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Ska is the musical ancestor of Reggae by way of an interim style of the big Jamaican beat known as Rocksteady. Ska crystallized as a genre in Jamaica around 1962, the same year that Jamaica gained sovereignty and self-governance, after more than 400 years of slavery under European occupation, first from the Spaniards from 1509-1655 and then the from the British from 1655 - 1962. (The British abolished slavery in 1834, however continued their rule of the colony until 1962.)

Ska has always been a revolutionary music, a people's music, music from the people of the countryside and the inner city alike, representing the needs and desires or everyman and everywoman. As Bob Marley sang along with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1964 when their Jamaican Ska group was called "the Wailers":

Got the news from a whispering tree This is the time when man must be free No more burden on our backs I want my freedom today

Get ready children

Didn't I build this country Didn't I plant the corn Didn't my people before me Slave for this country

And as the great Lord Tanamo sang:

Yes we must all try to live as one So if you c'yant give an 'elping hand, Come down off a ya pomps and pride

"...In fact, just take a look at the history of "trucking and bartering" itself; look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you'll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken - conscious efforts - to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there's a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manifacture wants in the general population. It's happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It's very dramatic too at cases like these. For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica - which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, "It's not paying anymore." So within a couple of years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called "free" economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same - and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we've got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slave have to become the happy workers - somehow we've got to work it all out. Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn't want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, "How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they're no longer enslaved into it?" Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn't really want a lot of things - they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate - the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn't then desire, so then the only way they'd be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations. There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants - and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don't really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism. In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be driven into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it's not their nature, that they've had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day..."

- Noam Chomsky In Understanding Power (pp. 203-204), 2002