Klive Walker
for Garth White (1947-2024)
RIHANNA
On Rihanna’s 2010 single Rude Boy her vocals portray the fearless attitude of the song’s female protagonist as something wrapped in a steamy sensuality. Sex seems to be on the rude boy’s mind and so she teases him, dares him to perform:
Come here rude boy, boy/
Can you get it up/
Come here rude boy, boy/
Is you big enough.
The song seems more concerned with the female character’s command of the situation than the intimate act itself. What increases the stakes of this encounter is the sense the rude boy is confident, used to getting his own way. That’s what the two words describing him suggest. The teaser is herself a rudie, a take-charge rebel who is certain she can play with fire and conquer it. Rihanna’s seductive singing is submerged in the bounce of a dancehall-inspired beat and a potent Caribbean posture rocketing the single to number one on America’s Billboard charts and to becoming a hit in a variety of other countries.
Who are these rudies Rihanna sings about? How long have they inhabited the music culture? Regardless of how old you are, over the last sixty years the odds are rudie has invaded the music of your generation. There’s Bob Marley’s recordings in the 1960s, the Specials’ British ska revival of the late 1970s, Fishbone’s eighties ska-funk, the ’90s hip hop of Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man and of course dancehall’s reinvention of rudie personified by Josie Wales, Super Cat and Ninja Man through to Bounty Killer, Vybz Kartel and beyond. Rudie isn’t simply the domain of over-eager testosterone. Aside from Rihanna there are other women artists who can be seen as occupying its domain. They include Jamaican rhumba dancer and vocalist Anita ‘Margarita’ Mahfood; Grace Jones, the model, actor and recording artist; vocalist Rhoda Dakar; dancehall star Lady Saw, Tanya Stephens and in this moment, Spice and Shenseea.
All those women artistes radiate rudie characteristics of a rebellious persona and defiant lyrics highlighting their ideas of an independent woman dipped in rhythms influenced by ska or reggae or dancehall. How has rudie come to be so absorbed by global popular culture? What is its story, its heritage? This is a journey through history that attempts to answer those questions using, not necessarily a strict definition, but what can be described as the characteristics of rudie formulated by the late Jamaican music historian Garth White.
RUDIE
Rudie’s origins can be found in Kingston, Jamaica, during the 1960s. 1964 is a good year to begin. That’s when we can observe Rudie as he emerges from one of the wood shacks in the tenement yard where he lives. He walks while guiding his bicycle across the dust bowl that is the open area of the yard. His ride has no fender. No lights. No brakes. It is minimalist art born out of necessity. When he arrives at the street Rudie’s slim, muscular 5’ 9” frame mounts his cycle. His dark grey gun mout’ pants ride up his ankles to reveal black socks decorated with red diamonds. The cuffs of his white Arrow shirt, lined with maroon pinstripes, hang unbuttoned over his wrists. The tips of the Clarks desert boots he wears touch the asphalt.
Rudie shifts his gray fedora scratches the front of his widow’s peak, then readjusts the hat so that it conceals half of his forehead. He retrieves the ratchet, a large single-blade pen knife, from the side pocket of his pants. He bites on the unsharpened edge of the blade folded into a hard sheath connected to the blade by a hinge. He pulls out the blade with his teeth, testing its fluidity of motion. The typical way to expose the sharp side of the blade is to flash it out by a quick-snap wrist motion where the sheath becomes the handle and the hinge locks the open blade into position. He uses one hand to gently return the blade to its sheath-handle then eases it back into his pocket. He rides into the night. Tiny raindrops spit at his hat, his back and his thighs. All of a sudden the spitting stops. The sky clears and the bright stars reveal themselves. They guide him to his Bournemouth Club destination. As he approaches the intersection of Sea Breeze Avenue and Kingston Harbour Lloyd Brevette’s bass lines walk into his ears with the impudence of a rudie taking care-free strides through a downtown laneway. When the venue appears, he can clearly hear the Wailers’ cool harmony and Bob Marley’s tense tenor. The sounds of the Simmer Down recording spill out of the venue like a rolling wave collapsing on a beach. Rudie smiles knowing he and his bredrin are the subject of the song. He is also amused because he spoke to Peter Wailer outside the Ambassador theatre a couple days before. Peter revealed to him that a big Wailers record was about to drop.
Rudie may be fictional but his sense of style, his humble residence, his mode of transportation, his weapon, his dancehall destination and the music he enjoyed there are all true. That summer Simmer Down, a song by rudies about rudies, hustled its way to number one on the Jamaican charts.
RASTAFARI
1960s rudie is the culture of grass roots youth. Ska, the grandmother of reggae, is rudie’s music. In the world of Rudie the sound system is the ultimate expression of this new popular sound breathing life into parties with a relentless, holistic bass, trap drums indebted to nyabinghi and horns heralding a Jamaicanized jazz. This first indigenous popular music announces the age of Jamaica’s independence and is a battle-cry for this new nation’s real liberation even as it inspires the ‘drop legs’ dance, slim pants, crinoline-informed dresses, the stripped-down bicycle and the ratchet knife all wrapped up in a chaotic restless spirit. Unemployment, petty crime, and scarce resources are Rudie’s reality. That’s one reason why ghetto youth gangs with names like Skull and Spanglers battled with bottles, stones, ratchets and sometimes even guns. That’s what gives birth to gang leaders like Zacky the High Priest. 1966 is the year Rudie piques the interest of the Jamaican mainstream. Popular rudie tunes are on the city’s two radio stations. Rudie culture spreads like a viral disease in high schools where students from downtown tenements mix freely with uptown students from the lower and upper middle-classes. Rudie doesn’t exist in isolation but thrives in depressed communities where it collides with another important influence on youth culture then.
Rastafari, at the time, a young 36-year-old movement, embraces God as a black Emperor living in Ethiopia. Rastafari understands Africa as a place with a history of sophisticated civilizations, recognizes Jamaican descendants of captives from that continent to be carrying the impossible burden of inequality because they were forced into slavery so many centuries ago. Rastafari as a movement has been persecuted, ridiculed and pushed beyond society’s margins but its sages are deeply respected by the poor and the young: Mortimer Planno and Prince Emmanuel in Trench Town. Ras Negus and Count Ossie in the east. 1966 is pivotal for Rastafari. In April their deity, Emperor Haile Selassie, arrives in Kingston. He meets with the government, politicians and prominent Rasta leaders. His state visit allows this underground movement to claim some measure of legitimacy and the ability to gesture toward the mainstream. The result: An enhanced profile for Rastafari that increases its attraction to middle-class youth and to rudies.
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rudie and Rastafari intersect throughout much of the 1960s but 1966 is pivotal for their cross-pollination. Both are residents of West Kingston’s worst ghettoes when bulldozers rumble into their neighbourhoods and destroy their humble homes in the name of a dissonant urban renewal. In those destitute enclaves, some rudies and some Rastafari transition from occupying a precarious existence on the edge of desperation to complete homelessness. So devastating is their removal that some are forced to live among the dead in May Pen cemetery. After the bulldozer invasion, Back-O-Wall becomes Tivoli Gardens, a garrison for the Jamaica Labour Party. There is no surprise that rudies’ anger bubbles over into a desire to act out, to rebel.
Rebellion, then, is not one-size fits all. There are different paths: A life of crime attracts some. Others are seduced by the illicit demands of elected politicians. Some are drawn to Black Power, Rastafari and even socialist alternatives. Another group consists of potential musicians, singers, painters, sculptors, poets and writers who rebel through their art. These groups of political henchmen, activists and artists intersect and interchange in interesting ways.
COMPLEXITY
The figure of the rudie is misunderstood, and too often oversimplified. The rude boy is usually portrayed as nothing more than a gangster. That’s the typical knee-jerk response of most ska histories. But there is another way to understand rudie. Garth White, a pioneer in discussing the history of Jamaican music, lived on the front lines of that moment. His groundbreaking 1966 essay ‘Rudie Oh Rudie’ attempts a more precise description. White writes that the rude boy is a lower-class individual with African heritage disgusted with the ruling system[1]. In another essay which appears in Reggae International, a book anthology published in 1982, he says: “The young black adult became increasingly disenchanted and alienated from a system which seemed to offer no relief from suffering. Many of the young became ‘rude’…Rude boy applied to anyone against the system.”[2] This sense of the rude boy’s racial and social status plus their rebellious attitude presents a way of understanding him but doesn’t really disturb the generalized gangster label that seems tattooed to his forehead.
White gets more specific in that Reggae International essay. He suggests there are three types of rude boys. The first includes a range of young men, some involved in petty crime, others indulging much more serious ‘bad man’ behaviour. He implies the ‘acting out’ of these ghetto youths be considered revolutionary even if their approach is unfocused or as he expresses it: anarchic. White’s second group is young mercenaries hired by the two main political parties. Can political goons be against the system? That’s difficult to argue. What can’t be disputed is that this group is immersed in the fashion, music and rebellion of rudie even if that rebellion is misguided.
The third and most interesting faction in White’s unravelling is cultural rudies. They, hiding in plain sight, escape the observation of most analysts. White describes them as inspired by Rastafari. (2). As a movement Rastafari is more than just an Afrocentric perspective demanding repatriation, it promotes a liberation theology attacking the injustices of Jamaica’s racist class system. Cultural rudies are young people involved in the arts, students or just progressive law-abiding youth. White is uniquely positioned to provide this deeper assessment. Back then, he is a student from a humble background attending the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus. He is the first to write about the social impact of Jamaica’s popular music in the previously mentioned essay. At the time he could be considered a Rastafari who transitioned from the cultural rudie path.
RUDE BOY WAILERS
Music is a focus of rudie culture. Rudie is an important influence on ska and rock steady, the first two forms of popular music to emerge from the African-Jamaican imagination. After six years or so ska’s fast-paced beat and horns-intensive melodies give way in 1966 to rock steady, its languid, seductive bass invigorated by boogie piano. Then just two years later in 1968, reggae arrives, breathing a distinctive rhythm guitar chop, percussive keyboard and adventurous trap drum patterns. Rudie recordings excite the early days of ska from 1962 right through to the tail end of rock steady in 1967. The rude boy era of the music, though, is usually considered as covering the years 1965 to ’67. That’s when rudie as theme for song lyrics is the most prolific.
Rudie tunes reveal the tension between different perspectives of how to understand these rebellious urban youths. Alton Ellis’s song Dance Crasher embraces the ‘rudie as gangster’ perception. This song’s infectious melody boasts one of the best R&B-style voices in a time defined by exceptional singers. In the song, Ellis issues a reprimand disguised by his butter smooth vocals. A convincing plea to rude boys to hit pause on their intent: Muscling their way into dances, causing disruptions and using knives to hurt or may be even take a life.
Prince Buster’s Judge Dread is a scathing attack on rudies. His stern, apocalyptic, spoken word recording focuses on rudies as violent agents of Black poor on Black poor crime. Buster’s Judge persona deploys righteous Afrocentric indignation dispensing severe hundred-year sentences to various rude boys for crimes against their own communities. Derrick Morgan’s Tougher than Tough and Desmond Dekker’s 007 (Shanty Town) celebrate the fearless bravado of rudies. There is a sense in those tunes that rudie is not simply a gangster but a rebel.
The words of Lee Perry’s 1967 recording Set Them Free investigates a more complex reading of rudie. He doesn’t condemn them or celebrate their criminal actions. Instead, his lyrics offer a deeper understanding of the social conditions from which they emerge:
They are from a poor generation/
Having no education /
No qualification/
So they are driven to desperation/
Can’t get a job/
They have been forced to rob/
I’m not saying that they should but–/
A hungry man is an angry one
Set Them Free is the progressive answer song to Prince Buster’s conservative indictment. Perry makes sure we know that by including Prince Buster’s Judge Dread character in his song. There the Judge appears as the antagonist to Perry’s creation of the heroic lawyer, Lord Defend, who challenges the Judge’s harsh sentences and demands rudies be set free.
Garth White’s prime example of cultural rude boys is the Wailers. They are not a band, then, they have just transformed from a vocal sextet to a harmony trio featuring Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. White tells us the sound system deejays of the time refer to them as the Wailing Rude Boy Wailers. Their rudie songs imply young people who dress like rudies, listen to the music, display rebel attitudes and who may or may not involve themselves in petty crime shouldn’t be labelled as gangsters. Their ska tune Good Good Rudie leaves no doubt they view them as acceptable rebels. The song describes them as wise and supports their confrontations with police when they say “Rudies get taller as baton sticks get shorter”. On Let Him Go they are even more specific about their admiration for rudie:
Remember he is smart/
Remember he is strong/
Remember he is young/
and he will live long
The song accuses the establishment of persecuting these youth it sees as rebels not criminals:
You frame him/
You say things/
He didn’t do/
You rebuke him/
You scorn him/
You mek him feel blue.
The chorus then celebrates the fact that the system must set them free. With these and other recordings The Wailers mount a defence for cultural rudies like themselves.
Let Him Go doesn’t feature Marley who was living in Delaware, USA, by then. But he records several pro rude boy tunes with the Wailers before he migrates. Two examples are: Put it on and Rude Boy. 1964’s Simmer Down is possibly the Wailers’ earliest rudie track. On that tune Marley sings that rudies must cool their temper and not run it so hot. That recording is often interpreted as anti-rudie. But couldn’t it also be a friendly warning to rebellious youth to avoid clashing with the law and channel their anger in more cultural or progressive ways?
MARGARITA
The use of ‘rudie’ to describe this phenomenon rather than the exclusive ‘rude boy’ allows the the rude girl to enter the fray. In 1960s Jamaica the spotlight is exclusively on the young men of the culture. Much of the writing and analysis since then hasn’t avoided this quicksand of sexism. If a cultural rudie is an independent spirit, a rebel against the system, someone influenced by Rastafari, a woman who comfortably fits that description is Anita ‘Margarita’ Mahfood.
Margarita had earned an outstanding reputation through her excellence as a rhumba dancer. Rhumba moves emerged effortlessly from her body in response to the provocative Latin rhythms energizing the night clubs where she performed in early 1960s Kingston. Her engagement with Rastafari flowed from her participation in jam sessions at the iconic Nyabinghi drummer Count Ossie’s gatherings in Wareika Hills. There she was involved in creative movement to the sound of the Nyabinghi drums producing dance steps that in one form or another are associated with how Jamaicans, including Bob Marley on stage, moved to such rhythms.
Margarita Mahfood
“Margarita was a rudie”, says Winston Smith, a neighbourhood associate of Margarita who lived on the same street as her in East Kingston. Smith tells us that she ran away from home because her father opposed her insistence on pursuing her art. Margarita as rudie was intent on liberating herself from the life her father and society as a whole demanded that a fair-skinned young woman like her, who attended a prestigious high school, should inhabit. She set aside those expectations and instead became a dance artiste who associated with Rastafari. Margarita’s trajectory synchronizes perfectly with White’s concept of the cultural rudie.
Margarita grew up in the same East Kingston neighbourhood that produced Count Ossie, his drummers and the iconic Jamaican band, the Skatalites. As a celebrity dancer, her collaboration with Count Ossie is not surprising, neither is her romantic and artistic relationship with Don Drummond, the mythic trombonist of the Skatalites, an all-star band of exceptional musicians, many of them jazz-oriented.
Margarita’s rebellion against the patriarchal system operating within the Jamaican music industry of the nineteen sixties, where women could only appear on recordings as junior partners in duet with a male vocalist, is another feature of her rudie credentials. She entered the studio to record Woman a Come, her own composition, with the Skatalites providing the music. The song describes Margarita’s ethereal connection with Don Drummond with poetic lyrics constructed from the language and imagery of Rastafari spirituality. On Woman a Come she is a solo artist backed by a collection of outstanding musicians on a session produced by one of the industry’s A-list producers, a first for a woman singer in Jamaica. And if that wasn’t enough, she distinguishes herself in another way: She is the subject of her own song. She is not voicing a male writer’s stereotypical lyrics about a woman with a broken heart lamenting that her man has left her.
Tragically Margarita didn’t live to witness Jamaican music’s 1965-67 rude boy phase. She died on January 2, 1965, murdered by her partner, the brilliant Don Drummond, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had spent many years in and out of Bellevue, Kingston’s main mental institution.
Margarita’s untimely passing is one of many great Jamaican tragedies. Though only twenty-five years old when she died, her contributions to Jamaica’s culture are significant. She remains a highly regarded artiste, is recognized as Don’s muse and a facilitator who propelled the talent of important grass roots musicians into the Jamaican mainstream. According to a Gleaner article Margarita Mahfood has the distinction of being responsible for the first appearance of Count Ossie and his drummers on stage and by extension the first time Rastas were allowed to perform in public in Jamaica. [3]. She was a rudie who grew up in a working-class neighbourhood, on a street with a resident sound system that she would sneak out to experience. Her Lebanese and European ethnic heritage is considered white by Jamaican standards. Her racial background doesn’t contradict Garth White’s classification of rudie because of her immersion in Rastafari. There were other women in Jamaica, from that time, who could be considered rudies. Margarita is just one high-profile example.
CULTURAL RUDIE DOMINATES
When roots reggae hit its stride in the mid-1970s, the figure of the cultural rudie dominated its gangster alter-ego. Rudie fashion, attitude and music were absorbed into the persona of Rasta artistes like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Judy Mowatt to name a few. Whether the following lyrics taken from Bob Marley’s Talking Blues are understood as literal or metaphoric its over-arching rudie attitude is undeniable:
Cause I feel like bombing a church/
Now that you know the preacher is lying/
So who is going to stay at home/
When the freedom fighters are fighting
Peter Tosh’s bravura performance of Stepping Razor written by Joe Higgs is, in its literal sense, emblematic of the no-nonsense rude boy rejecting any attempt to diminish his humanity:
If you wanna live treat me good/
I’m like a walking razor don’t you watch my size I’m dangerous/
If you are a bully treat me good/
I’m like a stepping razor don’t you watch my size I’m dangerous
As cultural rudies of the 1970s Rasta artistes engaged in a tense relationship with criminals and gangsters who adopted Rastafari hair and fashion to disguise their true objectives. That was one way the bad-man rudie and progressive Rasta intersected. Another was the hyper-masculinity they shared, the exertion of male dominance even as Rastafari preach peace, love and unity.
Judy Mowatt challenged such perceptions by discussing the tribulations of black women, historic and contemporary, mentioning that black men including Rastafari may not be there to support them. In her recording Black Woman, she paints a picture with music and words to highlight the plight of black women, their dehumanization and sexual assault under the system of plantation slavery. If Mowatt’s reference to contemporary concerns are generalized in Black Woman, she is more specific in Sisters’ Chant: “(Jah) help us to fight when the brothers are out of sight”. At the time Mowatt was a Rasta woman commenting on the behaviour of some of her male counterparts in the faith.
Sisters’ Chant can also be read as the independent posture of a woman praying to Jah for strength and for unity among Rastafari women for the purpose of liberating themselves from their woes. If those songs don’t seem rudie enough then on that same album Judy covers the Wailers’ rudie song Put It On. In the original the song can be translated to mean militant resistance against an oppressive system but also the description of a combative act of sex. Mowatt’s cover can mean a woman taking the lead or enjoying some measure of equality while engaging in intimate relations. An alternate reading of her version is that it describes a woman pushing back against sexism.
TWO-TONE
During the post-World War II migration of Caribbean people to the UK Jamaicans travelled with suitcases bulging with their dance culture and rudie fashion. Dances hosted by sound systems with names like Count Suckle and Duke Vin animated basements, living rooms, community centres or night-clubs in the London neighbourhoods of Brixton, Finsbury Park, Stoke Newington, Battersea and the West End’s entertainment area. Soon mainstream English society became seduced by the irresistible magnetism of ska and the unique style of rudie. This culture peaks in England during the mid-1960s at the same time it does in Jamaica.
A decade and a half later a mixed-race band of English youth smitten by Caribbean music and fashion of the previous generation decide to revive it for a new age. This biracial or two-tone band with a new take on an old sound is the brainchild of Jerry Dammers. He names the band The Specials. Their prominent Black members include two Jamaicans: Iconic ska trombonist Rico Rodriguez and lead vocalist Neville Staple. The gifted Caron Wheeler, a background singer in the band, also has Jamaican roots. They are the main instigators of rudie culture’s British face. They perform ska and some reggae at a faster pace with punk abandon. They launch in 1978 when ska in Jamaica is already a distant memory, when Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Third World are the big international names of Jamaican reggae.
Shortly after their formation the Specials join Rock Against Racism, a loose collection of punk, 2-Tone and British roots reggae bands who oppose the UK’s fascist National Front party. The Specials’ music reflects the full range of rudie concerns. Gangsters, a UK top ten hit, is a song based on an actual incident in Paris where the band of black and white rebel musicians is unfairly perceived as troublemakers by the owner of a hotel. Ghost Town describes the economic crisis in the UK then. As Dammers, the band’s keyboard player and main songwriter says: “Margaret Thatcher had apparently gone mad, she was closing down all the industries, throwing millions of people on the dole. We could actually see it by touring around. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience.”[4] The single peaked at number one on the charts. The band records cover versions of classic reggae and ska tunes among them Toots and the Maytals’ Monkey Man and Dandy Livingstone’s Message to Rudie. Dammers is responsible for the band’s attention to rudie style and their checkerboard logo with its photo-negative image of Peter Tosh as rude boy. He establishes the 2-Tone record label, which symbolizes the revival’s multi-racial nature and signs groups with similar musical and thematic intentions. The anti-apartheid song Free Nelson Mandela is a huge hit for Special AKA, an off-shoot of the original group. The tune becomes an anthem for the movement to secure Mandela’s release from prison.
The Specials represent the cultural rudie in a different time and a different location so Garth White’s racial stipulations don’t apply. Their activism supports local UK causes and the struggle for liberation in places like South Africa. Even their rebellion is 2-Tone.
A good example of the rude girl ethic as it existed in the UK ska revival is the all-female, 2-Tone band, The Bodysnatchers. The band only issued four recordings on two singles. One of them is a version of the Bob Andy rock steady tune Too Experienced. In their version they turn the song’s original subject inside-out, so the protagonist is a woman too experienced to have a man ‘wreck her soul’. Another song they perform in concert but not on record as The Bodysnatchers is The Boiler. When The Bodysnatchers disband after two years, its lead singer Rhoda Dakar joins Special AKA. The Boiler is the new band’s first single. The credit on the recording is listed as Rhoda with the Special AKA. Dakar’s portrayal of date rape, on that recording, conveys the range of emotions of the song’s female character from her quiet lack of confidence to her confusion at her attacker’s coercion to reluctance, then anguish and finally flat-out terror through screams and screeches of refusal. The Bodysnatchers and Dakar deploy a rudie attitude in their rebellion against the violence directed at women.
RUDIE REDUX
Back in Jamaica as the seventies gives way to the eighties the lyrical themes of the music begin to shift emphasis away from social rebellion. There is also the move to indulge a revitalized update of deejaying or emceeing over versions of previously recorded popular songs. Yellowman is the most popular deejay of the early eighties. He becomes the face of rude, X-rated music expressing overt sexual themes termed slackness by the culture. Yellowman is not a pioneer of the X-rated song and sex is not his only subject. He’s also skilled at delivering radio-friendly hits and social commentary. The rise of the 1980s neo-rudie retains the complexity of the earlier period by presenting its own cultural deejays. Brigadier Jerry, a gifted Rastafari innovator, develops his craft in the roots era but his influence and popularity as a sound system deejay soars in this new environment where the deejay is more prominent than ever before. Charlie Chaplin is another example of a stand-out culture artiste of that time.
GRACE JONES
In the 1980s the rudie tradition doesn’t confine itself to reggae or dancehall. Grace Jones develops into a performer far from Spanish Town, Jamaica where she was born. Her larger resumé includes careers as a celebrated model, a top tier recording artist and as successful an actor as a Black woman could be in Hollywood action-adventure films of the eighties. Her dark complexion, high cheekbones and angular face emphasized by geometric hair styles gave her a distinct presence. Her fluid look could shift from sex kitten to dominatrix to femme fatale.
Jones occasionally projected a gender-defying persona with costumes ranging from what were considered men’s clothes to very little at all. She confidently owns her sexuality. Above all she presents as someone very much in control. Jones’ androgyny and sensuality repeatedly step over the line of what some think is acceptable. She’s no ingenue and transcends the standard diva image. Grace Jones is compatible with a creative understanding of rudie as artist rebelling against social and cultural orthodoxies.
Island releases three albums by Jones during the early eighties: Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing and Living My Life. They synchronize with the fresh sound called new wave. The collection of songs on those recordings has in common the production team of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare, two extraordinary Jamaican musicians but Jones’ commanding, deeply resonant vocals are the main attraction. The intoxicating mix of new wave, funk and reggae Sly and Robbie deliver assists those songs to achieve significant popularity and sales. Pull Up to the Bumper, from the Nightclubbing album is her highest charting single. The tune’s rumpled rhythm is classic Sly and Robbie. Jones’ smoldering vocals stoke the song’s sensuality priming lyrics that discuss a sexual encounter. That persona together with her rebellion against a strict Pentecostal upbringing, her insistence on not being excluded by the modelling industry, owning her sexuality, her association with Island and Sly and Robbie and the embrace of her birth land’s culture, all flex the muscles of her rudie credentials.
BAD MAN RUDE BOY MC
The rhythm of Jamaican popular music undergoes a fundamental change in the mid-1980s. Initially this transition is assisted by a digital sensibility that gives birth to a new, innovative type of reggae with a faster electronic beat-driven tempo. The rhythm of Sleng Teng, the recording that starts this digital revolution, is created on a Casio keyboard. Dancehall, the place where the sound system party takes place, now becomes the name of a new type of music. Soon new deejays introduce fresh styles of emceeing that keep pace with the changing beat. Dancehall shifts from precocious teenager to defiant young adult at which point it challenges the roots reggae status quo. Dancehall is a tsunami sweeping away roots reggae’s dominance at sound system dances, the recording studio and the concert stage. A few years later when Shabba Ranks becomes an international star, dancehall completes its conquest. That’s when the gangster rudie plots his musical return not as a lyrical character but this time in the persona of a flesh and blood artiste. Shabba, and Yellowman before him, may not deserve to be associated with a strict description of dancehall artist as gangster rudie. Super Cat and Josey Wales are the heavyweights who blur the distinction between artist and ‘bad-man’ rude boy MC. Super Cat described himself as the Don Dada, a euphemism for a ranking gangster.
Dancehall is sound system culture, the skill of the selector, the deejay’s art on record and in performance. All signifiers that begin life in the early 1960s. The new dancehall updates the context of rudie for a new era. Rasta, roots reggae, and themes of equal rights and justice become secondary to the fully restored bad-man rudie MC spitting lyrics indoctrinated by themes of macho violence and sex. For the first time in Jamaican pop culture, deejays or toasters are more prominent than singers. You can hear urgent rudie attitude on the classic Beenie Man track Who Am I? There’s a similar but possibly more exaggerated swagger driving a range of artists like Ninja Man, Bounty Killer up to and including Mavado and Vybz Kartel, the major stars of raw dancehall in the first half of the new millennium’s second decade. Despite this ‘gangster’ persona hogging the spotlight during the 80s, 90s and deep into the initial decades of the 2000s, the culture side of the equation still delivers significant talent: From Sister Nancy, Sister Carol, Shelley Thunder, Tony Rebel, specific work by Buju Banton through Capleton, Anthony B, Sizzla and Damien Marley to Chronixx, Kabaka Pyramid and Koffee cultural reggae is thriving. There is no border separating the bad-man rudie from his culture counterpart. The lyrical themes of both sets of artists sometimes cross-pollinate.
LADY SAW
This redux of rudie culture in Jamaica introduces something new to sound system and dancehall: The rude girl seizing a presence front and centre. By the early 1990s deejays Lady Saw and Patra emerge as outstanding artists. Their rudie persona immerses itself in the lewd, blue lyrics of slackness except they are expressing a female perspective on these sensual affairs. Some critics position them as the polar opposite of culture which is supposed to be more concerned with rights and equity. The right of women to discuss their sensuality seems excluded from that notion of equality.
Lady Saw arrives on the scene and proceeds to melt down that chauvinist perspective. She says:
“The guys were doing it (slackness), why couldn’t a woman do it? (They) used to say all kinds of things, talking about women’s vaginas, all kinds of rude things. And I didn’t like that. So I made songs like “Pretty Pussy”— it goes “Girl, put up your hand/ you have the pretty pussy” … And the girls love that. It’s not degrading, or putting them down, it’s about uplifting them…I became like the female adviser. I became known as someone who spoke for women, who was always defending them.”[5]
Lady Saw
Lady Saw’s lyrics discuss sensual women who are not shy about their sexuality. Her songs display a sense of empowerment, a sense that women can have control over that aspect of their lives. In Lady Saw’s Sycamore Tree the female subject of the song demands the right to engage in passionate relations with a man on her own terms and have him respect her boundaries. The Healing track features star deejay Beenie Man in duet with her. It’s really a romantic ballad where the two vocalists breathe life into lovers who are the song’s main characters. In the song they are equals who express to each other how much they enjoy each other’s company…in coitus.
Rudie women are not immune to the ever-present dialectic ingrained in the music which is the existence of corresponding culture artists. There are many cultural women deejays: From Althea and Donna in the mid-seventies who experience a UK hit with Uptown Top Ranking to Sister Nancy who begins her career as a sound system MC. She recently enjoyed a resurgence after hip hop superstars Kanye West and Jay-Z sampled her Bam Bam recording. Shelley Thunder is the first female deejay of her era signed to a major label. Island released her album Fresh Out the Pack in 1989. There’s also Sister Carol, a New York-based Rastawoman and true culture lyricist. Slackness, though, was the main driving force of women deejays then. Of all the rudie women growing careers in the late eighties, early nineties Patra develops possibly the strongest international profile. She signs with major American label Sony which issues two of her albums: Queen of the Pack and Scent of Attraction. Then there is the extraordinarily talented Tanya Stephens who emerges in the late nineties and ascends to prominence in the early 2000s. The topics of her songs run the spectrum: Independent womanhood, sexuality, social commentary and criticism of various types of oppression. Stephens’ wall to wall lyrical rebellion and her trademark attitude place her squarely in cultural rudie territory though she sometimes crashes through the feeble wall separating it from slackness.
There are several reasons why Lady Saw stands out in Jamaica’s colourful history of rudie women. Two of the more important ones are her artistry and her popularity. Her vocal tone, her lyrical flow, her ability to sing well and her songwriting skills are so good that she is one of the outstanding deejays of her generation, male or female.
Where does Lady Saw fit on the rudie spectrum? The easy and obvious answer is to slot her into the slackness category perceived as being as negative as the male gangster. But isn’t she both culture and slackness at the same time? Don’t her songs’ descriptions of sexual encounters from a woman’s perspective have the gravity assumed in the general human rights of strivers and the poor?
FOR GARTH WHITE
Rihanna’s performance on the Rude Boy single can be seen as being akin to the recordings of Margarita, Judy Mowatt, Grace Jones and Lady Saw. They are all participants in the vast historical sweep of rudie culture, with their affinity for rebellion against the status quo. Similarly, there is a thread connecting the agonistic attitude in the rudie lyrics of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, with those of Super Cat and Bounty Killer for instance. In this meditation Garth White’s framing of rudie has been edited, revised and expanded in order to apply it to different eras of the music over time and location. His approach remains the initial touchstone for how we can understand rudie culture.
In this re-imagining rudie can only be multi-dimensional and multi-gender. Garth must be acknowledged for how we think about Jamaican popular music. He establishes a foundation from which we can build an ever-developing framework. He is correct to identify the initial icons of the music as Count Ossie, Don Drummond and Bob Marley. But that is incomplete. Louise Bennett, Margarita and Marcia Griffiths must be included in that list of pioneer greats. When he first wrote about Jamaican music there was little evidence it would impact the world so profoundly. His overarching legacy is his insistence, from the very outset, that we treat the study and analysis of our music with the same gravity as music from any nation big or small.
Endnotes
[1] Garth White, ‘Rudie Oh Rudie’, Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 13, Number 3, pp. 39–44, September 1967.
[2] Garth White, ‘Ska and Rock Steady’, Reggae International, edited by Stephen Davis. Rogner and Bernhard, New York, 1982.
[3] Rosemary Duncan, “Margarita, Rastafari drumming and performance”, The Gleaner, October 30, 2022.
[4] Alexis Petridis, ‘Ska for the Madding Crowd’. The Guardian, March 8, 2002.
[5] Joshua Jelly Shapiro: ‘Interview with Lady Saw’, The Believer, July 1, 2010.
Other Sources
- Heather Augustyn, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist, McFarland and Company Inc, 2013
- Herbie Miller, ‘Brown Girl in the Ring: Margarita and Malungu’, Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 4, December 2007.
