Oh Rudie: Jamaican Popular Music and the Narrative of Urban Badness in the Making of Postcolonial Society

Abstract

Rudeness and gunIs the talk of this townThe gun fever is badThe gun fever- The ValentinesSee they want to be the starSo they fighting tribal war- Bob MarleyFor due to political fictionlordDue to political fictionMan and man gone in a different segregationWe living so near and yet so farAll because of political war-Half PintIntroductionTHE FIRST MAJOR SOCIO-POLITICAL theme to be identified and extensively commented on in early modern Jamaican popular music is the phenomenon of the 'rude boy'. This theme emerged in Jamaican popular music in the mid1960s, some two to three years into Jamaica's postcolonial journey. By 1965, the die was cast; criminality was stepping up. The transformation of preindependence gangs into warring tribal entities was already becoming a mode of political organisation and mobilisation, and an ontological signature in the definition of political culture and political power in the making of the postcolonial Jamaican landscape. This article examines some of the underlying factors that gave rise to the expressions of badness, which in turn inspired the agency of Jamaican popular music to create and to develop rude boy songs as part of the ideational mapping, weaving and questioning of postcolonial society in the first ten years of independence, 1962-72.The origins of Kingston gangsUrban gangs such as the Mau Mau,1 formed in 1948/49, and the Phantom, founded in 1959/60, existed in Jamaica's capital, Kingston, prior to Jamaica becoming an independent nation state in 1962. Other pre-1962 gangs included the Vikings, Spangler, Phoenix, Skull and Pigeon. A central feature of these gangs was the absence among them of a modus operandi and culture of intergang warfare. Lloyd Bradley noted that [a]t the beginning of the 1960s, it was rare for these gangs to fight each other.2 In a number of interviews I conducted in 2009 and 2010 with founding members of the Mau Mau, Phantom and Spangler gangs,3 all the interviewees affirmed this fact. One noted former star high school cricketer and footballer of Excelsior High School, who grew up in Rae Town, recalled that although violence was endemic to the modus operandi of some communities of Kingston's poor, gangsters from all over Kingston would ritually congregate at certain entertainment spots to enjoy themselves without resorting to inter-gang rivalry. One of these gathering spots was the Palace Theatre, venue of the popular Vere Johns' Opportunity Hour. Another was the Barbecue on Fleet Street on Friday nights. This former Excelsior student said:Barbecue is a place pon Fleet Street whey the man dem from the west, the man dem from the east, the man dem from the north . . . meet every Friday night. And Duke Reid or Coxsone [would] play music. Dat cyaan miss you pon a Friday night, you know. 'Cause it is the best in recorded music you getting. And just the whole camaraderie and the gathering. Man from west and from south and man from east a play dice outside and card. Lantern and all kind a ting. A beehive of activity. 4The reasons that some gang members of old gave for forming or joining gangs had their roots in colonial oppression and injustice. Members of Mau Mau, Phantom, Spangler and other gangs that I have interviewed at different times, in different venues, men now in their late sixties and seventies, all spoke of a persistent regime of race/class prejudice, unemployment, lack of education and training, neglect, alienation, and a future devoid of optimism. Poor, uneducated, untrained, stigmatised urban young black males in Kingston, who were seen as most resistant/immune to the European civilising ontology, became the central target of the colonial 'civilising' mission, with the police as the principal 'civilising' agency. These men spoke of the persistent rituals of police violence, torture, insults, persecution and general harassment directed at them, and suggested that forming gangs was, in part, the joining of forces to respond to colonial police excesses. …