Posted by
VarmentPoontang September 11, 2009 -
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It's 1990 and many people say punk is dead. Others say punk is still dying. Still others say the story of rock and roll is nearly over. Such people have at least learned one thing from punk: they have adopted the same blind pessimism that caused so many bands to burn out so quickly.
Many believers of this theory often see only the superficial qualities of the subculture made visible through the mass media. The fashion and the well-publicized scandals of Sid Vicious and friends were as far as most people saw from outside the subculture. In Facing The Music edited by Simon Frith, Mary Harron reduced the meaning of punk to "the spectacle of middle-class children dressing up in a fantasy of proletarian aggression and lying desperately about their backgrounds."
Harron attributed her perceived failure of punk firstly toward the bands' misdirected hatred -- toward stars of the previous generation like the Who or Rolling Stones, toward their record companies, toward even their fans with more venom than they directed toward the government. Because they had no "real" political focus, no mass consciousness for social change, nor a single issue like Vietnam, Harron believed punk accomplished little besides reviving the British pop industry before it failed.
Harron went on to generalize that punk's "second generation" suddenly switched from "anarchy and mayhem to orthodox left-wing politics," adopting the same ideas of grass-roots networks and alternative distribution systems that the hippies had during the sixties counterculture, adding only rock hype -- rebellion and conscious exploitation of the media. She said it was only briefly that punk was able to "exploit hype while challenging it on its own ground, both through its consistent attack on the values of the music industry and by exposing to its audience how that industry worked." Then their "puritanism" was so bad for the music that "post-punk austerity" began to pall.
Harron's most amusing generalizationwas yet to come -- after simplifying the punk movement into a split into rock and pop, she implied that the two styles transcended and left behind the "punk loyalists" (hardcore?), who clung to the independent labels, the clothes, the sound and "what they saw as the ideals of 1976." In fact, Harron said, they retreated from the present, evolving to a brand of flaccid and impotent neo-hippies with vegetarian, pacifist and mystic deals. Their determinedly non-commercial musical course was described as "abrasive or dirgelike," and while they "joined the ranks of other die-hard rock conservatives," Harron went on to espouse the virtues of disco.
It is clear that Harron merely took a glimpse of the smoke from the forest fires sparked by punk. Underneath the smoke was a whole new opportunity for kids to become active in a culture they could call their own, instead of being force-fed with highly consumeristic advertising of dry commercial culture.
When the superstars of punk dissolved into the corporate rock world, commercial media like Rolling Stone hailed the Sex Pistols and The Clash as the only legitimate icons of punk, and assumed the same thing happened to the whole subculture when members of the respective bands went on to more commercial dance- club success in the form of Public Image Ltd. and Big Audio Dynamite. This is not true. Nor is the other view accurate; that the punk subculture stagnated into a musically conservative, politically passe state of nostalgia.
Skinhead Suss
By declaring the death of a whole subculture just because the founding icons disappeared, the media and its scholars assumed not only that punk left behind a void, but it grew out of a void. Within this so-called void, there was a thriving skinhead subculture, originated either in the late 50's or the 60's depending on who's telling the story. While there is no convincingly authoritative source on skinhead history, there has been enough discussion about it in fanzines from Sniffin' Glue to Maximum RocknRoll that the disparities in details of the accounts tend to even out.
In the December, 1989 issue of Maximum RocknRoll, John M. Stafford of Washington, D.C. wrote a letter that briefly summarized such accounts of skinhead history. He said skinheads resulted in a fusion of cultures between the white working class of England, immigrant Jamaicans and West Indian Blacks who called themselves rude boys. The ration of whites to non-whites during certain periods are unclear, although the resulting subculture was an undeniable example of cultural pluralism. The rude boys were into ska, a precursor of reggae that fused American R&B with Caribbean rhythms. The mods and other whites were into R&B and Motown.
When the cultures fused, popular skinhead music developed a mixture of R&B, soul and Jamaican music. Throughout the mid 1960s the Jamaican music became more important to the skinhead scene as the music came into much greater circulation. In the late 1960s the music went through many changes, evolving from ska into rocksteady, and finally into reggae. The skinheads who listened to reggae were supposedly at their greatest numbers from 1968 to 1972. The music industry recognized this and the stores were filled with skinhead anthems: "Skinhead Train" by Laurel Aitken, "Crazy Baldhead" by the Wailers, "Skinhead Moondust" by the Hotrod Allstars and more. One of the better known black skinhead bands was Symarip, who produced an album called Skinhead Moonstomp on Trojan records.
Fashion was a relatively important part of the skinhead culture. The fashion grew out of the "hard mod" subculture of the working- class East End of London in the mid-1960s. the mods' tough, clean style was partly a reaction to the androgynous finery of hippies and the sloppiness of the long-haired bikers known as rockers.
Their hair was generally kept at around a half inch in length instead of being completely shaved. A "crop" had practical benefits as well; it required neither shampoo nor comb and couldn't be grabbed in a fight. They wore T-shirts, button-down Fred Perrys, Ben Sherman shirts, Levi's , black Swat slacks with suspenders (always referred to as "braces"), black felt "donkey" jackets that wouldn't tear in the factory or a brawl. While steel- toed Doc Marten boots and jeans were worn to work by the majority of those with blue collar jobs, they would change into tailored suits with silk handkerchiefs, scarves or ties and loafers or brouges (wingtips in the U.S.) for a night out. At dance halls they mixed freely with the West Indian rude boys. Their sussed style did not mean they were always polite. Skinheads were often noted for antisocial behavior such as going hippie bashing and for creating havoc in the soccer terraces. Their feud with hippies was rooted in the fact that the "dirty long-hairs" with bellbottoms and sandals tended to be dropouts from white middle-class society, while skinheads took pride in their working-class, integrated origins and a more dignified style. Unfortunately, they had not yet adopted the hippie-rooted ideals of non-violence.
"It was almost a kind of anti-hippie movement," said Joe, a Minneapolis skinhead interviewed in the Jan. 31 City Pages. "They didn't like the style of the long hair. The short hair showed they took pride in their appearance. The hippies didn't. I'm not saying they were wrong or anything; they just didn't," he said. The punk fashion that was yet to develop for another four years would be radically different in attitude and appearance. Originated by the skinheads, Alison Lurie describes the derived punk style in The Language of Clothes:
It featured hair cropped to a fuzz and dyed startling, unnatural colors: often very pale yellow, sometimes red, green, orange or lavender. Faces were powdered pasty white, with sooty eyes and heavy lipstick. In clothing, red, black and white were the favorite colors. Punks wore black leather jackets and jeans decorated with metal studs and superfluous zippers; T-shirts printed with vulgar words and violent and/or pornographic pictures -- often images of rape and murder. Artificially torn and soiled clothing, held together with outsize safety pins, exposed areas of pale, unhealthy flesh, which were often bruised and scratched. One favorite accessory was the dog or bicycle chain, which might be pulled tight around the neck or used to fasten one leg to the other. Punk chicks might also wear this costume, or they might vary it with hot pants, side-slit skirts, tight angora sweaters and spike-heeled sandals; their boyfriends favored heavy "shit-kicker" boots.
While the fashion served as effective symbolism and identity for early punks, it was soon taken up by many middle and upper-class youths who alienated many punks away form the style. "In the language of clothes," Lurie said, "the punk style was a demand for attention, together with a cry of rage against those who should have paid attention to these kids in the past but had not done so": the parents who were too immature or too exhausted; callous or helpless teachers and social workers; a welfare state that seemed uninterested in their welfare and had no jobs for most of them. early skinheads had little use for so much attention and to the superficial qualities of the punk appearance.
Sailin' On
By 1972, two new sounds hit the skinhead movement, dub reggae and rock'n'roll. Dub made reggae less interesting to some skinheads, and a long affiliation started to wane. With dub, the heavy influence of rastafarianism and the artists who did not wish to conform to this new standard of the reggae scene soon were relegated to near obscurity. Thus, artists like Laurel Aitken, Prince Buster and the Skatelites were abandoned until the 2-Tone era, and Lee Perry was ostracized because of his active campaign against rasta. Skinheads used to dancing to the straightforward rhythms of ska, rocksteady and reggae had little use for the stoned, slowed-down, spaced-out beats with the bottom frequently dropping out from under them. Perhaps if marijuana caught on with the skinheads as much as it did with the rastafarians, things would have been different.
Reggae was soon replaced by a new form of rock 'n' roll when a band of white skinheads from Wolverhampton called Slade started becoming popular in 1973 and introduced the skinhead world to Oi! or pub rock as it was known then. After two hit singles, Slade signed with a major record company and sold out to glam metal. But by then, of course, punk had arrived. While the popular Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned attracted a huge following, including many white middle-class teenagers, the skinheads chose to largely distinguish themselves from the spectacle, continuing to embrace Oi! bands like Sham 69, Cocksparrer, Oi Polloi and the 4- Skins. While Oi! music was often difficult to distinguish from ordinary punk by unfamiliar ears, the music reflected a musical style based on the old tradition of pub sing-a-longs, but often much, much faster. The words challenged the bloated corporate complacency of rock just as punk did.
The Essex-based Crass was an extreme example of a band who incorporated the ideals of their lyrics into their lifestyle. Formed in Essex, England in 1976, partly in the Sham 69 image, they soon evolved into an anarchist commune. The band established several independent record labels and an information service. Crass espoused the ideals of anti-violence, feminism, and flushing out hypocrisy in organized religion in the context of their ear- damaging vehemence on their records. By their second album, Stations of the Crass, they dismissed the influential Sham 69 as full of hot air by doing a parody of them called "Hurry Up Garry," which is also a wicked snipe at the music business. They also summarized their scorn of punk as merely a fashion concept on "White Punks on Hope." Crass reached their peak in Penis Envy by drawing an ugly parallel between rampant sexism and white man's rape of nature and society.
While eventually finding themselves embroiled in legal battles with various government agencies, Crass stood as a successful model of dead-serious political commitment in the punk/skinhead movement. Several bands reflected Crass's influence both politically and "musically," including The Ex in Amsterdam, The Gang of Four and The Mekons in Leeds, The Au Pairs in Birmingham, The Pop Group in Bristol, The Fall in Manchester and Liliput in Switzerland. Skinheads not into Oi! or Crass temporarily kept the suss alive inside the Northern Soul movement, until it crashed on its face with the rise of disco.
By 1977, the skinhead subculture began facing problems from the fascist National Front, who began using kids who favored the more paramilitary aspects of skinhead fashion, to create disruption. The far right preyed upon the division of the traditional skinhead movement in Britain as the economic woes of the time began to erode the group from within. "It got so there were a lot of working class kids out of work and extremely frustrated with what was going on. That was when it became easy for them to start blaming their problems on the immigrants, who were mostly minorities," said Joe.
A group of former skinheads tattooed their faces with swastikas and taunted onlookers with "Sieg Heil" salutes, joining Britain's right-wing resurgence, which Margaret Thatcher would exploit so successfully. Encouraged attitudes were anti-immigrant (and therefore anti-Black), anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and anti-IRA, in that order. In response, a dedicated population of skinheads were inspired to strengthen their cultural pluralism through the 2- Tone movement. To combat the influence of the White Power organizations and spearhead a skinhead revival, most bands mixed both black and white members and the movement was molded around integration. While some 2-Tone era bands were all white (such as Madness, the Shadows and the Oppressed, an anarchist band) or all black (such as the Equators), they shared cultural and musical ideas, creating a hybrid of exciting new music. Writers like Mary Harron could hardly call them conservative.
The National Front recognized 2-Tone as a threat to their foothold in the skinhead subculture, and they did their best to use violence to disrupt shows by the 2-Tone bands. The Specials's last release, the Ghost Town EP, was a telling commentary on the violence, and it spent eight weeks atop the British charts. But it was basically futile because by the beginning of 1982 most of the 2-Tone bands had broken up. Yet the seeds for their multicultural inventiveness and integrity had been dispersed, and the effects can be seen from a multitude of subcultures to mainstream commercial music.
Baldies & Boneheads in America
The skinhead subculture had already taken root in the U.S. by 1977, where it was viewed as a dramatic but not particularly political variant of punk. There were Black and Latin and Jewish skins, many of whom hung together in the bi-racial 2-Tone bands. The style "stood for unity," said James DePasquale, 18, who became a skinhead four years ago. "Everybody who had a shaved head, you considered them a brother," he said in the May/June '89 issue of the Utne Reader.
With the help of fascists like Bob Heick, leader of a national Nazi youth group called The American Front, fascism also took root in American by 1985, when Nazi skinhead violence exploded at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco that summer. "There were always idiots," says Tim Yohannan, editor of Maximum Rocknroll. "Now there's idiots with ideology."
Skinheads distinguished each other with the terms "baldies" for the leftist non-racist skinheads, and "boneheads" for the white- power Nazi skinheads. Boneheads had no music scene of their own to speak of, since Skrewdriver was never allowed into the United States, and domestic white-power bands were wooden amateurs who lacked broad appeal. So the bones crashed the punk clubs, sometimes taking a razor blade to the locks of a longhair or ripping an anti-racist button off a peace punk's shirt.
As in Britain, American punks, skinheads, or "baldies" have fought back in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, where punks and "ska" skins have joined forces for more direct action. In January, 1989, more than 150 anti-racist skins from at least ten cities came to Minneapolis to form an umbrella organization for the anti-racist skins scattered throughout North America. By the end of the weekend, "The Syndicate" had been organized, and future anti-racist activities were planned.
The Twin Cities emerged as a center of anti-racist skinhead activity in 1987 when a group of baldies challenged the neo-Nazi White Knights. the White Knights were effectively driven out of Minneapolis by a campaign of physical confrontations that reduced the neo-Nazi group to a handful of die-hard white supremacists and their leader, a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The January Minneapolis skinhead gathering, while predominantly white, included African-American, Native American, Latino and Asian skinheads. The average age of participants was 19. Their passionate desire to clear the skinhead name is rooted in the belief that skinhead culture has something to offer all nationalities.
While the question of racism has been pushed on the skinhead movement, the media seems to ignore what many skins consider equally important: the question of class. The skinhead movement quite explicitly places its hopes for the future of the united action of the working class. It is as much by addressing and twisting the class question as by appealing to racism that the neo- Nazis have been able to establish a beachhead among white working- class youth. There is a deeply felt contempt for the rich in some quarters of American society that can be tapped with either revolutionary class politics or the half-baked Nazism of a Tom Metzger and his racist, anti-Semitic organization, White Aryan Resistance. But while the boneheads were puppets of Metzger, the Syndicate did it themselves.
By the time the mainstream had declared the death of punk in 1979, or 1980, or 1981, etc., the influence of punk, the skinheads's Oi! and anti-racist 2-Tone and the do-it-yourself ethic had spread all over the world. Independent labels were created by the dozens throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and a few countries in Africa. Especially around urban areas, independent fanzines could be found with music critique of all the newly formed bands and their demos, interviews, comics, Xerox art, poetry, fiction, news, investigative reporting, political agendas and more. It was a renaissance for those who were stranded form or chose to avoid the elitist upperclass artists and intellectuals who communicated only with their peers in art and academic journals, and the commercial culture targeted for everyone else who presumably did not deserve to have a voice.
Many people are ignorant of the many post-punk subcultures because they are not as easily pegged and defined as the simpledays of the Sex Pistols. The perpetual process of sharing cultural ideas and developing new hybrids of music blur the distinctions between one style and the next. Punk has evolved into or influenced popular styles like hardcore, hip-hop, jazz/speedfunk, industrial, goth/glam, metal, thrash, speedmetal/speedcore, and other styles that defy labels.
Younger kids involved in musical subcultures are looking back toward the roots of the past generation, reviving ska (for the second time) with bands like the Red Skins, the Potato Five, the Deltones and International Jet Set. They started an anti-racist organization founded in San Diego called S.H.A.R.P. (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), in addition to the aforementioned Syndicate. It has already spread to England, Europe and Australia. There has also been a rise of anti-Nazi fanzines like Zoot and Spy Kids. In Washington D.C. there is still a significant group of people who consider themselves sussed skinheads, who are actively breaking down racial and cultural barriers by taking in African-American, Asian-American, Mexican- American, Jewish, immigrant and homosexual/bisexual skinheads into one integrated cultural-pluralistic community.
Hardcore Coast to Coast
Much of the punk and skinhead influence on America developed into hardcore, growing from both the West and East coasts. In California, there were bands like The Dils, Black Flag, The Weirdos, The Avengers, The Germs, The Descendents, Adolescents, X, Minutemen, Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty), The Vandals, Fear and others; in Washington D.C. there was Minor Threat, Bad Brains and other bands on the Dischord label.
Black Flag has often been considered America's first hardcore band, beginning in 1978. By creating the still-surviving SST label (although it had recently declared bankruptcy), Black Flag single- handedly gave the West Coast hardcore scene international prominence. by the time their first EP Jealous Again came out in 1980, Black Flag had begun touring enough to become a major attraction in nearly every city and inspire others to get into the scene. While Black Flag and their peers wrote cutting songs like "T.V. Party," about commercial culture and middle class suburban life, the sound they made was predominantly a joyful noise, and they rarely preached to their fans.
The Dead Kennedys became an exception to the West Coast scene when they honed a self-righteously moral attack upon middle and upper-class values. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, their 1980 debut on I.R.S., contained "Holidays In Cambodia," their crowning achievement. The Dead Kennedys's sarcastic diatribes bordered on the overbearing on In God We Trust, Inc. until they redeemed themselves with an improved sense of humor on Plastic Surgery Disasters in 1982. By 1981, they had formed the Alternative Tentacles label which became a grassroots force as productive as SST.
The East Coast had much more in common with the Dead Kennedys than the more hedonistic California bands. While SST was just starting, Minor Threat helped establish the Dischord label. They issued the Bottled Violence EP in 1981, which revealed strong influence from the ideology of Crass and the music of The Ruts. The power of their own influence became apparent when, with one impassioned hardcore tune called "Straight Edge" they called for abstinence from drugs and booze. From that song, Minor Threat unwittingly would create a whole new American subculture which would adopt the same song title. A song that acknowledged both the aspirations and realties of political punk rock inspired a whole generation of skinheads and people without any label to denounce the self-destructive, nihilistic lifestyle that cultural icons like Sid Vicious romanticized. Ian MacKaye, lead singer for Minor Threat, would later emphasize that he was not telling people that they should restrict their own lifestyles. He was merely describing the choices he had made for himself at the time.
Meanwhile, Bad Brains carried on the tradition of the 2-Tone movement to the states, pushing the hybrids even further. The black jazz-rock fusionists from Washington D.C. proved their mastery of hardcore early in their career with the 1980 single, "Pay to Cum!". On the 1982 ROIR cassette album, Bad Brains featured radically contrasting excursions into dub and rasta reggae amongst the hardcore fury. As the band progressed, they shed some of the hardcore sound to create even more exciting blends of funk, reggae and metal wile continuing to espouse rastafarian principles.
The Rise of Independent Rock
By the mid 1980s, it became nearly impossible to keep track of all the new bands and styles that were helped out by the essential fanzines to get their messages and names out. In addition to all the loyal hardcore fanzines inspired by Maximum Rocknroll based in Berkeley, CA, other fanzines such as Flipside, Your Flesh, and Chemical Imbalance have been able to attain an impressive level of slickness and circulation to make a reasonable impact on the independent music scene and its underground subcultures without compromise; resorting to getting paid by corporations and advertisements. They manage to include more variety than the uncompromising hardcore 'zines than the unadventurous mainstream, with the notable exceptions of New York's Trouser Press and Chicago's Matter magazines.
But mainstream culture has become increasingly aware of the multitudes of music coming out of the post-punk subcultures, shown by coverage of the most successful bands from SST, Dischord, Homestead, Twin/Tone, including The Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Husker Du, The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., Squirrel Bait, The Effigies, Big Black, Naked Raygun, Sonic Youth, The Swans, Fugazi, Bad Brains, to hip-hop artists like Boogie Down Productions to several inventive industrial bands and the retro "sludge" movement (The Melvins, Green River, Blood Circus, Mudhoney, Nirvana) initiated by the Sub Pop label in Seattle, reaching back to the pre-punk music of The Stooges, The MC5, Alice Cooper, Radio Birdman and even Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath.
The Fall of Independent Rock?
Suddenly the industries see big possibilities for mass consumption of the bands who once thrived (or starved) in the underground subcultures. A corporation called Joseph-Fox Communications, Inc. even tried to emulate the style of fanzines with a tiny, slick and laughably naive production called New Route: The new route to new music. Douglas Joseph, the Editor- in-Chief and presumably the former half of Joseph-Fox, wrote an editorial in the October 1989 issue where he brought up the Warner Bros.-Time Inc. merger, PolyGram buying out Island and eventually A&M, EMI buying out Chrysalis Records and Virgin Records taking in major equity partners. "CBS Records is owned by Sony, and RCA Records by BMG," he said, brilliantly concluding that "the music industry is big business."
Joseph believes that the consequences of big business, the sales, distribution and in-store product placement being leveraged with merchandising, advertising and AOR radio play is a positive influence on the music scene. He believes the Godzilla corporations will generously spread increased profits to employees, stockholders, and most importantly, toward developing new artists. "The future of the record business is with the young artists," predicts Joseph.
His theory is that stronger companies will be more apt to experiment with new ideas as well as new musicians, such as BMG funding a new "independent" label, First Warning, which is distributed "independently" by Rough Trade. All A&R and marketing is done independently of BMG, although if any band does or says something BMG does not like, they would disappear from the industry as a label-less band. But Joseph says "as the major labels get bigger, there is more opportunity for the independents." Although independents fear the big squeeze of major labels, the money flowing into the alternative markets from the large companies strengthens the marketplace and supposedly creates more awareness for everyone.
"So," wrote Joseph, "as long as the music industry is healthy, properly managed and new artists continue to crete interesting music, we will hear great music from both major and [puppet] independent labels."
It is powerful people like Douglas Joseph and his New Route to brain-death who continue to remind underground fans of the reality of their worst nightmares. Even more dangerous to the underground culture than Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, it is this continuing threat of the corporate powers to control and exploit the independents for their own convenience and profit that continues to inspire youth around the world to do it themselves. ShareThis
