Boomer era rockers and Nazi regalia

Post Reply New Topic

With bikers it often seems to be a genuine reflection of their politics, rather than just edgelording for the sake of edgelording.

They typically won't self-identify as Nazis, but when it quacks, walks and swims like a duck ima call it a duck until proven otherwise. You know, the 3%er crowd and similar.

Here's a fairly detailed summary of the punk thing that was going on in the 1980s - known as Oi! music:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oi!

There's also a play called Oi! For England, a poor quality copy of which can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/oi-for-engl ... -80s-drama

I vaguely remember seeing it when it was first aired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oi!

Fixed that link for you.

I'm pretty familiar with the history of oi, UK82 (UK hardcore), street punk and similar fwiw.

^^^ Yeah that's what I was getting at. When I was in highschool in the late 70s the punk movement was at its height in Australia (we were always a bit behind with the movements in the UK) and a number of highschool kids were into skinhead movement which was quite popular. A lot of skins were bullies lurking around the school yard.

By about 1981 or 82 the skins lost their ground to the rise of new wave music.

The skinheads have always been fringe and associated with racism here. Skinheads gravitated towards hardcore punk rock, a faster, louder version of the original punk rock that rejected what they saw as the dumbing down and commercialization of punk signified by New wave. Racist skins lasted through the 80s and beyond and were recruited by hate groups.

That happens, but biker culture as it is today mostly arose out of WWII vets that had just come back from fighting against fascism and is far more about shock value. It's where you get straight biker men kissing and why one of the stereotypes of gay men is that leather biker bit. Fascism is more or less completely antithetical to what most bikers believe as it's very much a freedom based subculture and even for those that don't to that far, we're still largley not particularly interested in being part of a group like that.

Thanks - I don't know how it got broke, but it did.


I wouldn't win any prizes for being an expert in the field myself. As I was into the hippie thing in the 1970s I hated the skinheads until I found out that they weren't so homogenously evil as I'd thought. I could never understand why a bunch of racists were so keen on reggae. I also hated punk to begin with, because I was starting to make a little bit of hard-earned headway with playing progressive rock, when suddenly these punks came along and put me completely out of fashion. But eventually I got the point - years too late as usual - and got very into The Jam, who remain one of my favourite bands. It's strangely ironic that some of the punk bands gradually acquired quite a lot of musical finesse, and Paul Weller started doing soul music.

At least in Australia the skins were riding the crest of the punk wave. Yeah it did percolate through the 80s and it was so much of the zeitgeist that a movie came out in 1992 called Romper Stomper with Russel Crowe. Anti-Asian groups proliferated at this time. So people at that time just shrugged and said that was inner city Sydney culture (not great if you were Asian). It was big here, hardly a fringe in the late 70s, we had skins mixing with the punk fans, sometimes hard to disentangle. But you are correct they were attracted to punk music/scene rather than the other way around.

But from the 90s it really died away and it would be what you called fringe.

It happens when the URL contains certain characters, like brackets or exclamation marks. Essentially you have to parse those ones manually to get them to be parsed correctly.



I was a huge nerd for subcultures and their associated music even as a kid. I listened mostly to metal but I was always pretty fond of punk too. Covers by metal bands introduced me to UK82 (Discharge, Exploited) and American hardcore punk (Misfits, Black Flag, DKs, DRI, etc). Friends introduced me to stuff like NoFX, Lagwagon, etc and then other friends to stuff like the Casualties.

I grew up with the idea that skinheads were usually racist, only to learn about SHARPs and the connections between skinheads and ska, reggae and dub fandom.

By about halfway through high school I'd gone down most metal subgenre rabbit holes, along with maybe half of what I was aware of within punk, with punk and related styles starting to dominate over metal within my tastes.




I'd say the relationship between skinheads and hardcore punk is a bit more complicated. Hardcore mostly rejected the fashion style associated with punk, short hair and t-shirts are kinda like the default 80s hardcore fashion. Skinheads were usually at hardcore shows, but they weren't the core of the audience. There were skinheads in hardcore bands (like Agnostic Front), but most hardcore bands didn't adopt that style. Likewise, there were metal fans and traditional punks at a lot of hardcore shows during that period, but none of them were the core audience and fights between the different cliques wasn't uncommon.

Musically I'd associate skinheads more with oi! than with hardcore, even in the US. Hardcore punk hadn't quite fully split from punk yet, so hardcore bands who overlapped with those styles existed. UK82 was more connected to traditional punk than the American hardcore scene. A lot of the harder/faster punk that appealed more to punks and skinheads gets called street punk and remains a distinct style compared to hardcore.

Gradually the American hardcore scene started to open up to metal influences (crossover thrash) and seems to have less participation from people who identified more with skinhead or punk fashions.

Explicitly white supremacist music wasn't really accepted by any of those scenes. Oi! and early hardcore influenced a lot of so-called Rock Against Communism, but those bands were mostly rejected by their local punk and hardcore scenes and had to establish their own scenes. Somewhat comparable to how Christian rock and metal bands usually weren't accepted by mainstream rock and metal scenes.

Skinhead hardcore can almost be seen as it's own subgenre of hardcore that's become somewhat isolated from the rest of hardcore. WP/WS skinhead hardcore is largely it's own thing, further isolated from the rest of hardcore and even somewhat from non-WP skinhead hardcore. WP types see that stuff as a tool to recruit, so the people who promote and distribute it are usually fully in the WP world, not the hardcore or punk world.

TL;DR: Hardcore punk mostly chased the racist skins out back in the 80s, often with fists and baseball bats.

Siouxie Sioux was brought up in this thread. Siouxie and The Banshees's first single was about a hate crime they witnessed.


Since Bowie was broughtup here is a 1983 interview where Bowie calls out a VJ for MTV about the channel's lack of video's by black artists.

FWIW, I called Siouxsie Sioux out for being someone who embraced the swastika for shock value (and thus could have contributed to normalizing it), not for fashy adjacent politics.

Although:

https://forward.com/culture/music/48104 ... mned-dead/

Public Enemy’s and Michael Jackson’s “antisemitism” was a very big deal at the time.

This 1979 Frank Zappa song was controversial also.

At the time it did not bother me, I thought it was kind of funny, it was Frank Zappa doing his thing. In hindsight the Jewish American Princess stereotype and this song in particular is misogynistic.

Nazi imagery was normalized then which is the point of this thread.




As for Siouxsie Sioux what to make of this song and imagery?

People have speculated this was an apology for her earlier Nazi imagery, that it is an anti Israel song. Maybe we are overthinking it, it is a Christmas song, it was released 28 November 1980.

Maybe she is a bigot, is not her stage name cultural appropriation? Maybe the “too many Jews for my liking” line was a shock attempt.

We are not mind readers, we don’t know what they were thinking, or if they survived think now. While most if not all these people were not Nazi’s it would not surprise me if a few people used the normalization of Nazi imagery to express their bigotry.

We all based on our experiences interpret and misinterpret lyrics and have different ideas as to what is beyond the pale. As a baby boomer my take on this bound to be different than people who were not around then.

As for my lines the normalized rock star sex with numerous underaged girls was way worse than what we are discussing in this thread. A lot of people became victims of actual crimes and not only from the rock stars but the teenage boys who worshipped them. The females who were not victims of crime had to put up with a whole lot of s**t because of this.

I find the normalization and weaponization of Nazi comparisons more offensive then the subject of this thread.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 27 Feb 2025, 6:51 am, edited 2 times in total.

I won't disagree on that.



I'm not really sure anything said in this thread could fairly be described as weaponized. Glamourizing those movements is in bad taste, regardless of the motives. In particular it gives plausible deniability to people who wish to display that imagery with more serious intentions. It's also something that maybe shifts meaning over time. Maybe it was genuinely edgy at one point, but a lot of those tropes became worn-out over time and that changes the context.

I'm not saying people shouldn't appreciate any of those act. Jeez, I like several of the acts mentioned in this thread and another big example that hasn't been mentioned so far. Jeff Hanneman from Slayer was big on showing off his Nazi merch.

I'm sorry, but it's cringe AF. It doesn't mean their music should be off-limits, but it is something I'm not fond of. I'm sorry if me saying I find fashy imagery cringe is offensive, but I don't think I'm doing either of the things you describe.

I brought weaponization up in the context of people having different ideas about what lines should not be crossed and saying these are mine.

I am not offended by what you find cringe. Why would I, I found and still find most of what pop stars wear cringy.

Don’t worry the bloc of Siouxsie and the Banshees songs I planned on posting in the 70s and 80s music appreciation thread is still going to go up.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 27 Feb 2025, 9:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

!	Cornflake wrote:
	Some off topic posts have been removed. More drunk-posting, apparently.

I don't want to misinterpret your position, but I hope it's clear that whatever lines I might point to are more lines I feel it's ill-advised to cross or to follow others when they cross, rather than some sort of standard of purity I expect anyone else to follow (or even more so, to blindly follow because I said so).

Personally, I don't think I'm in much of a position to make demands of purity given that there's plenty of problematic stuff I enjoy. Enjoying something and being aware of questionable elements don't have to be mutually exclusive, but it's worth not losing sight of those criticisms.