Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the offbeat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads. Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods:
… Read more the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk; and third wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Rude Boy (or rudie) is a slang term that originated in 1960s Jamaican street culture, and that is still used today. In the late 1970s, there was a revival in England of the terms rude boy and rude girl, among other variations, being used to describe fans of two-tone ska. The use of these terms moved into the more contemporary ska-punk movement as well. In the UK, the terms rude boy and rude girl are used in a way similar to gangsta, yardie, or badman. In the 1960s, the Jamaican diaspora introduced rude boy music and fashion to the UK, which influenced the mod and skinhead subcultures. In the late 1970s, the term rude boy and rude boy fashions came back into use after the ska band The
… Read more Specials and their record label 2 Tone Records instigated a brief but influential ska revival. In this spirit, The Clash contributed "Rudie Can't Fail" on their 1979 album, London Calling.
In Jamaica, the rude boys and rude girls were young Jamaican thugs from the ghettos, fallen into delinquency and sowing terror, some being real gangsters. In rage against the institutions, the economic fatality, they spit out their resentment of unemployment, injustices, and the immobility of capitalist society. Quite the opposite of teddy boys. They regularly go to sound systems where they sometimes play for a living.
In Great Britain, the rough boys listen mainly to ska music, which is characterized by groups like Madness or The Specials, which cover certain famous tracks of Prince Buster, recorded with Two-Tone Records, the "revival" of Jamaican ska, after the wave of the punk movement which saw the resurgence of former Jamaican artists, like Laurel Aitken, nicknamed the godfather of ska. They mingled with English mods in the 1960s, which gave birth to skinheads. the skinhead movement is, therefore, in its origins and in its traditions, a mixed and multicultural movement; it is not uncommon to see black skinheads in 1969 although many white skinheads will become politicized on the far right thereafter.
2 tone is a genre of ska music that fused traditional Jamaican ska music with elements of punk rock and new wave music. Its name derives from 2 Tone Records, a record label founded in 1979 by Jerry Dammers of The Specials, and references a desire to transcend and defuse racial tensions in Thatcher-era Britain. Many two-tone groups, such as The Specials, The Selecter, and The Beat featured a mix of black, white, and multiracial people. It was part of the second wave of ska music and it influenced the third wave ska and ska-punk movements. The two-tone sound originated among young musicians in Coventry in the West Midlands of England, who grew up listening to 1960s Jamaican music.[5]
… Read more They combined influences from ska, reggae, and rocksteady with elements of punk rock and new wave. Bands considered part of the genre include The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, Bad Manners, The Bodysnatchers, and Akrylykz. The Specials' keyboard player Jerry Dammers coined the term "two-tone". Dammers, with the assistance of Horace Panter and graphic designer John "Teflon" Sims, developed the iconic Walt Jabsco logo (a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, pork pie hat, white socks, and black loafers) to represent the two-tone genre. The logo, based on an early album-cover photo of Peter Tosh, included an added black-and-white check pattern.
“Skinhead reggae” has come to mean a subgenre of reggae with influences taken from ska and rocksteady as well as soul/R‘n’B, often with fast Hammond organ leads and danceable beats, loved by adolescents of the British working class. But reggae itself became popular among white British youth after ska and rocksteady had receded, more or less as skinhead became an identifiable subculture in the United Kingdom, in 1968, peaking in 1969, and then disappearing into seudehead, glam/glitter, etc., by the early 70s. Therefore, it is something of a misnomer to speak of “skinhead reggae” as separate from the early reggae that was popular amongst white kids, because those white kids
… Read more were nearly all skinheads. It was not until at least a year or more into the close association between the musical form and the fashion that the tunes now inextricably linked to the subculture by their lyrics began to emerge. Many of the skinhead reggae songs were covers or else more well-known early reggae/ska/rocksteady tunes that had been reworked, sometimes with new lyrics specifically about skinheads. Symarip’s “Skinhead Moonstomp,” possibly the most classic (and one of the most primitive) skinhead reggae song.
Printed in USA
Posters 
More products 
