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It's grin out there: why have lockdown deniers co-opted the smiley face?

The blissed-out symbol of acid house has been given a new meaning in 2021. Should ravers be up in arms?

It was an emoji before emojis were born – an early viral image of the media age. The smiley can probably be traced back to 1960s US kids’ TV show The Funny Company but its paradoxical quality of simplistic ambiguity has made it endlessly adaptable. It’s been co-opted by Mad magazine, Nirvana, Talking Heads and the Watchmen comic series, but its most enduring usage surely began in the late 1980s when flyers for house pioneer Danny Rampling’s Shoom night in London featured the image. Before long, the smiley was on magazine covers and Top of the Pops; the beaming yellow face of a blissed-out era and a symbol of scandal, too – the implacable trickster facade of the latest tabloid moral panic.

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