Rude boy

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 per…   Read more

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 T…   Read more

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