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

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004

Abstract: Timothy S. Brown, "Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and 'Nazi Rock' in England and Germany"

This article takes a comparative and transnational approach to a key phenomenon of the late-20th century: the dovetailing of music-based youth subcultures with radical politics. First prominent in the "Counterculture" of the 1960s and 70s, the phenomenon has become increasingly salient with the rise of right- wing-extremist rock music and racist skinhead violence in Europe since the fall of Communism. Examining the evolution of the "skinhead" from a fusion of West Indian immigrant and white working class youth styles in 1960s England into a vehicle of right-wing extremism in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, the article combines history and theory in an exploration of how an originally-English subculture was transformed through its contact with German social, cultural and historical traditions.