PUNK HARDCORE - The Eighties

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. 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 Conflict, the Gang Of Four, and the Mekons in Leeds, the Pop Group in Bristol and the Fall in Manchester.

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 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. 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. 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. 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, with bands like the Red Skins 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 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.