Punk primers and reggae readers: Music and politics in British children’s literature

Abstract

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British punk and reggae artists united to fight racism throughout society. Young people embraced the ideology of these musical forms, and many wrote about and published their experiences with racism and the police, and their desire to change society. Children’s and young adults’ highly politicized writing contrasted with that of adults who wrote about punk and reggae during the 1970s and 1980s. Adult authors divorced the music from its political meaning by focusing solely on punk and reggae style, yet left the threat of police oppression to thoroughly remove any appeal to young readers. The rejection of punk and reggae ideology by mainstream adult authority was so successful that later incarnations of punk and reggae children’s books either allied the music with the authorities or turned it into commodified nostalgia.

In the summer of 1977, the British music scene heralded an unusual alliance: the anarchic bands of punk, including the Clash, X-Ray Spex, and the Sex Pistols, with the Rastafarian-influenced reggae bands, including Steel Pulse and Aswad, performing on-stage together in concerts for the anti-fascist Rock Against Racism (RAR). RAR grew out of protests against Britain’s far-right National Front organized by the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), but while the ANL was made up of a broad age spectrum of the British population, RAR was aimed specifically at getting young people involved in left-wing politics. RAR had its own fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, the letters section of which contains many references to young people creating their own fanzines and clubs such as SKAN (School Kids Against Nazis), and organized not only concerts, but film nights and informational rallies. Music acted as an organizing force for young people to express political views.

While British young people demonstrated their anti-fascist credentials through their musical affiliation, adults (particularly, but not exclusively, white British adults) and institutions treated RAR and the musical styles with which it was associated with skepticism or even hostility. As Stuart Hall (2011) argues, “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged,” and this is certainly true of punk and reggae (p. 79). The BBC, for example, dismissed RAR concert attendees as interested only in free music, not in politics. The Sex Pistols were banned from radio after releasing “Anarchy in the UK,” and reggae music was similarly confined to pirate radio stations. Schools prohibited clothing and hairstyles associated with punk and reggae. Adult suspicion of punk and reggae also found its way into less obvious forums, including children’s books. In fact, children’s fiction and nonfiction about punk and reggae tends to blunt or even co-opt the music’s political message to remove its threat to authority and to British institutions. This is true of children’s books produced at the height of the RAR movement, as well as more recently, in books that attempt to teach a new generation about the political music of the 1970s. This article will trace the depiction of reggae and punk in British children’s literature written by adults since the advent of RAR, and contrast these depictions with other media, including children’s television and child-created literature.

I Shot the Sheriff: Notting Hill Carnival, police brutality, and Eric Clapton

The creation of RAR in the summer of 1977 was a direct response to musically related events of the previous summer in London and Birmingham. In early August of 1976, rock star Eric Clapton—known for his cover version of Bob Marley’s reggae hit, “I Shot the Sheriff”—delivered a drunken, racist rant onstage at a Birmingham concert. Simon Frith and John Street (1992: 67–68) describe the event at the Birmingham Odeon: “From the stage, Clapton said he wanted to ‘Keep Britain White’ … One consequence of Clapton’s outburst was a letter to Melody Maker, NME, and Sounds” calling Clapton “rock music’s biggest colonist” (Music History Calendar, n.d.) and arguing that music fans had to stand against such behavior. This letter, written by Red Saunders, Syd Shelton, and David Widgery was signed with a call to other readers to join a nascent organization, Rock Against Racism. Within two weeks, the group had 600 replies to their call to join (Manzoor, 2008).

The same weekend the letter appeared, London’s Notting Hill Carnival, an annual celebration of Caribbean music and culture, turned into a riot when a police force in excess of 3000 officers began using the much-hated “sus law” (allowing them to stop and search anyone suspected of criminal activity) to arrest Black British carnival-goers. The Special Patrol Group (SPG), who were known to stop Black British youth regularly under the sus law at the same time that they protected National Front marchers, had a heavy presence at the carnival, and the riot only exacerbated relations between the police and Black British youth. Ian Goodyer (2009), in Crisis Music, suggests that the increase in political activity in Black British communities

seemed to signal an attempt on the part of the state to police the free expression of Anglo-Caribbean culture. These pressures helped to mark out reggae as an oppositional form, and to promote the emergence of a militant, hard-edged UK reggae sound. (p. 92)

Local reggae bands, such as Birmingham’s Steel Pulse and London’s Aswad, began producing songs about clashes with the police—making them ideal musical spokespeople for RAR. Many punk musicians quickly allied themselves with the movement. Both RAR and punk shared an anti-establishment, anti-capitalist ethic, and as Alan Sinfield (2004: 283) points out, RAR represented “the possibility of working with—politicizing—actual popular cultures” rather than trying to replace popular culture with “high” culture. Paul Gilroy (2005) notes that punk and reggae artists borrowed from each other:

Drawing on the language and style of roots culture in general and Rastafari in particular, punks produced not only their own critical and satirical commentary on the meaning and limits of white ethnicity but a conceptual framework for seeing and then analyzing social relations. (p. 159)

RAR borrowed from punk’s “homemade” collage-style album cover design for their fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, and reggae and punk bands began to take musical cues from each other, living up to the slogan of RAR for “Black & White, Unite & Fight.”

But because both punk and reggae were critical of the government and its institutions, mainstream British response to RAR tended to downplay the importance of the movement. News reports on RAR on the BBC argued that people who attended the concerts were not “dedicated” to the cause, and only did it to listen to free music and “add one more protest slogan to a very long list” (Hall and Steed, 1979). Participation in Rastafarian culture was one way that Black British youth could signify their difference from mainstream culture; as such, its visual and auditory signs such as dreadlocks, reggae music, and the red, green, and gold knitted hats of the Rastafarians became popular. Young White Britons adopted the mohawk hairstyles and ripped, safety-pinned fashion of punk bands. Establishment Britain saw Rastafarians and punks as threatening; Paul Gilroy (2005: 125) notes that Rastas “triggered official alarm” from police, and Sally Tomlinson (2008: 49) adds that “schools worried over allowing pupils to wear dreadlocks” in case it would lead to anti-authoritarian behavior. Jeremy Vine discussed punk music on the BBC program Crimewatch, suggesting that “for many people, it’s a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian communism or hyperinflation” (BBC Newsnight, 2016). Adult suspicion only made the movements more popular with young people.

The imitation zone: punk and reggae “style” in picture books

Adult suspicion was often manifested in criticism of the “styles” of the youth who belonged to the punk and reggae subcultures. Dick Hebdige (2011: 261) says, in “The Function of Subculture,” that “the success of the punk culture as spectacle [is] its ability to symptomatize a whole cluster of contemporary problems” in its fashion. But adult reviewers of punk frequently tried to shift the public’s gaze away from the problems in favor of the style. When Dick Witts suggested to Tony Wilson of Granada TV in 1978 that “you spent a lot of time talking about her appearance” (p. 13)—referring to Wilson’s interview with X-Ray Spex lead singer Poly Styrene—Wilson responded, “Her appearance was so carefully structured . . . She’s a real artist” (p. 13). In order to make it acceptable, reviewers had to portray the music of punk and reggae as visual art, rather than cultural criticism. But this equation of the style of punk and reggae as art turns both types of music into commodities. Frederic Jameson (2011: 65), in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” writes that “the only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-class rock.” But he adds that this authenticity is destroyed once these experiences become part of the commodity system. By highlighting style over politics, punk and reggae became something that could be bought and/or consumed by its audience—and that audience increasingly included younger children.

Both punk and reggae were teenager- and youth-led musical movements, but they had an impact on the wider culture, including on children. Representations of punk and reggae during the late 1970s and early 1980s specifically directed at younger children were mostly created by adults, however, and generally depicted both musical styles in negative or comedic fashion. Indeed, many representations focused on the fashion and “styles” associated with the music rather than the music itself. The ITV show “Tiswas,” for example, had Spit the Punk Dog, who first appeared in 1975. Spit never sang or played punk music, but he was known to be “scruffy” and spit rudely at anything he didn’t like. BBC’s “Play Away” featured Floella Benjamin, among whose many characters was Reggae Rita, a dreadlocked Jamaican (Benjamin was Trinidadian) who sang calypso or folk songs, but rarely reggae. Although Benjamin did put out a 45 r/min record as Reggae Rita (Benjamin, 1984), the minimal lyrics consist mostly of Benjamin saying “crucial!” and “rub-a-dub!” over an electronic reggae beat. These visual and auditory images, like Eric Clapton’s version of Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” take on the stylistic elements of reggae and punk without any connection to the ideologies behind the music.

The idea that punk and reggae were “style” that you could put on and take off, and indeed consume is also prominent in picture books of the era. Perhaps the best example of this is Bully Bear Goes Punk! (Bull, 1981) by Peter Bull and Enid Irving. Bull, an actor, was also a prominent teddy bear-collector; in 1979, the toy company House of Nisbet designed a teddy bear for him and he began to write books about “Bully Bear.” In most of the books, the idea of consumerism is evident in the book’s title; for example, Bully Bear goes to Hamleys or Bully Bear Takes a Package Tour. In Bully Bear Goes Punk!, Bully Bear decides to “Change his Image” (p. 2; capitalization in original) when a bird calls him old-fashioned. The image he chooses comes from graffiti he sees on a brick wall suggesting that “PUNK RULES OK?” (p. 6). And it is an image that Bully Bear wants; he has his fur put in a “Mohican” (p. 6) and tinted mauve. He then goes to a punk shop, where he buys clothes that shock the other bears with whom he lives:

He was festooned with pockets and zips all over, with fierce small dog collars round his arms, and bicycle chains (without padlocks), and his fur had mauve points sticking up, dusted all over with talcum powder.

Worst of all, Bully had a large safety pin stuck through his right ear. (p. 12)

It is not clear that Peter Bull understood punk thoroughly, as he also has his bear wearing roller skates and going to a disco. Youth cultures are mixed seemingly at random to create a sense of chaos. Perhaps Bull’s inclusion of the safer, tamer roller disco with punk stylings allowed him to present one of punk’s primary characteristics—anarchy—in a way that would produce humor rather than fear in young readers. Like the depictions of Spit the Punk Dog and Reggae Rita, the punk roller disco Bully Bear is played for laughs in ways that diminish any political significance of the music and its associated movements. Eventually, Bully Bear returns home, throws away his punk clothing, and order is restored through the reading (to the other bears) a classic story of a British bear who behaves properly: Winnie-the-Pooh. Bull allows his bear to dress up temporarily, but ultimately emphasizes the idea that punk is not for children.

God save the queen, the fascist regime: reggae, punk, and the police

However, while most of Bully Bear Goes Punk’s narrative emphasizes style over substance, the ending of the story nonetheless suggests that accepting the style of punk means living with the consequences of its substance. The conclusion of Bully Bear’s punk adventure at the roller disco inadvertently highlights the reason for punk’s embrace of anarchy when Bully Bear is threatened by the police. After “An awful Hullaballoo broke out” (p. 22), Bully bear runs out of the disco and into a policeman who tells him, “Creating a Disturbance is an offence” (p. 24; capitalization and underlining in original). Real punks wanted to create disturbances to the social order, and particularly to the “fascist regime” (as the Sex Pistols described it) embodied by the police. Bully Bear, however, accepts the authority of the police; “taking no chances . . . he sadly threw away all his lovely new clothes, and rubbed his tummy to get the mauve points out” (p. 26), returning to safety, routine, and order at the Bully Bear Lodge. Embracing punk, even if only in terms of style, leads to trouble.

Even children’s books that are not “about” punk or reggae reinforce a connection between adopting the stylings of the music and suffering the consequences of its ideologies. Dan Jones’s illustrations for Michael Rosen and Susanna Steele’s (1982) Inky Pinky Ponky: Collected Playground Rhymes are filled with police surveillance over a multiracial East End community. Darcus Howe (1988: 58), in From Bobby to Babylon, points out that the feeling of being under constant surveillance by police in the 1970s and 1980s Britain was not uncommon for certain groups. “It is no exaggeration to note that thousands and thousands of young blacks have grown up in British society having little contact with any other section of British society but the police and courts. They have developed in the shadow of the SPG” (the SPG is London Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group). The surveillance in Inky Pinky Ponky, while ubiquitous, is racially inequitable. The police remove an old White East Ender with a wine bottle from the Queen’s lawn (where her feet are shown, with her trademark corgis around her), calling him a “silly old fool” (n.p.) but not punishing him in any other way. A Black boy with dreadlocks, however, is stopped in his bumper car at a carnival by a police officer for suspected drinking and “driving.” The accompanying rhyme suggests that “all I drank was a small ginger ale” (n.p.) but he is nonetheless put in jail, the only person in the book to be incarcerated despite police being present at several events involving much clearer wrongdoing. John Solomos (1988: 109), in Black Youth, Racism and the State, writes that during this time period, “The imagery of violent street crime combined with that of violent street disorders and confrontations to make every young black, or particularly groups of them (such as Rastafarians), a potential suspect in police eyes.” In Inky Pinky Ponky, actual drunkenness in front of the queen is silly, but possible drunkenness on a carnival ride is a punishable offense—if you are young and Black and your hair is a symbol of Reggae/Rastafarian culture.

If I follow my mind: punk and reggae, children and young people

The portrayal of punk and reggae culture in material written by young people during this time is very different and focuses on issues rather than style. Discussion of racism, both individual and institutional, is overt in poetry written by young people, as is their desire to unite across racial and cultural boundaries. Hugh Boatswain, one of the student poets contributing to the Hackney community organization Centerprise’s collection, Talking Blues (1976), writes in “Dub Rock” that reggae music expands the mind: “Riddim licking his mind” (p. 30) and is “Linking him to the past” (p. 30) and Africa. For the young poet, reggae music and Rastafarianism is not just a style to put on; although the poem mentions dreadlocks as an aspect of the dub rocker, the focus is on the change in thinking. Ten-year-old poet Accabre Huntley’s (1977) collection At School Today, published by her parents’ publishing house Bogle L’Ouverture, includes the poem “Blackman Brotherman” about a Rastafarian. Like Boatswain, Huntley mentions Rastafarian “style” in terms of the striped tam and dreadlocks, but the focus of her poem is, like Boatswain’s, on the ideology: “Blackman Brotherman/ We want Peace” (p. 31) she writes; the poem goes on to connect the dreadlocked Brotherman with freedom of the mind. In Centerprise’s second collection, As Good as We Make it (1982), Angela Mars’s poem “Black Man Turn A Pillar of Salt” reads like a reggae song, with a chorus and verses with repetitive phrases, and an unmistakably political viewpoint: “Babylon ah lic dem with Correction/ Police lock dem up, is not dem fault” (p. 65). The poetry written by young Black Britons is not about reggae or Rasta fashion, but about ideas, self-awareness, and a call for action against racism and the police.

Young punks also connect to music through poetry and literature in collections produced by small community publishers in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. As Good as We Make It includes a story by Ian Crawshaw, “Pigs and Good Boys,” about Sean, “a twenty-one-year old, lanky, East End punk offspring of Irish immigrants” (p. 27) who knifed a cop and is in prison. Crawshaw comments that most people are “powerless” (p. 28) and that “To Sean, the world is a prison” (p. 28) where he is kept in his place by authorities who “regulate what you do, read, say, think” (p. 28). There is no mention of what Sean is wearing, ever; the piece focuses on the lack of future for young people in an authoritarian state.

An unnamed 12-year-old White student from Hackney, writing in Chris Searle’s (1984) collection of poetry, Our City, begins the poem “Racist People” by saying, “I am English and I am proud” (p. 75); the speaker associates with skinhead culture but not its racism. Skinheads, White working-class youth who initially had been associated with ska and early reggae in the 1960s, had split into groups that aligned themselves with the right-wing National Front and those that countered the National Front and associated with RAR and similar organizations. The speaker argues that Margaret Thatcher “don’t give a shit” (p. 75) about racism and that the National Front “should be booted out” (p. 75). The speaker, in keeping with skinheads’ attitudes, welcomes Black Britons to unite with White Britons. Unlike the picture books, this poem does not include any reference to style; the speaker mentions nothing about clothing or even music. The focus is on the ideologies associated with skinheads.

In addition to these community-based efforts, British youth also created publications of their own, in particular the newsletter of the children’s arm of RAR, SKAN (School Kids Against Nazis), which was aimed at the 10–14-year-old and offered for sale at five pence an issue. SKAN advertised for membership in Temporary Hoarding, the fanzine of RAR, so there was likely some crossover in readership. The RAR organization oversaw the printing and distribution of the SKAN Newsletter, and likely had some editorial control, but most of the journal was made up of poetry, letters, and interviews by young people. The first edition of the newsletter noted SKAN chapters in Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Oxford as well as London. The paper included poetry written by students; one such poem by “Maggie Duff, school leaver from East London” consisted of four quatrains that highlighted the ideals of the organization (if not its literary aplomb) as an inclusive, anti-racist space. The membership of SKAN (1978; like RAR itself) seems to have been predominantly White, as the appeal in this quatrain suggests: “Regarding black kids as the problem/ Is the wrongest thing of all/ Blaming Asians for your anger/ Is no answer, find the cause” (Duff, 1978; p. 1, 6). A poem in a later issue, by B. Kavanaugh (1978), is clearly addressing White English youth when she writes, “They say to us, get rid of the Blacks, the Pakistani’s [sic], the Irish and the Jews” (p. 3; 6, emphasis mine). Most of the photographs in the first four issues are of White youth, although Black musicians such as Steel Pulse appear (p. 4; 12), and many of the letters express an interest in reggae bands and a political commitment to anti-racism.

There is a distinct mistrust of adults and institutions prevalent throughout the SKAN newsletters. The first issue suggests that “Most teachers and school authorities have stood by and done nothing while the Nazi scum have appeared in our schools (p. 1: 1978; 2). A poem by Leon Rosselson (1978) suggests that education is “useful training/ For a career/ On the dole” (p. 3, 8). And an anonymous poem entitled “Back to Front” in issue four argues that the peacefulness of SKAN and RAR activities only annoys the police: “the London police thought it was shit/ no-one caused trouble, they had no one to hit” (p. 4: 1978, 8–9). Work produced by young people in the 1970s and 1980s contrasts starkly with children’s literature written by adults; while adults were often fixated on the clothing and hairstyles associated with music, many young people embraced the ideas first, seeing the style as a natural outgrowth of the ideas—if they discussed style at all.

Babylon makes the rules: wombles and borribles

Children’s literature and media does not exist in a vacuum. Even when children’s literature and media of the 1970s and 1980s ignored punk and reggae, continuing instead to offer stories that reproduced the status quo and a reinforcement of order and authority, this traditional literature provoked responses from other authors—and the responses provoked responses. A case in point is Elisabeth Beresford’s The Wombles series, written for middle-grade readers, first appearing in 1968 in book form and turned into a BBC television series in 1973. The Wombles are creatures (bear-like in their original incarnation, but closer to rodents in their television version) who dislike humans and fear contact with them will lead to their extermination through The Great Womble Hunt; but Wombles live off human rubbish by recycling it for their underground burrows on Wimbledon Common. Their homes, therefore, resemble human homes, and they even have a great library filled with classic books. Their society is highly ordered, and they admire the (human) monarchy in the shape of the Queen.

In 1976, Michael de Larrabeiti’s first book in his trilogy, The Borribles, was released, about anarchic pre-teens (they are referred to as “children” throughout the series, and there is no hint of romantic relationships between any of the characters) who never grow old—at least if they aren’t caught by police. The Borribles go on a Tolkien-like adventure across London that they call The Great Rumble Hunt, ferreting out the “Rumbles” (who all have the same speech impediment and thus refer to themselves as “Wumbles”) on Wimbledon Common. The Borribles defeat the Rumbles, in the process stealing their names and destroying their orderly homes—including the library. The trilogy is aimed at an older audience than the Wombles series (in either format), but is clearly engaging with readers aware of Beresford’s series, who might have experienced a different Britain than the cozy world Beresford and the BBC portrays.

While the Rumbles are uniformly described as rat-like, the Borribles do not all look the same, and this difference forms an early descriptive passage in the book. Knocker, a Borrible selected to train the “champions” who will defeat the Rumbles, is “flabbergasted; one of the champions was black” (2014: 25). The Black Borrible ends up stealing the name of a Rumble called Orroccoco, a word that mashes up the name of one of Beresford’s Wombles—Orinoco, named after the South American river—and cocoa. (That this vaguely discomfiting connection between the color of cocoa and the Borrible’s Blackness might not be accidental is underscored when, in the second book—The Borribles Go For Broke—a Bangladeshi Borrible named Twilight is introduced.) The first book concentrates on the Great Rumble Hunt, but the next two books switch to the clash between Borribles and the SBG—the Special Borrible Group, de Larrabeiti’s version of the Special Patrol Group (SPG) who were responsible for strict enforcement of the “sus” laws that saw many Black British and punk youths arrested without cause during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is in the third book that a community of Black Borribles in Brixton is introduced, who speak in “a West Indian dialect which the blacks only spoke among themselves” (Larrabeiti, 2014: 511). These Borribles monitor the police illegally and help the White Borribles escape. The head of the Brixton Borribles, Bisto, has dreadlocks (Larrabeiti, 2014: 510). To counter the police, the Black and White Borribles work together, “their hearts beating with a strange excitement they felt the one for the other; tribe for tribe, black for white, friend for friend” (Larrabeiti, 2014: 523). De Larrabeiti has recreated the ethos of RAR in his adventure novel; but this unity of the Black and White working class children against the police would cost the author his publisher. The anti-authoritarian tone of the books caused de Larrabeiti’s publisher, Collins, to cancel publication of the final book in the trilogy, The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis, in 1985. The publisher wrote, “The battle between the law and lawlessness is glamourised and given a status, which we cannot appear to condone in children’s literature now that Britain has entered a new era in which this battle is a daily reality” (Flood, 2014). By giving a punk sensibility to his books, and channeling the cross-racial unity against the police of RAR, de Larrabeiti brought down condemnation from those who had the power to publish and promote his books.

Even so, the trilogy was eventually published (by science fiction/fantasy publisher Tor) and had an impact on the younger generation (including future children’s and YA authors China Mièville and Neil Gaiman). And while it is impossible to know exactly how de Larrabeiti’s books affected his readers or the wider community, Beresford’s Wombles had a later television incarnation that shows how (as with picture book versions) punk and reggae can be contained and absorbed by the mainstream culture. The Wombles may have been defeated in de Larrabeiti’s books, but in the 1990s television series, they lived on. It is possible that one of the newly introduced characters in that series had been influenced, like (or even by) de Larrabeiti, in the idea that London, if not Wimbledon, had a changing population. One of the “frequent visitors” to Wimbledon Common in the 1997 series of “The Wombles” is Stepney, a dreadlocked DJ womble. Like picture book versions of reggae and punk characters, style is everything; Stepney has no political outlook at all. Indeed, he is not connected with areas generally associated with Black Britons; the largest Wombles fan site (Wombles Wiki, 2017) comments that Stepney selected his name from a London streetfinder, and adds obliquely, “The names Brixton and Peckham were not appropriate.” Despite introducing otherness to a previously all-White Womble world, nothing changes in terms of the ordered, monarchy-loving society.

Just because we play what the people want: pirates and picture books

Children’s books have continued to present Rastafarians, reggae and punk since the 1980s, despite musical styles having moved on. One of the most recent incarnations involved a book series that became a popular and controversial television series, about a reggae-playing mouse called Rastamouse. Creator Genevieve Webster had “a love of the Caribbean culture that inspired her to co-create Rastamouse” (Da Souza and Webster, 2013) in 2003 with British-Trinidadian Michael da Souza. Their first book was Rastamouse and da Crucial Plan (Da Souza and Webster, 2012). Rastamouse, unlike earlier depictions of Rastafarians, is not regarded as suspicious, however, and he is not apolitical. Despite having the dreadlocks, the Rastafarian tam in red, gold, and green, and the affinity for reggae music, Rastamouse is not a criminal element in these books, but a crime-solver at the behest of President Wensley Dale. As in many children’s books (such as Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar), authority figures are marked by the wearing of hats; President Wensley Dale has a police officer’s flat cap, which is plain in the original books but which gains an officer’s badge in the television series. This badge addition allies the president with the forces of law and order, as well as giving him authority to call Rastamouse into service for the state. All criminals are caught and reformed, generally by being put to work for children (who are represented in the text by the Likkle Orphans).

An episode from the BBC’s television version of Rastamouse, first broadcast in 2010, “For Real FM” (later published in book form as Pirate Riddims) seems to echo the concerns of the 1970s and 1980s, except that now the Rastas and the law are on the same side. Li’l Patch, a pirate mouse, has stolen all the records and CDs from several collections in order to run her own “pirate” radio station. Ironically, pirate radio stations had been popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a means of rebellion against institutional oppression—from both police and the BBC, who refused to play most popular Black British artists. Most pirate stations in the 1970s and 1980s played the music popular with RAR fans—that is, punk and reggae. In fact, RAR’s Temporary Hoarding even commented on this attempt at control; Glenn Harding (1978: 9) in an article entitled “Free Radio in the UK” argued:

The guys who run this Country (the faceless ones) don’t want to see us getting our hands on the transmitting end of a radio station because they probably won’t agree with what we might say. Far better to keep feeding us the shit from “impartial” BBC.”

For a while, the UK government’s Department of Trades and Industries (DTI) would regularly raid pirate stations to shut them down, but (as the popular “Pirate Anthem” by Shabba Ranks and Cocoa Tea proclaimed), “If they [the DTI] brought one down we’d build five more strong” (Ranks and Tea, 1991). Thanks to the influence of MTV and White or multiracial bands that played what Boy George called “reggae music that wouldn’t frighten white people” (Spencer, 2011), the BBC began playing commercialized, pop versions of reggae (through groups such as Culture Club or UB40) on Radio 1 in the mid-1980s and the influence and prevalence of pirate radio stations diminished. The outsider music cultures of punk and reggae were effectively reconstituted by the BBC, appearing similar to the original punk and reggae but with content that did not disturb the status quo.

The Rastamouse episode and book effect a similar strategy of containment. Rastamouse uncovers Li’l Patch’s theft, and exposes her as a thief. “Lil’ Patch, ya know ya deeds was bad, and ya really mus’ tink twice,” Rastamouse tells her, “Dis borrowin’ tings widout asking, mi mus’ say, it nah very nice” (n.p.). The narrative continues, “Lil’Patch is worried about what will happen to her pirate ship and radio station, but Rastamouse has a proper plan to keep For Real FM alive” (n.p.). Just as the BBC had earlier contained reggae and punk by offering versions acceptable to the power structure, so too does Rastamouse contain Lil’ Patch’s pirate radio by literally handing control over to the state. “On the first day of the For Real FM Pirate Party Cruise,” the narrative states, “President Wensley Dale takes the mike” (n.p.). As Althusser (2011: 208) writes, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as radio communication “function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately . . . this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic.” Rastamouse, unlike the Rastafarian reggae artists of the 1970s and 1980s, does not want to fight Babylon; he is an agent of Babylon himself. Having witnessed the failure of state repression against the Black community in the 1970s and 1980s, the institutional state apparatuses such as culture, communication, and education co-opt the messages of the people to reinforce state power and the status quo.

My façade is just a fake: punk nostalgia

While Rastafarianism and reggae have been co-opted by the institutional state apparatuses in recent times, modern children’s books have a different relationship to punk. By focusing on reggae/Rastafarian messages of “one love” and ignoring the more militant, anti-“Babylon” aspects of the movement, children’s books can depict an ideology that aligns with the power structure. Punk continues to elude this power structure, however, as its messages of anarchy and existentialism cannot easily be turned to the state’s advantage. While children’s books of the 1970s and 1980s negated the power of punk by highlighting and ridiculing the “style” aspects of punk, recent children’s books have instead looked at punk through nostalgia. As Frederic Jameson (2011) writes, “This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia” (p. 77). Eric Morse’s (2015) What is Punk? was written to give child readers an introduction to “a thing out there called punk—let’s talk about how it started and why it was great” (Parikh, 2015). But Morse adds in this interview that:

People have asked me, “Should you be telling kids about these guys that were belligerent and anarchists and addicts?” At this point in our cultural history, though, punk is like an industry. Nobody is going to grow up not knowing what punk is, in one sense or another. They’re not going to grow up with people in pop culture being belligerent or addicts or anarchists—a–holes in one sense or another. So the point of the book is not, “Hey kids, let’s burn everything down.” (Parikh, 2015)

Indeed, it would be difficult to understand why anyone would have wanted to “burn everything down” based on Morse’s version of history. Morse’s rhyming couplets are meant to detail the early history of punk, but in condensing the history to fit in these couplets, Morse removes most of the ideological power of punk. The text reads as a list of early punk bands from different places. The London section is particularly innocuous; it begins, “Back in foggy Londontown, things were getting really bad. All the young kids in the streets seemed to be going mad” (2015: n.p.). The collective madness and the “bad” things are never explained or identified; there is seemingly no reason behind the Sex Pistols “harass[ing] the upper class” (n.p.), and the band names are described as “silly” (n.p.). The Clash may have “played songs for working people and equality for all” (n.p.), but Black Britons are not represented in Morse’s book, nor does he suggest what he means when he writes that the Clash “fought the law” (n.p.), only that doing so made them “the coolest band around” (n.p.). The book never answers the questions it poses (including the title question, “What is Punk?”) with anything more than vague generalities; punk is “culture and vision” (n.p.), but so is the London Symphony Orchestra. In fact, for Morse, culture is vision; the illustrations showing clothing and hairstyles are the only indicators of how punk’s “culture and vision” are different from that of an orchestra. And on the few occasions where Morse states that punks are acting outside the status quo, he gives no reason for their rebellion; his text is disconnected from the political scene that created the conditions for punk to emerge.

End of a punky reggae party

For a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, British punk and reggae artists united to fight racism and oppression throughout society. Young people embraced the ideology of RAR as well as the music, and many wrote about their experiences with racism and the police, and their desire to change the society that seemed to render them permanent outsiders in society. But challenging the police and racism meant disturbing the status quo, something adults—including adults who wrote and published and produced media aimed at children—tended to reproduce, rather than question, authoritarian structures. Adults who wrote about punk and reggae during the 1970s and 1980s divorced the music from its political meaning by focusing solely on style, yet left the threat of Babylon in the form of police presence hanging over the books to thoroughly remove any appeal to young readers. The rare book that aligned itself with young people instead of state authority, such as de Larrabeiti’s Borribles trilogy, faced censorship. The rejection of punk and reggae ideology by the mainstream authorities was so successful that later incarnations of punk and reggae children’s books either allied the music with the authorities or turned it into commodified nostalgia. RAR’s uniting of White and Black working-class youth in the period may have given young people hope that they could have a hand in ending racism and police brutality—but the ideology of the state rendered that hope, as the Sex Pistols termed it, pretty vacant.