h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Was that supposed to be funny?

some hints.

1 Dont be 18 months behind with your witty peices.

2 be consistent, "At 14, the Chavs will begin to search for a good car with their new mobile phones they recieved in early years"

Early years means 1-5 if they have had these phones since the age of 5 how can they be new 9 years later?

3 Be funny I was looking for the gags and still havent seen one.

4 Move from Birmingham the only funny Brummie Jasper Carrot stopped being funny many moons ago.

5 Whereas us yam yams spend allourtime laughing mostly at the pathetic friendless teenage spods from Birmingham who spend their time trying to write "funny" peices about passe cultural terms to quell their frustration at still being virgins while scruffier kids are going at it like knives.

"The Chavs classify many people under several headings:"
So do you, which therefore makes you a chav.

And another thing.

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Goths, skaters and geeks are actually valid 'headings' used by the subcultures themselves.

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No. As a former goth and a friend of goths this is just a leeetle bit narrow minded. Many goths don't wear any make up and quite a few don't 'adore' gothic architecture (which is a totally different type of gothic) or horror films.

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All skateboarders are, by their very nature, skaters regardless of whether or not their dye their hair. In fact, most skaters who *do* dye their hair because they are into punk rather than to look like Japanese cartoon characters.

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I wear glasses *and* enjoy science fiction. And like many geeks I wear the term as a badge of pride.

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Having been on the recieving end of this term from groups of Chavs I'll have you know that it's actually a catch-all term used for anyone who dresses in an unusual fashion (for example, I wear black, have long hair and often wear t-shirts depicting various extreme metal bands).

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Isn't that what *everyone* calls them.

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Kevs are Chavs by any other name (especially in Cambridgshire). The term Kev actuall pre-dates the term Chav by a good few years.

in my bong and shotty years, (the best classification of those years spent round other peoples' bedrooms talking utter cod), the word chav was used to mean, very specifically, Gypsies. Actual, petrol syphoning, 2 gram 8th, moped nicking, gypsies. it was also a verb. to steal or deprive cheekily. (chav a snout mate?)

Now it means, apparently nothing at all.. A wearer of burberry, as long as their not old and also wearing wellies. A rudeboy, but not an ACTUAL rudeboy, because they're rudeboys and you don't call them chavs because they've actually got guns. A what? an underling? peasant, ignoramus? someone WE DON'T UNDERSTAND?

oh well, thankyou The Sun for mutating another pop culture beyond all recognition,

NB> the interesting part of this story is that Countdown's beloved Dictionary Babe, Susie Dent, tipped Chav as the buzzword of 2004, sparking the whole sun distortion thing, to the extent that it no longer meant that which it was picked up as meaning - a lexographer's Heisenberg and no mistake.... get in!!

A rudeboy is a besuited appreciator of 1st and 2nd wave ska, not the puffa jacketed idiots who think they're rudeboys.

actually mate, twotone ska heads don't have exclusive rights to the word rudeboy I'm afraid. It originates from jamaica around the rocksteady period of soundsystem music's evolution. A rudeboy was and still is any man who has no respect for law and order, and furthermore his own community. That a ghetto sufferah should struggle against the system and the Jamaica's then white dominated heirarchy was to be expected, but the rudeboys were characterised by a lack of respect for anyone.

The 1980s saw the twotone scene adopt and, paradoxically, grey the meaning of the word. The specials are a case in point, writing songs such as "message to rudie", an anti-rudeboy song, though they were often greeted on stage with cries of "RUUUUDDEEBOOOY!"

This good man/bad man schism in the dance remained and was further exacerbated with the outbreak of jungle, where ecstatic rave culture clashed with the uk's criminal underbelly. Jungle music is littered with Badman and rudeboy samples, and all subsequent urban dance styles have picked up the terminology.

The point being, therefore, that the word rudeboy has a reach far beyond any one culture now, and certainly isn't rooted exclusively in modern ska.

discography:
Prince Buster - Judge Dread
Derrick Morgan -rudie don't fear
The Specials - message to you rudie
Shy FX and UK Apache - Original Nutter

PS. respect man, that wasn't sposed to be a cuss. just well interested in slang that's all safe!

peace

<< It originates from jamaica around the rocksteady period of soundsystem music's evolution.>>

1st wave ska (mentioned in my previous post) actually predates rocksteady by about five years. The source of most misconceptions about the 1st wave is that the only properly recorded (historically, rather than musically) version was a heavy sanitised and 'family friendly' version displayed at the 1959 (I think) World Fair in the US.

Oh, a few years back Sir Horace Gentleman put the record straight on 'Rudi' saying that it wasn't anti-rudeboy, just saying that you don't need to resort to violence and trouble-making all the time.

ska was uptempo music which reflected its heyday, immediately after Jamaican independance. Whilst I'm not certain of the precise point of origin of the word rudeboy, one commonly used way to document the spread of slang is to look for references in the media at the time. In this case the only media we have are the dubplates that were spun on the soundsystem lawns, and it is clearly in the slower paced rocksteady that rudeboys and their attendant culture crop up most notably.

stranger cole -drop the ratchet
Keith McCarthy -everybody rude now

The rudeboy situation in jamaica became noticeably more serious following the political unrest in 1966 -clearly at the heart of the rocksteady years.

I'll grant you "dance crasher", (1963 - Alton Ellis), and I'm certainly not doubting outright that either the word 'Rudeboy' or rudie-ism in its black on black violence sense existed at the time when ska first made popular on the lawns, but I do have issue with your assertion that ska is in some way inextricable from the word, which is in use in all forms of music where soundsystem culture displays an influence. Certainly there are dance crashers in the current Grime scene, and I was at fabric a couple of months ago when a gun was drawn at a DNB night, causing the club to relegate drum n bass dances to a fortnightly event.

anyway it's nice to see we've got a decent and interesting discussion going on the back of what was initially a fairly uninteresting and reactionary article about chav culture. (anyone worked out a definition for that yet then?)

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That's not what I meant at all, I was merely pointing out that everything I've read on the subject (but bear in mind that this was a few years ago) suggests that the rudeboys emerged at the same time a ska and that you were wrong in the assumption that I was only talking about 2tone.

yeah that's true. I was definitely wrong about that mate.

think i must have misread what you were saying, cos I thought you were taking issue with my use of rudeboys in a context outside of ska. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Peace

yeah I can see why i was confused now..

A rudeboy is a besuited appreciator of 1st and 2nd wave ska, not the puffa jacketed idiots who think they're rudeboys.

see though I agree that most puffer jacketed idiots probably aren't actual rudeboys, rudeboys are by no means necessarily besuited. I think that's what I was bangin on about, but zarquon knows for sure...

Not a problem... the internet isn't exactly great for making things clear.

not as good as a nice and a 45 mix certainly..

Hi Mr D. nice to *meet* you Metasystem.

Chav is a word I first heard a few years back from a squaddy mate of mine based in Chatam, he and the other soldierboys used it to describe the locals.

I first saw it being used ona a website about two and a half years ago. It had a basic diparaging description and was slowly puffed out by the invited contributions of dim-witted and bitter readers who then had their contributions "nicked" for a book "written" by the web-sites owners.

The Sun picked it up after the site had been a internet sensation for a sometime.

one love

Hey Blicky (hey, Blicky, hey, you and your badger friends),

Well, I never knew that. I always used to call them 'townies' (because of the fact they always hang around the town centre rather than as a "Gerrort moi laaaand" type thing), but have since adopted 'chav' because that way people know what I'm on about.

I'm not quite sure Mr. Dreadful fully understands that he is merely jealous of the fact the author of this piece has social interaction with other human beings which allows him to represent Chavs so well.

*Withering look*

Since you obviously don't know me at all (and therefore don't know that I'm socially active, married and have quite a few friends) I'm going to let that one go.