Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and "Nazi Rock" in England and Germany‪.‬

Right-wing extremist rock music--so-called "Nazi rock"--is one of the most problematic of popular musical genres. Emerging from the skinhead youth subculture in Britain at the end of the 1970s, and spreading to the continent and across the Atlantic in the following decade, it has served as accompaniment to a rising tide of racist and anti-immigrant violence in Germany, and become a focus of recruiting for the radical right world-wide. Yet as a generic category, "Nazi rock" is inherently unstable. A phenomenon that is at once artistic and political, it sits uneasily across analytical boundaries. The area of overlap between music genre and political content is, for one thing, far from complete. Rightwing extremist ideas are not strictly confined to skinhead rock music, but have found their way into a variety of other musical genres and youth subcultures. (1) The spread of Nazi rock beyond its original social boundaries--it is no longer simply "skinhead music"--means that the genre and the skinhead subculture are, if still intimately linked, by no means synonymous. Conversely, the various genres that make up "skinhead music" are by no means exclusively right-wing. Although Nazi rock arose out of the skinhead subculture, the subculture is--as will be seen--heavily divided about the meaning and value of the genre. (2) The original skinhead movement of the late-1960s was a multicultural synthesis organized around fashion and music. The first skinheads were offshoots of the British "mod" subculture of the early 1960s. The mod was stylish, dedicated to cultivating the right look; upwardly mobile, very likely the son or daughter of a worker moving up into the white-collar realm of the bank or advertising firm. Above all, the mod was a music fan, obsessed with dancing to American soul music at all-night parties. (3) From the 1960s, the split implicit in the mod scene--between its working-class origins and its upper-class pretensions; between its subcultural subversiveness and its obvious appeal for boutique-owners and advertisers--began to widen. With the mod subculture swerving ever closer to the commodified, Carnaby-street hippie style of "swinging London," certain mods began to emphasize the more proletarian aspects of the look, cutting their hair shorter and replacing dandified suits and expensive shoes with jeans and heavy boots. These no-frills "hard mods" prefigured the arrival of the first skinheads. (4) Whereas appreciation for black culture--above all American soul music but also Jamaican ska--had stood at the center of the mod way of life, the skinheads took the connection a step further; their reference point was a local symbol of cool, young Jamaican immigrants who modeled themselves on the authority-defying "rude boy" of the Kingston ghettos. The clean, hard look of these transplanted "rude boys" fit nicely with the stripped-down elements of the hard mod style, and their evening wear echoed the earlier mod emphasis on expensive suits and nice shoes. But by far the most critical element in the symbiotic relationship between skinheads and black immigrants was music. Skinheads embraced the reggae music of Jamaican performers like Desmond Dekker as their own. Reggae artists and labels, in turn, actively courted the skinheads, producing songs and albums aimed at this young white audience. The resulting genre--"skinhead reggae"--fueled the rise of the skinhead subculture while jump-starting the careers of many Jamaican performers in Britain. The identity of the original skinhead was thus constructed in dialogue with black immigrants and organized around music created by black performers. (5)