[I don’t listen to that much ska, but this is just a stunning piece of music journalism. Highly recommended. -egg]

When I got back home and was trying to write about Jah B., doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance. Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style mento, calypso? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.” Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear and body, or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth…

[…]

…if you listen to these songs or even listen to thirty seconds of each, you can hear the rhythm we’re talking about begin to change in flip-book fashion. You hear it persist, you hear it move from song to song, but you hear it changing. You hear the emphasis on the upbeat getting stronger, hear an essential garishness creep in, feel the tempo getting faster, everything sort of sliding forward in the measure. African drumming, calypso and mento and Cuban counterpoint, Rastafarian groundations, the sound systems, and something quintessential but indefinable that is Jamaican, all of these had readied the people, certain people, for this change, to receive this rhythm from the States and just crank it a little, then send it back. In those eight songs you can hear ska unfurl as another tendril out of the blues, the great mother root. It’s as tidy a demonstration as I know of the fact—deeper than ska, deeper than Rosco, deeper than the South—that black popular music in the twentieth century can’t be comprehended except as a phenomenon of what Bernard Bailyn calls the Atlantic world. In this case the old West Indian world, of which Tennessee lay at the northern fringe. It’s the shatter-zone of the slave diaspora. Circulating currents. We gave Jamaica blues. Jamaica gave us ska. Jamaica gave us dub, we gave back hip-hop. It’s been happening for four hundred years.

via ISSUE 83: That Chop on the Upbeat :: Oxford American – The Southern Magazine of Good Writing.