Subcultures, pop music and politics: skinheads and "Nazi rock" in England and Germany

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004 by Timothy S. Brown

In exploring the relationship between the skinhead subculture and the development of the "Nazi rock" genre, we can use the concept of "articulation" as a means of approaching two key questions: 1) what accounts for the seemingly-paradoxical transformation of the skinhead subculture from one organized around appreciation for black cultural forms to one organized around white and frequently racist forms?; and 2) how and why is a movement based on a specifically "English" working-class identity meaningful in Germany? In approaching these questions, we will focus on three themes. The first is movement. As the subculture is communicated over time and through space--going through successive iterations with differing personnel and external circumstances--it articulates with new influences, musical and otherwise. It is out of these "communicative links" that sense is generated. We will try to understand how movement creates meaning. The second is displacement. We will explore how identities are developed less in relationship to the here-and-now, than in relationship to other times and places, to real and imagined pasts and geographic locations. We will seek to understand how absence becomes presence. The third is conflict. We will explore how identity is created through a series of constantly-shifting oppositions played out around a struggle to establish "authenticity." The development of "Nazi rock" is a product of this struggle.

ii. From England with Hate: Skinhead goes to Germany

The skinhead subculture that was transmitted to Germany was not the original, but the revival. The style was first brought to West Germany by British soldiers during the punk era of the late 1970s, but it was only during 1980-81 that a real skinhead scene began to develop. As noted above, the skinhead revival that grew out of the punk movement in England developed in association with new musical genres, the most important being "street-punk" or Oi! music. Rejecting the alleged art-school pretensions and commercialization of Punk Rock, street-punk bands like Sham 69, Cocksparrer, and the Cockney Rejects played a raw, stripped-down version of rock 'n roll that attracted a huge skinhead following. In their use of shouted refrains and audience participation, these bands drew on elements of the traditional "pub sing-along," and it was from the most common of these refrains--"Oi!" (a cockney greeting)--that the new movement received its name. Coined as a moniker for the new movement by Sounds magazine journalist Gary Bushell in 1980, the term "Oi!" quickly became synonymous with "skinhead."

By 1980, this also meant synonymous with "right-wing." The reasons for this are complex. The skinhead movement of the 1960s was not explicitly political, but it foreshadowed, in a number of areas, the politicization of the late-seventies revival. As is well-known, skinheads were accustomed to victimizing Asian immigrants, and as Roger Sabin has shown, they received little discouragement from adult society. (16) So-called "Paki-bashing" was merely a physical expression of the racist animosity of the larger society. (17) The sixties were a period of what might be called a racist consensus in Britain, with repeated legislation to curb immigration and increasing attempts by the conservative and radical right to turn immigration into an election-winning issue. (18) Leading politician Enoch Powell lent respectability to racist views when, in April, 1968, he spoke of the possibility of a race war if immigration was not curbed. (19) Powell's warnings gave voice to a widespread anxiety about immigration, an anxiety that was being exacerbated at the time by a media frenzy over the "threat" posed by the immigration of Asians being expelled from the former colony of Kenya. (20) Powell's speech also gave aid and comfort to neo-Fascists and helped to fuel the rise of the newly-founded National Front. (21)