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JCC Battle of the Bands

Get your teens out for a rockin'evening of fun: It's the 5th Annual JCC Battle of the Bands

The 5th Annual JCC Battle of the Bands, presented by Don't Just Sit There, a teen social action and community service group, will take place May 28, 6 11:30 p.m. Admission is $5 per person. This event raises money for charitable projects such as, Adopt a Family, Hole in the Wall Camps, Open Pantry and more.

Battle of the Bands began when the Don't Just Sit There group decided to host a concert atmosphere event for their peers in a safe, substance-free environment, while raising money for charity. More than 200 people attended Battle of the Bands last year.

All the competing teen bands are in middle and high school, representing East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, Westfield, Springfield, and Enfield, CT. Hydraulic Sandwich of Greenfield, last year's 2nd place winner, will play as the non-competing featured highlight band. This event is open to the public. Everyone is invited to come in and rock out! The bands will perform various styles including Punk, Rock, Emo, and Ska.

Contact Amy Kimball, Teen and Camp Director, with any questions, (413) 739-4715 or akimball@springfieldjcc.org.

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Ska is a form of Jamaican music which began in the early 1960s. Combining elements of traditional mento and calypso with an American jazz and rhythm and blues sound, it was a precursor in Jamaica to rocksteady and later reggae. Musical historians typically divide the history of ska into three waves. Ska's popularity has waxed and waned since its original inception, and has had revivals of note in England in the 1980s and another wave of popularity in the 1990s.

Emo is a subgenre of hardcore punk music. Since its inception, emo has come to describe several independent variations, linked loosely but with common ancestry. As such, use of the term (and which musicians should be so classified) has been the subject of much debate.

In its original incarnation, the term emo was used to describe the music of the mid-1980s Washington, DC scene and its associated bands. In later years, the term emocore, short for "emotional hardcore", was also used to describe the DC scene and some of the regional scenes that spawned from it. The term emo was derived from the fact that, on occasion, members of a band would become spontaneously and literally emotional during performances. The most recognizable names of the period included Rites of Spring, Embrace, One Last Wish, Beefeater, Gray Matter, Fire Party, and, slightly later, Moss Icon. The first wave of emo began to fade after the breakups of most of the involved bands in the early 1990s.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the term emo began to reflect the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi, which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason put forth a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic in nature than its predecessor. The so-called "indie emo" scene survived until the late 1990s, as many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles.

As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the more mainstream style, creating a style of music that has now earned the moniker emo within popular culture. Whereas, even in the past, the term emo was used to identify a wide variety of bands, the breadth of bands listed under today's emo is even more vast, leaving the term "emo" as more of a loose identifier than as a specific genre of music.