STORY · REGGAE
Rude boys in the dock
Well supported
A mid-1960s moral panic over Kingston's rudies played out, verse by verse, on record.
How ska and rocksteady studios argued with a moral panic about youth violence, some records condemning the rude boy, others speaking for him.
A city on edge
In the years around independence, young men poured into Kingston looking for work and, often, for a way into a recording studio. When neither came, frustration sometimes spilled into violence, and the press, pulpit and respectable opinion fixed on the rude boy as a symbol of disorder, a moral panic with real fear and real exaggeration mixed together.
The studios did not stand outside the argument; they conducted it. Across a record cycle of call and answer, some songs glamorised the sharp, defiant rudie while others pleaded for calm, a musical debate about who the rude boy was and what he deserved.
Judgement and sympathy
Prince Buster staged the courtroom itself on 'Judge Dread', handing down absurd sentences, while his earlier 'Al Capone' lent the rudie a gangster glamour. Derrick Morgan answered from the dock with 'Tougher Than Tough', and the Clarendonians and others kept the exchange running. These were answer records before the term was common.
The rude boy was condemned and defended in the same three minutes of music.
Other records reached for reality rather than a verdict. Desmond Dekker's '007 (Shanty Town)' set the rudie amid the shanty and the courthouse without simple moralising, and the Wailers' 'Simmer Down' counselled restraint from inside the same community. The music never settled the question, which is exactly why it mattered.