Pick it Up

Have you ever listened to a band and they used the term "pick it up"? Well that all started with a little style of music called "ska". Ska is a term often used to pump up a crowd and get them stoked to see the band. I would like you to pick it up, and get pumped to learn all about ska it’s time to know when it started, where it started, who started it, and how it has changed over time.
What is ska? It is an up-beat happy form of music that incorporates; rolling bass, off beat guitar, brass horns, and a drum beat you can’t help but dance to. Ska has been around as far back as the 1930’s. To this day most people don’t know about it. A good example is a local ska band called Natalie Wouldn’t. They blew my mind away with their form of Jamaican-born rock blending with the up-lifting sound of brass horns. So let’s jump back to the 1930s and find out more about ska’s origins.
Ska started in the 1930’s, when it branched off of New Orleans jazz. Local bands at the time took the smooth sound of jazz and mixed it with Jamaican instruments, and it was characteristically up-beat. The first well known ska artists are Prince Buster, Byron Lee, and Peter Tosh in 1964. They were the first musicians to expose Americans to ska at the World’s Fair in New York in 1964. Before that ska was only known in the West Indies. Even though it wasn’t very popular at the time, most jazz fans seemed to enjoy it. However, ska began sounding a little more rock and roll in the sixties and seventies. As the sixties and seventies came around ska progressed into rock. Popular bands, at such as The Rolling Stones and The Beatles transformed the music by blending ska with piano and strong guitar. However, people didn’t call the music ska, so it was still considered an underground form of music. In the seventies ska was mostly categorized with jazz and reggae. It wasn’t until the eighties that ska became popularized in the punk movement. The punk movement gave ska a whole new look and sound. It is mostly thanks to the British label Two Tone Records. They recorded most of the ska music at the time. The new look of ska still had the joyful up-beat sound of its early years but was over taken by the rapid speed of punk music. The lyrics became silly, and there weren’t very many ska songs that were about serious issues. People who followed this type of music often had Mohawks, and wore black and white clothing that was often in checkered patterns. Furthermore, the punk and ska style was dirty not much personal grooming going on there. The fans formed a new dance called skanking that was often done in this time at ska shows. Skanking is running in place pretty fast sometimes in a circle. Also at this time they started to incorporate terms to hype the audience such as "pick it up." The vocals required fast verbalizations and tongue twisters. Ska singers required a quick tongue. This new style of ska and its music has stayed with its fans until this day. It even inspired rap and hip hop music in the nineties. Ska music has inspired many rap style artist. It started toasting, that is spoken lyrics based on the rhythm of the music. If you were to take away everything but the percussions in ska music it would sound similar to rap. Ska is definitely not rap, but did inspire rapping. In the 1990’s ska became even more popular. Bands such as Less than Jake and The Fish incorporated lyrics of equality and political issues. That skyrocketed ska into main stream the more popular ska bands were Operation Ivy and Sublime. They are known for their political lyrics. Sublime is well known band, but people who know of Sublime probably don’t recognize the ska guitar cords, and their horns that are incorporated in their albums. Even though this music is under appreciated ska has been around for decades, supplying people with up-beat music that makes it hard to not dance to. Ska went from being silly music to hard hitting political moving songs that help people keep on moving in this harsh world. This type of music has come a long way from its jazz roots. It is the one music category that I have great appreciation for and believe that everyone should know of.

I hope you are pumped! below is a video thanks to youtube of streetlight manifewsto a very nice ska band. Listen and enjoy!