Ska was invented in 1997 when The Mighty Mighty Bosstones released its album “Let’s Face It.”

Wait a second. That’s not right. Ska has been around much longer than that. Maybe it was created by No Doubt in 1995 with the album “Tragic Kingdom.” After all, all the good ska music is played on the radio, right?

If you ask Dicky Barrett, lead singer for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, “It’s about time some good music was played on the radio.” Barrett said that on a cold, rainy day last summer in Chicago at the Warped Tour before the band played “The Impression That I Get,” a song that has now become an anthem for frat houses and keg parties alike.

But is “The Impression That I Get” the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for ska music? I certainly hope not.

Let’s face it, the primary goal of record companies is to make money, and they’ve got it down to a science. The music industry is constantly searching for a genre or group of artists they can categorize and sell to the masses.

This is happening right now with ska.

It’s not the first time an entire style of music has been exploited. In 1991, the Seattle band Nirvana took the music industry by storm, playing music nothing like mainstream audiences had ever heard before.

The music industry dubbed the band’s sound “grunge” and immediately embarked on a feeding frenzy, looking to sign bands who had the same aggressive, hard-edged sound. As a result, a myriad of Nirvana clones hit radio airwaves, and the whole style of music became homogenized and uninteresting.

Now, it seems that record companies are at it yet again, trying to cash in on ska.

So, what is ska?

Ska is a style of dance music that originated in Jamaica in the early 1960s. The sound was characterized by the accented afterbeat of the guitar and jazz-style horn lines.

The first band to play ska was the Skatalites, a band that was together for only a year (until 1965) when it disbanded as a result of differences between members. The band got back together in 1983, and has been together ever since.

A few years after ska first appeared, some musicians started to slow the music down, creating reggae.

Since its origins in the early ’60s, ska has gone through many changes, most noticeably in the late 1980s when bands began to mix punk and ska, spawning what The Bosstones have called “ska core.”

I have been listening to ska for about three years now. Strangely enough, I got into ska the same way most people are getting into it this year — through The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

The Bosstones played a low profile slot on Lollapalooza ’95, kicking off the day on the main stage.

When the Bosstones took the stage, the music hit me square on the head, and I loved it. The next day I went out and bought its newest album at the time, “Question the Answers,” and the rest was history.

I had never heard music before that could cause an entire crowd of people to get up and dance. It was powerful, and I immediately wanted to submerge myself into ska.

That was when I started going to the Fireside Bowl, a run down bowling alley that is considered the “punk Mecca of Chicago.” The bowling alley (in case you were curious, you can’t bowl there) hosts both punk and ska shows every night of the week by locally and nationally known bands. I also went to ska shows at the Metro, a club near Wrigley Field.

After going to the Fireside for about a year, I finally began to realize what this music was about. A sense of unity could be felt by the people who attended the shows. It was all the same people going to the shows, and everyone knew each other, if not by name then by face.

It was its own community.

A subculture.

We went to shows every weekend, getting together to enjoy the music and dance under one roof. We united, leaving all of our differences at the door. There was no line of division between performer and audience.

Any one could be apart of it, all that mattered was that you liked the music.

And then everything changed.

The Bosstones, Goldfinger and Reel Big Fish emerged onto radio (none of these bands embracing the traditional, old-school style ska).

I first noticed it at a Reel Big Fish and MU330 show I attended last May at House of Blues in Chicago. I went there with the intention of buying a ticket at the door, but to my surprise, the show was sold out. “The show’s been sold out for two weeks,” they told me.

This was the first time I had ever been unable to pay at the door. Luckily, I met the lead singer of the Blue Meanies, who was kind enough to put my name on the guest list.

When I entered, none of the usual people I had seen were there. I was lost in a sea of Marilyn Manson and U2 T-shirts. The usual people dancing right in front of the stage were pushed to the back of the club, replaced by violent moshers. When my friends and I danced during MU330’s set, we were stared, laughed and pointed at. It just wasn’t the same anymore.

When I came to Iowa State this year, I was surprised to see that ska shows at the M-Shop were like ska shows in Chicago two or three years ago. There’s room to dance, and a nice friendly environment.

This Sunday, the Ska Against Racism tour is coming to Ames. It will be a chance for ska to return to its roots and bring back what made it so great in the first place — unity.

Ska died in 1997 when the Mighty Mighty Bosstones put out its album “Let’s Face It.” Or was it in 1995 when No Doubt released “Tragic Kingdom?” Is it dead at all? You make the call.

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Conor Bezane is a freshman in journalism and mass communication from Chicago.