The rude
boy has come a long way from his origins in Jamaican subculture, as shown in a
new photography exhibition celebrating the movement's distinctive style.
It was
towards the end of 1963 that the Wailers released their first single, Simmer
Down, on the legendary Studio One label in Jamaica. The song was written and
sung by an 18-year-old Bob Marley, the lyrics intended to placate his mother,
Cedella, who was worried about the company her son was keeping in the Trench
Town ghetto of the Jamaican capital, Kingston, where they lived. Simmer Down
was aimed directly at the often sharply dressed young men locally known as
"rude boys", who were making headlines in the then newly independent
island with their violent and antisocial behaviour. "Simmer down, oh control
your temper/Simmer down, for the battle will be hotter," sang Marley over
a frenetic rhythm by the studio's stellar house band, the Skatalites. Produced
by Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Simmer Down was not the first song to
address the rude boy phenomenon. The previous year Stranger Cole had released
Ruff and Tough, produced by Coxsone's rival, Duke Reid, a song now recognised
as the first rude boy anthem. Simmer Down, though, had an urgency that caught
the edgy, increasingly unruly atmosphere of Kingston's mean streets. It was
also an early example of what, as the fast-paced, jazz-inflected thrust of ska
gave way first to the slower "bluebeat" and then to the even slower,
but deeper, bass-heavy rhythm of reggae, would come to be known as "sufferer's
music" – a song voiced by, and for, the oppressed, who ordinarily had no
voice in Jamaican society.
"The
figure of the rude boy with his swagger and casual disrespect for the law harks
back to older archetypes like the semi-mythical Stagger Lee character in black American
folk blues, the bad man who seems invincible," comments Paul Gilroy,
academic and author of several books on the politics of race, including There
Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. "That kind of figure also appeared in
various guises in the imported Hollywood western and gangster movies that young
Jamaicans lapped up. But the emergence of the rude boy at this particular
moment also marked out the acquisition of a new self-confidence and sense of
self-reinvention among the young and disaffected that was related somehow to
Jamaican independence in 1962. The rude boy was a recognisable, if culturally
complex take, on an archetypal bad-boy figure."
Since
then, the rude boy has recurred throughout the history of popular music both in
Jamaica and Britain. His sartorial influence – sharp suits, pork-pie hats,
shiny shoes – was felt in both the early mod and, more problematically,
skinhead movements of the early and late 60s, as imported ska and bluebeat
singles from Jamaica ignited the hipper dance floors of London and beyond. It
was revisited, too, for the 2 Tone movement that emerged out of the Midlands
and London in the wake of punk in the late 70s, when bands such as the Specials
and Madness reinvigorated Jamaican ska.
Now an
exhibition of photography called The Return of the Rudeboy is about to open at
Somerset House in London. Curated by fashion photographer Dean Chalkley and
stylist and creative director Harris Elliott, it aims to "depict a
collective of sharply dressed individuals, who exemplify an important yet
undocumented subculture …" With live events, DJs, merchandising and even a
rude boy barber shop, as well as screenings of fims such as The Harder They
Come – perhaps the ultimate depiction of the lawless rude boy lifestyle – the
exhibition will, say the curators, "document the life, style and attitude
among a growing group of people that embody the essence of the term".
What,
though, is the essence of rude boy in 2014? For many young people, the term is
now synonymous with the 2011 single of the same name by Rihanna, the reigning
rude girl of sexually suggestive R&B. "Come here, rude boy, can you
get it up/Come here rude boy, is you big enough?" she sings, rendering the
term reductively literal and blatantly stereotypical.
I put it
to Harris that, in their interpretation of the term, the rude boy also seems to
have travelled a long way from his edgy ghetto roots, shedding his
anti-establishment tendencies to become simply an arbiter of a certain kind of
post-modern urban style in which the past is rifled and recontextualised, and,
in the process, stripped of real meaning. (An installation will show off a
range of "handcrafted items" made by the luxury luggage designers
Alstermo, that "will reflect the precise environment that our rude boys
cultivate and inhabit".) Are they, in short, elevating style over
substance? "We are definitely looking at the rude boy as representing a
particular kind of style that has evolved over the years," says Harris,
"The show is really about the contemporary expression of that style, even
though there are elements and details that refer back to Jamaica in the 60s and
to the influence early Jamaican emigrants had on British style."
Chalkley
concurs. "It's a celebration of a kind of sartorial attitude that has
endured through early bluebeat and rhythm and blues through mod, skinhead and
all those 60s working-class style movements. Today, it is much less tribal and
much more refined – guys with English tailored tweed jackets, brogues and
vintage Levis or whatever, but with loads of attention to detail."
Missing
for me, though, is the rude boy attitude – the edge that added somehow to the
cool. It strikes me that, if one were to go looking for the contemporary
equivalent of the original Jamaican rude boy, the forbidding housing estates of
north and south London, where the so-called "postcode wars" are
currently played out, might be a better place to prowl. Paul Gilroy agrees:
"Originally, it was certainly very much to do with where you lived, where
you could and couldn't walk, and the whole tense political geography of
Kingston. So, a comparison with the postcode wars would certainly be valid. The
rude boy was essentially about attitude first and style second."
Taking
their cue from the archetypal "baddies" in so many Hollywood western
and gangster movies, the rude boys struck fear into the hearts of respectable
Jamaicans, but attained a level of respect in the ghettoes, where they fiercely
defended their turf from rival gangs. They also made their presence felt at
early ska and bluebeat sound-system dances, either as hired protection or as
rampaging troublemakers – the so-called "dance crashers" immortalised
in a track by Alton Ellis, who recorded a string of anti-rude boy songs
including the almost existential Cry Tough – "how can a man be tough,
tougher than the world?" Soon, the rude boys were being employed by the
likes of and Duke Reid, a policeman turned record producer and sound-system
owner, who thought nothing of beating up his rivals and their charges. Prince
Buster, the legendary ska singer, began his musical career as a rude boy
providing protection for Coxsone's sound system before becoming a performer.
His early hits, such as Madness and One Step Beyond, became early rock-steady
anthems in Kingston and London, and on a song called Judge Dread, he took on
the role of a magistrate sentencing rude boys for "shooting black
people". According Chris Salewicz, music journalist and author of Rude
Boy: Once Upon a Time in Jamaica, Buster had "a serious indentation in the
back of his head from a beating he received from rival rude boys".
This was
the fiercely competitive and casually violent milieu that the Wailers stepped
into when they recorded the placatory Simmer Down in 1963, but the song soon
took on a life of its own. As the American music journalist Timothy White noted
in Catch a Fire, his 1986 biography of Bob Marley, the main reaction to the
song in the ghettoes of Kingston was "a communal shock of
self-recognition". Despite its cautionary thrust, Simmer Down became both
a big-seller and, paradoxically, a song much beloved by the very constituency
it criticised, a constituency that was increasingly making its presence felt in
the cut-and-thrust world of Jamaican music. "The militant rudies got
bolder as Simmer Down got bigger," writes White "and, while Dodd was
moving a thousand copies of the single a week, he was also paying for extra
muscle around his premises. "Throughout the 60s, the rude boy was a
constant presence in Jamaican music, whether employed as protection by
producers such as Duke Reid or to disrupt rival sound-system dances. He was
both celebrated and castigated in songs by the likes of the Rulers (Don't Be a
Rude Boy), Baba Brooks (Gun Fever), the Clarendonians (Rudie Bam Bam), Derrick
Morgan (Cool Off Rudies), the Pioneers (Rudies Are the Greatest), Dandy
Livingstone (A Message to You, Rudie) and, perhaps most famously, Desmond
Dekker, who had a UK hit with Shanty Town – "Dem rude boys out on
probation/Them a rude when them come up to town" – and recorded several
songs on the subject including Rude Boy Gone a Jail and Rudy Got Soul. The
Wailers released two other rude boy songs, Rude Boy (1965) and Rudie (later
retitled Jailhouse), both of which are celebratory. In 1972, the infamous
"Rhygin" became the real-life model for the rude boy played by Jimmy
Cliff in The Harder They Come, still the definitive portrayal of a Jamaican
rude boy who buys into the outlaw myth even as he dies in a blaze of glory.
As
reggae became infused with the spiritual message of Rastafarianism in the
1970s, the rude boy survived as an archetype and an often threateningly real
presence through sharp-dressed, but edgy, artists such as Tapper Zukie and
former Wailer Peter Tosh, who, in 1977, recorded the ominous Stepping Razor,
its opening line almost a rude boy statement of intent – "If you want to
live, treat me good."
"Like
Bob Marley, these guys came from the west Kingston ghetto and so did many of
the people they mixed with,' says Salewicz. "When they sang about the
oppression and the poverty, there were voicing their own experience. For many,
the only way out was music or crime, and it was only the gifted few who made it
as musicians."By the late 70s, though, the rude boy was undergoing an
unlikely rebirth via the multicultural 2-Tone movement – ska rhythms melded to
punk politics – which emerged out of Coventry with the Specials at its
vanguard. Founded by Jerry Dammers, the Specials had their own record label, 2
Tone, which bore the logo of a silhouetted rude boy based on a photograph of
sharp-suited Tosh from the Wailers debut 1965 album, The Wailing Wailers. One
of their hits was the loping A Message to You, Rudie, a cover of Dandy Livingstone's
original anti-rude boy song but this time, the Specials were addressing the
often far-right British skinheads that had become a disruptive presence at
their otherwise celebratory gigs.
As the
rude boy was being reinvented as a symbol of multicultural Britain by a new
generation of ska bands that also included the Selecter, Madness and the Beat,
many of the original Jamaican rude boys had become so-called enforcers for the
two main political parties in Jamaica, the Jamaican Labour party and the People's
National party. By the late 70s, the turf wars of old had escalated into often
murderous sectarian feuds that left hundreds dead. In many ways, then, the
trajectory of the rude boy from young delinquent to fully fledged gangster
prefigures the rise of hip-hop bad guy – Ice T, Tupac Shakur – that stalked
gangsta rap two decades later.
As Paul
Gilroy says, the rude boy is a complex archetype as well as a real and
recurring presence throughout modern black culture and popular music. That he
has been reinvented once again purely as a style icon can be read as a positive
development in tune with a contemporary Britain where race is no longer such a
fraught issue – or as a reflection of our more conformist times in which style
is constantly elevated over substance. For the time being, if Return of the
Rudeboy is anything to go by, the rude boy is back: still cool, but no longer
edgy; razor sharp but minus the razor.
Return
of the Rudeboy is at Somerset House, London 13 June-25 August
