NGOSKA Fest takes to Sinchon's streets
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Wataru Buster, lead singer of Japanese band Oi-Skall Mates, points at someone while performing as the headlining act at New Generation of Ska Fest 2016 in Club SHARP on Aug. 27, 2016. / Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar
By Jon Dunbar
Promoting underground music is a labor of love, and nobody has labored harder nor loved more than the people behind Seoul’s fourth annual New Generation of Ska (NGOSKA) Festival.
U.S. punk legends Suicide Machines will headline the show this Saturday, supported by Japanese ska bands Rollings and Coquettish and seven more Korean ska and ska-punk bands.
“This year, Seoul City helped us out with some funding,” festival organizers said. “Every year we had to ask our friends for financial support, which we never really wanted to do since the first festival. Our minds are still the same as they were the first time.”
The festival returns this year to Yonsei-ro, the car-free street running between Sinchon Station on Line 2 and Yonsei University’s front gate. It was there four years ago in 2014 when the Bruce Lee Band, fronted by Korean-American ska-punk workhorse Mike Park, headlined the first NGOSKA Fest. They helped promote the genre to locally based fans as well as countless unsuspecting passersby.
That first year was a huge achievement, but without ticket sales and by eschewing corporate sponsors, it lost a fortune of the organizers’ money, plus over 15 million won in donations collected from crowdfunding site Tumblbug. The next year, it moved inside to EMU Art Hall next to Seoul History Museum where Rob “Bucket” Hingley of legendary U.S. ska band Toasters schooled the local scene on ska history. In 2016 it moved to Club SHARP in Mangwon-dong, western Seoul, where Japanese skinhead-ska band Oi-Skall Mates performed a frenzied show to a small but packed room of diehard ska lovers.
None of this would be possible without Ryu Jinsuk, a linchpin of Korean underground music since the first New Generation of Ska-branded show in 2006. He’s also the charismatic lead singer of ska-punk band Skasucks and the owner of Club SHARP. He leads Team New Generation of Ska, a group of musicians taking on the colossal task of introducing a new musical genre to Korea through this festival. And on top of all this, as well as leading the tattoo parlor Suck Tattoo, he became lead singer of the new 2-tone ska band the Rulerz last year, also set to perform this weekend.
Other Korean bands include Korean ska-punk pioneers Lazybone, Daejeon punks Burning Hepburn, Jeju Island world music purveyors South Carnival, Busan band Ska Wakers, and the youngest band, Rudy Guns, who are reuniting after members are returning from military duty.
Ska is a style of music originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s that has since passed through many cultural filters. It spread to the U.K. through immigration in the late 1960s where British mods and skinheads became fanatical listeners. In Jamaica around 1967 ska evolved into reggae, and many Jamaican ska musicians such as Bob Marley grew their hair out and began singing more about Rastafarianism and world peace rather than shantytowns and gangsters.
In the late 1970s U.K. bands like the Specials and Madness revived ska which spread throughout Europe, the Americas and Japan. Some U.S. bands in the 1990s merged it with punk music, creating ska-punk. The Korean ska scene, while much younger, has bands performing music influenced by all these musical eras.
The free street festival starts in Sinchon at 1 p.m. this Saturday. Visit
for more information.