Rude Boys

A fashion tied up with the musical phenomenon. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records and the mastermind behind the worldwide success of Bob Marley and reggae, owed his initial success to the production of a hit single in 1964, My Boy Lollipop, sung by Millie, a young Jamaican girl of 14. Millie was thus responsible for the first worldwide success of Ska (or Blue-beat as it was known at the time), the source and origin of all the Jamaican musical styles that followed. Blue-beat is a cocktail of different styles, a mixture of Rhythm and Blues and Pop Tamba Motown propagated by American radio stations, and grafted onto the body of the local Caribbean rhythms of Jamaica. The spread of this Rock Steady/Blue-Beat/Rudie Blues style was entrusted to sound systems (mobile audio systems) that were popular at the time, just as they are today, and to the technical skills of DJs like Prince Buster, who were authentically creative in their mixes. The splendid garb of the Rude Boys owed a debt of gratitude to the sophisticated elegance of the New York jazz scene in the 1950s as well as to the Italian style that had been adopted almost simultaneously by the Mods of England. Leather jackets were worn with pipe-stem trousers. De rigueur were dark glasses, berets, and Pork-pie Hats. Typically Rude Boy and Jamaican is, instead, the style of trousers riding above the ankles, as well as the love of iridescent fabrics (two-tone). The end of the 1970s saw many of the protagonists of the original era, such as Desmond Dekker, coming back to popularity, thanks to the success that Ska groups, such as the Specials and Selecter, had in the market.