uptempo. Slower tracks do exist, but the main point of the genre is to provide a good dance background to Caribbean dances like the mambo and the mento. In most cases, if you can’t dance to it, it isn’t ska music.

Bass guitars get plenty of work in ska music and typically play a lot of quarter-notes and eighth-notes. Drummers put extra emphasis on the backbeat, hitting harder for beat two and beat four. Guitarists typically use a ska chop to force their instrument to make a percussion-like stabbing sound on beats two, three, and four. 

Typical rock instruments like guitars, basses, and drums are almost always joined by a jazz horn section that can include saxophones, trumpets, and trombones. The horns are the ones that usually get an instrumental solo in the song, unlike the guitars getting it in rock music. These instrumentals typically replace lyrics on a verse or two, alternating with the vocalist. 

With most ska bands, you should expect to hear some sort of political or social message in the lyrics of their songs. At the beginning of the genre, the groups largely focused on the racism experienced by members and advocated for both racial equality and integration—at the time, integration was an ongoing process. 

Later on, you’ll find groups advocating for and against all sorts of political ideas. Ska bands forming in California in particular, especially in more recent years, heavily advocate for the legalization of cannabies for medical and recreational purposes. At other times, groups have advocated for and against specific presidential regimes, as well as in opposition to the many wars countries find themselves in.

It’s also not surprising to find that artists involved in ska music have gone on to become activists. A few bands broke up simply because the members wanted to get more into activism and decided to pursue that instead of continually producing music.

The Four Characteristics Of Ska

1. Pretty much every ska band will use a lot of rock instruments and horns in their music. These will include bass, guitars, saxophones, drums, trombones, and trumpets.
2. The singers and the horn section will often trade off on the melody. Many songs will feature instrumental verses or sections done entirely by their horn sections. Think of those banger saxophone solos you would normally hear in a jazz concert but done in a different style. 
3. Ska is almost exclusively written in a 4/4 time signature. This genre is a fast-paced, dance style of music that’s meant to be played quickly. Typically, you’ll hear drummers emphasize the backbeats at beats two and four, and guitarists make stabs at beats two, three, and four. 
4. A focus on social justice. Early ska music was focused on racial integration and equality, but social justice and freedom are still themes that follow this genre to this day. There may be a wide range of topics that artists tackle, but ska music will always contain some sort of message in the lyrics.