Jamaican ska music

Jamaican ska music

While the world is rife with different music genres, Hip Hop is perhaps the most prominent, given that it is practice in even global regions, it did not originate. Hip Hop was developed in the U.S. by Latino Americans and inner-city African Americans in the 1970s. The genre is usually constituted of stylized rhythmic that accompanies a rhythmic and rhyming chanted speech, also known as rapping. Hip Hop, however, is more to the Latino Americans and inner-city black Americans. As such, there are numerous other factors/events that made this music genre possible. One of the significant stimuli was the Jamaican ska music, which unfortunately dwindled. This paper will document the importance of Ska Music in the development of Hip Hop and how the genre degraded.

To start with, it is critical to understand the context of Jamaican Ska music. Jamaican Ska music is a genre that initiated in Jamaica towards the end of the 1950s (Chatman, 2018). This music genre tends to combine the elements of calypso and Caribbean Mento with rhythm and blues ad American jazz. The Jamaican Ska features a walking bass line, which is accented with rhythms on the offbeat. Accordingly, the Jamaican Ska is often recognized as the precursor to Reggae and Rocksteady, which are also world-class music genres (Chatman, 2018). In most cases, the Jamaican Ska music was meant to set the pace for dancing. It stood out among the rest of the Jamaican Music simply because of its quick, upbeat, and exciting nature.

Even though acknowledged as a precursor to Reggae and Rocksteady, the Jamaican Ska Music perhaps influenced the Hip Hop genre the most. A vital tenet of the Ska music that has been absorbed into the Hip Hop genre is dubbing out tracks (Chatman, 2018). These Ska music traditions are direct lead into the sampling and emceeing values that the Hp Hop artists embrace at present. The Jamaican Ska dubbing entailed mixing supplementary or additional sounding to the original production, hence creating the finished soundtrack. For example, a Ska musician used to compose his or her song while including words and rhythms of previous artists. This trend has indeed been taken up by the hip hop culture. Fundamentally, this tradition has been integrated into the hip hop culture in the sense that artists are now making instrumental remixes of original songs (Chatman, 2018). Hip Hop musicians are not only incorporating the soundtracks of their fellow rap artists but also that of peers practicing distinct genres. An excellent example of such is My Girl remix that features Stefflon Don, Alkaline, and Red Rat. This song is adapted from an earlier Ska track by Red Rad. Even though some of the lyrics of the song are that of Red Rat’s original song, the artists have also introduced their own to make the Hip Hop song even more interesting.

Another way that the Jamaican Ska music has influenced Hip Hop music is through natural sound effects. As such, the Ska Music deejays would put incorporate natural sound effects into the music beat to make a track even more interesting besides empowering. Hip Hop culture has also taken up such a Ska music tradition (Chatman, 2018). This mainly occurs where the Hip Hop artists want to put an emphasis on some message. For example, the producing Hip Hop incorporates sound effects that entail natural sound such as gunshots, crying babies, and breaking glass, among others (Chatman, 2018). With such sound effects, it follows that the audience of hip-hop music is able to understand the intentions of the artist.

Another way that the Jamaican Ska music has influenced the Hip Hop culture is through toasting tracks. In the early days, Ska Music disk jockeys would get on the microphones to hype up tacks (Chatman, 2018). This creativity encompassed the emcees sounding words while Music was playing to make the crown more enthusiastic. The sounds or words voiced by the emcee were typically in correspondence of the Music played. Alternatively, the emcees would put in exclamation words, for example, “wow” and “year.” These words would then elicit rapid activity among the members of the audience (Chatman, 2018). This Ska Music tradition later influenced the current practices demonstrated in the exercise of hip-hop music. In the modern-day, the Hip Hop artists and the emcees, to be precise, have taken up the habit of singing along soundtracks. Hence, these emcees sound motivating slogans, which then trigger an otherwise passive audience into a frenzy.

Unfortunately, Jamaican Ska Music has not progressed with time. Instead, the genre has continued to disintegrate. According to Johnstone (2018), the end of Ska Music came about in the mid-1990s. The scholar relates that Bradley Nowell was the last person to perform a proper Ska Music. The key reason for the demise of Jamaican Music, according to Johnstone (2018), was the post-irony movement in North America. The scholar identifies that even though “rude boys” and “rude girls” tried concertedly to revive the Ska Music, they failed miserably because the post-irony movement had already succeeded in convincing the people about the inappropriateness of the music genre. The death of the main forces behind the revival of the Ska Music has not helped anything. In an article by Genzlinger (2019), it was revealed that Ranking Roger, who was a prominent vocalist of the British Ska band known as the Beat tried as much as possible to rekindle the spark of the Ska music between the late 1970s and the early 1980s. However, his health deteriorated, and this meant that his activism would no longer proceed. He most concerning thing is that, upon Ranking Roger’s inactivity and the eventual death, those who had found inspiration in the artist waned off. Therefore, the foundation that had laid on the survival of the Ska music was now at stake.

Conclusively, this paper has illustrated that, even though the American Hip Hop music has continued to dominate the airwave across the world, the genre has its roots in the diminishing Jamaica Ska Music. It has been established that most of the primary facets of the Hip Hop music culture borrow from the tenets of Ska music. Toasting on the microphone and dubbing are the heavily borrowed elements. Just like the Jamaican Ska music, the Hip Hop culture entails the tendency to include the songs of other artists in an artist’s soundtrack. This is commonly known as remixing in the culture of Hip Hop. This discussion has also portrayed that the Hip Hop music genre encompasses including natural sound effects, for example, birds singing, which was also a commonplace with the production of the Ska Music Unfortunately, this paper has shown that the Ska music is dying off, with the case made worse by the death of artists who have tried to revive the music genre.