Skinheads

I just watched an A&E documentary called "Skinheads USA."  It centered around one white supremacist (who is now serving jail time) and the groups with which he was affiliated--namely the Aryan National Front, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Neo-Nazi Skinheads.  What disturbed me about this exposé wasn't their doctrines of hate and bigotry, but about the general ignorance of the history of the skinhead movement by both A&E and the Neo-Nazis.

The central figure of the documentary, Bill Riccio, stated in a public address that the reason that the skinheads shave their heads is because they have been defecated on by the Zionists, Blacks, Hispanics, etc., and by shaving their heads, they are cleaning themselves, and purifying themselves.  At this point in the documentary, I began shouting, "LEARN YOUR HISTORY," at the TV.

Skinheads first began emerging in Britain in the early 1960's as a working class reaction to the yuppie 'mods.'  The mods would typically have longer hair and would listen to mainstream music.  They were typically rich and had high-paying white-collar jobs.  The skinheads were the blue-collar working class.  They typically cut their hair short because of the machinery that they worked around.  In factories, hair, especially long hair, was difficult to manage.  Soon, these blue-collar workers began shaving off all of their hair.  Around the same time, a new style of music was spreading from Jamaica:  Ska.

Ska was a music of necessity.  In Jamaica, many people would make their living by throwing dance parties centered around manipulated music and charging admission and selling food and drinks.  These were the Sound Systems which would play a genre of music called "dub."  Dub music was made by taking an R&B track and running it through various EQs, sound filters, and echo effects to create music that was stripped bare of mostly everything except bass and drums.  However, in Jamaica, records were brought in from America about once a month, so the makers of dub music, called selectors, decided to contract Jamaican musicians to make music with an R&B sound.

These Jamaicans mixed the American R&B with their own traditional Jamaican musical style called Mento.  Thus, Ska was born.  The ska of Jamaica was far different from the American Ska music of the 90s (bands like Reel Big Fish, Catch-22, and Sublime) called Third-Wave and from the British Ska music of the 70s and 80s (bands like The Specials, Madness and Bad Manners) called Two-Tone.  The ska of Jamaica had a much more basic feel to it.  It didn't always have horns, but it always had an upbeat, a staple of Ska music that hasn't left the genre.  The first Jamaican Ska artist to hit it big was Desmond Dekker with his song "The Israelites" which topped UK charts until The Beatles bumped it off with their hit "Ob La Di, Ob La Da" (which showed marked influence from Ska).

The growing Skinhead movement latched onto this growing musical genre, and began to form their own bands.  They often had songs about Skinheads, glorifying this working-class brotherhood, as typified by The Specials' "Skinhead Moonstomp" (moonstomp referring to the dancing at Ska concerts).  Soon, their taste in music progressed, as they emerged with a new genre of music called Oi! Punk (exclamation mark is always included).  Initially, skinheads had no political identity, or at least, their political identity didn't unify them as a movement.

Slowly, the Skinhead movement moved to the US, and perhaps not as slowly, the working class saw their jobs being taken by minorities.  They saw injustices being done to the working class in general.  Some Skinheads took to Nazism and formed select Skinhead groups founded on Nazism and White Supremacy.  These Skinheads were much more violent that the traditional Skinheads.  Eventually, seeing the the Nazi Skinheads were giving the traditional Skins a bad name, some took to other causes.  Some became Communist Skinheads (sometimes called Redskins), while others just took an anti-racist stance (spending their time beating up racists)--the most notable group being the SHARPs (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice).  However, the traditional skinheads remained neutral, or as neutral as they could be.  The SHARPs saw this as sympathy for the Nazi and White Supremacists and began calling them Fencewalkers, because they didn't go out and actively beat up Nazi Skins.

Here in New Jersey, a state with a huge Ska scene, the Ska & Punk community has been torn apart by fighting amongst the various Skinhead groups.  Skinhead groups have become almost like gangs, as the traditional Skins do their best to keep out of political affairs without having their cars or houses trashed.  I suppose the point of this is that not all skinheads are racists, and we should do our best to align ourselves with these Skins to bring the community back together by routing out the racist skins.

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