In honor of Trojan Records’ 50th anniversary, Nicholas Davies’ “Rudeboy” tells the little-known story of a seminal British-Jamaican label.
We know the rudeboy: whether it’s Rihanna’s brazen “Come here, rude boy, boy, can you get it up,” or The Clash’s stomping “Rudie Can’t Fail,” the Rudie holds a lasting place in popular culture. He is brash, mischievous, and cool. And boy, does he have a great taste in music: the catchy riddims of ska and reggae, born from none other than the Jamaican island.
Nicholas Davies’ latest documentary, Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records, is dedicated to the rudeboy and his music. Moreover, it tells the story of how this massive Jamaican staple made its way to the United Kingdom, bridging cultural barriers unlike any other before.
We hear from the early elders of the Jamaican ska and reggae movement throughout the film. There’s the colossal producer Duke “The Trojan” Reid, grandfather of the sound system style; there are bigshots Derrick Morgan, Dandy Livingstone, Marcia Griffiths, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry; we even see popular icons like Desmond Dekker, one of the first Jamaicans to grace British television with his hit, “The Israelites.” Davies interviews those who are still with us, often dramatizing their past scenes through gorgeously shot recreations. His sense of story is impeccable, here— Rudeboy feels far removed from the educational bent of some BBC programme; rather, it brings viewers right into the nostalgic past.
Yet that nostalgia was not always of a better time. Davies carefully addresses the trenchant racism that followed the mass Jamaican emigration to the UK throughout the mid-20th century (perhaps too carefully— his subjects, whether to relieve their trauma or normalize it, seem to diminish racism’s severity: “This is the type of things that kids used to do; you know how kids are crazy,” said Roy Ellis.) Somehow, though, the Black rudeboy found his way. He survived in house parties and basement clubs, where his mother-island’s stereo thrived without limits. That is, until, the music breached those walls altogether.
With the help of a certain West Indian record collector Lee Gopthal (a mixed-race East Indian, Jamaican-born Brit,) and London’s Chris Blackwell, the mighty Trojan Records changed the landscape of British popular music, integrating those Jamaican sounds into the culture at large. Soon enough, working-class classrooms saw young, white skinheads blasting reggae, doing the moonstomp, and finding kinship amongst their second/third-generation Jamaican peers.
Where Rudeboy struggles is in tracing this glorious, multicultural moment’s downfall; it is too swift, too fleeting, too elusive. Which is, perhaps, how these things seem to happen. We hear of the sudden commercialization of reggae, whose sweet radio string arrangements betray the pounding beats of hard reggae. We hear, too, of Lee Gopthal’s fall from the company— a story that leans on the racism he faced, rather than the details of his financial failures (he was the company’s accountant, after all.)
It is, at least, a conscious choice on Davies’ part: what we are left with after Rudeboy is much less an understanding of a music’s commercial fallout. Instead, we remember the immense triumph of this Jamaican-British culture altogether.
