Kulit Kepala

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

The History of.......

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.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.