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www.groovekorea.com / August 2014 74 Edited by Emilee Jennings (emilee@groovekorea.com) muSIC & ARTS S hine your two-tone shoes, don that pork pie hat and get your skanking ass out to Sinchon for the New Generation of Ska Festival 2014. On Aug. 30, from 2 to around 11 p.m., 12 great ska acts will be performing at a free outdoor festival near Yonsei University. What is ska? It’s a type of popular music, originally from Jamaica, which first appeared in the early 1950s. The original ska bands rep- resented a fusion of Caribbean Mento and Calypso with American jazz and R&B, and ska was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Since then, it has been through many incarnations: In the 1960s, it became popular with British mods; in the 1970s and 1980s, it became closely associated with punk music and was also adopted into skinhead culture. The Specials, Madness, The Beat and Toots & the Maytals are some of the most famous ska groups, but like its own history of blurring lines between genres, bands like Rancid, Sublime, No Doubt and The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones are all known (or at least were at one point known) for being heavily ska-influenced. In the 2006 Hongdae music scene, some local players held a concert called Ska vs. Punks, a celebration for fans of both genres. “But it was just a local show, like any other club show in Hongdae,” says Kim Ji-won, 29, a festival organizer. Fortunately for hard-core aficionados, the initial event was able to generate enough interest to turn it into a concert series, which has continued every year since, sometimes twice a year. New GeNeratioN of Ska feStival Story by Dave Hazzan / Photos by Jon Dunbar ENTrANCE IS FrEE, BuT DANCING IS CoMPuLSorY