Curating the Moving Image (2011) | The P&P Blog
Spirit of ’69: the apolitical multicultural roots of skinhead
Curatorial statement – Spirit of ’69: the apolitical, multicultural roots of skinhead
Is not black, is not white, is what is right
Everything will be all right if we just unite
Sheggae, reggae
Skinhead moon invasion!
Leaving from shanty town to brixton
Sheggae, reggae, jeggae, reggae, sheggae
Reggae, sheggae, jeggae
(Apollo 12 A.K.A Skinhead Invasion – Laurel Aitken)
Ska music started in Jamaica. There was a great mixture of two influences: there was the rude boy and the sort of hard working class kids growing up, and what came out of the two was skinhead. And it was white and it was black. The two clashed only on the dance floor and only for the best of reasons.
(Douglas Trendle A.K.A. Buster Bloodvessel in: Skinhead Attitude)
From Jamaica to Brixton, from west to east, to the moon and back: the skinhead subculture is and always has been an inherently cross- and multicultural phenomenon.
Jamaican rude boys living in the UK introduced British working class youth with something they had not experienced before: reggae music. The need to distinguish themselves from their parents combined with this new dance music gave rise to a subculture called mod. Because of the economic boom in the 1960s this subculture became more and more intertwined with consumerism and expensive fashion. The (hard) mods who did not have that much to spend on clothing, but were proud of their working class roots developed into a distinct subculture. They became known as skinheads.
Skinheads combined their love for reggae music and the rude boy apparel (closed cropped hair) with working class aesthetics (work boots, braces) and some fashion conventions incorporated from the mod subculture. It was pride in the working class and love for ska, rocksteady and reggae that unified the skinheads, not politics, hate or aggression. In fact, the traditional skinhead movement was and still is inherently apolitical.
Black reggae bands and performers such as Symarip, Laurel Aitken, Derrick Morgan, Desmond Dekkers and the Hot Rod All-stars directly addressed this new subculture with their distinctive skinhead (or: early) reggae music. The traditional skinhead movement faded away, but experienced a revival at the end of the 1970s with bands such as The Specials, The Selecter, Madness and Bad Manners. Some of these bands are still active today and share the stage with a new generation of contemporary skinhead reggae musicians (although they might not call themselves this any longer) such as the Aggrolites and the Upsessions.
Traditional skinheads today are active all over the world, in every continent, with members from all colours and religions abiding to different political ideas. Although style and appearance may vary greatly, traditional skinheads all over the world share their working class pride and love for early reggae music.
So what about the extremely right wing, racist and/or nationalist politically engaged (neo-Nazi) skinheads you see on the news and read about in the papers? They are real, they exist and they are probably as aggressive and violent as the media depicts them, but the skinheads that propagate these messages of hate are not the only skinheads that are around and certainly not the same skinheads that met up at the dancehalls to listen and dance to reggae music, drink beer and have fun with friends.
This is not to say that the traditional skinheads were completely innocent and passive, but instead that politics, aggression and hate was not what united them as a group, as a subculture; it was pride, pride in themselves, in the movement, in their working class roots and their love for Jamaican music.
In this exhibition a more positive view on the skinhead subculture is presented, with the focus on what the news media left underexposed: its apolitical multicultural roots and cross-cultural pride, fashion, friends, fun and reggae music.
Books:
Skinhead (Nick Knight, Omnibus Press: 1982)
Skinhead Nation (George Marshall, S.T. publishing: 1996)
Spirit of ’69: A Skinhead bible. (George Marshall, S.T. publishing: 1994).
Photography:
Skins (Gavin Watson, Independent music press: 2007)
Skins and Punks: Lost archives 1978-1985. (Gavin Watson, Vice books: 2008)
PYMCA (Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive)
Documentary:
Skinhead Cross Culture (Bryan Davis, USA, 2009, 111 min)
Skinhead Attitude (Daniel Schweizer, Switzerland/France, 2003, 90 min)
World of Skinhead (Doug Aubrey, United Kingdom, 1995, 59 min)
Film:
Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platt-mills, United Kingdom, 1969, 86 min)
This is England (Shane Meadows, United Kingdom, 2006, 101 min)
16 Years of Alcohol (Richard Jobson, United Kingdom, 2004, 102 min)
Television:
This is England ’86. (Shane Meadows, United Kingdom, 2010, 185 min)
S.O.U.L.-Sounds of Underground London: The Skinhead Generation: 54, 46 Was My Number. (United Kingdom, 2003 )
Skinhead Farewell. (Ian MacMillan, United Kingdom, 1996, 50 min)
Music:
Symarip – Skinhead Moonstomp: Deluxe edition (Universal Music, 2008)
Trojan Skinhead Reggae Box Set (Sanctuary Records, 2002)
The Aggrolites – Aggrolites (Hellcat Records, 2006)
Vignette mood exploration
Source: http://gavinwatsonsphotography.blogspot.com/2010/05/skins-1980.html
This was England
This was England – Photo exhibition PYMCA (2007)
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31667949@N07/sets/72157623166940782/
Visual Exploration
 The Aggrolites
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Skinhead cross culture
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 This is England
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 Skinhead Moonstomp
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 Lagos Calling
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 Jim Ferguson’s fashion notebook
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Well, since we play specifically late-’60s/early-’70s reggae, we had a worldwide following literally the day we started. It was small but worldwide, almost all skinheads and rudeboys. Now it’s punk rockers, skater kids. Lately we’ve seen older people, parents, young kids, people into hip-hop. That’s what we wanted. We think reggae is like food. Food is for everybody. But at first it was the subculture of traditional skinheads who listen to this kind of music. They’re not the racist ones, they’re the ones that predated the whole punk rock racism thing. They call it skinhead reggae, though the real term is early reggae. We call it dirty reggae. (Brian Dixon, guitarist in The Aggrolites: LA Weekly)
The purpose of entering these festivals has less to do with possible awards and recognition and more to do with increased awareness and better distribution. Like all documentaries, getting your message across and connecting with your audience are of paramount importance. Whether your doc is applauded or panned is of little significance in the grand scheme of things (but critical acclaim certainly couldn’t hurt). What is ultimately important is what people walk away with. Let’s hope the powers that be don’t rush to judgement by the title alone! Skinheads deserve better than that. (Bryan Davis: Unified Pride)
My older sister was going out with a skinhead who took me under his wing and taught me about the roots of the whole culture. He was a nice bloke who bore no relation to the stereotypical racist yob that people now associate with that time. … I learned from him that skinheads had grown out of working class English lads working side by side with west Indians in factories and shipyards in the late-60s. The black lads would take the whites to blues parties where they were exposed to ska music for the first time. Soon, Jamaican artists … were making a living out of songs aimed directly at English white kids. This was where the whole skinhead thing came from – it was inherently multicultural. But nowadays when I tell people that I used to be a skinhead, they think I’m saying I used to be racist. My film shows how rightwing politics started to creep into skinhead culture in the 1980s and change people’s perception of it. … I always wanted This Is England to tell the truth about skinheads. (Shane Meadows, director of This is England: The Guardian)
Lagos Calling was an attempt to imagine a fantasy alternate reality. What if the skinhead fashion movement had arisen in 60′s Lagos, instead of London? What if anthropological portraits from the time had been lost, and then resurfaced, damaged, faded, as a relic of a cultural hybrid that has since died out? Lagos Calling is what I came up with.
The skinhead aesthetic was perfect for it, since it was itself a product of a mixing of global cultures and immigration. British working class youth listening to Jamaican dub and ska. The fact that it was later co-opted by white racists made the imaginary transplanting to Nigeria (a former British colony) even more jarring and powerful for me. (Clayton Cubitt: Saatchi)
Work plan
It was not only by congregating on the all-white football terraces but through consorting with West Indians at the local youth clubs and on the street corners, by copying their mannerisms, adopting their curses, dancing to their music that the skinheads ‘magically recovered’ the lost sense of working-class community. (emphasis in original: Hebdige 1979: pp. 56)
Project goals:
Because I was fooled by the popular beliefs and stereotypes surrounding the skinhead subculture, a sense of unfairness rose up in me. Unfair not only to the apolitical traditional skinheads still active today, faced with stereotypical prejudices, judgments and accusations. But unfair also to people who (like I did before) believe in and generalize such negative stereotypes without being aware, and without being made aware, of the skinheads’ apolitical and multicultural roots.
This widespread ignorance is not only caused by the ‘boneheads’ (right-wing, racist skinheads) crave for attention itself, but especially by the media and academics who provided platforms to make these messages of hate heard by a wider audience. By solely focusing on this radical fraction of the skinhead movement the media and academia confused a racist division for the whole skinhead subculture.
With this project I want to confront people with their own prejudices, like I was confronted with mine at The Aggrolites concert. I want to make people aware of the stereotypes surrounding this subculture by focusing on the underexposed apolitical and multicultural roots of the movement. In doing this I will use the same audiovisual media that gave rise to the initial stereotypes. To summarize my goals, my intent in this project is to:
- Show people they have been fooled by popular beliefs, conceptions and stereotypes by shedding some light on the underexposed apolitical multicultural roots of the skinhead movement
- Explain why they have been fooled by reflecting on the negative academic and media attention
- Provide another perspective on the skinhead subculture by creating an online platform for a more positive media depiction of the apolitical skinheads subculture
Target audience:
Those who are fooled by the stereotypes and popular conceptions surrounding skinheads (those who believe, like I did, that all skinheads are politically engaged, racist neo-nazi’s). Racist, anti-racist (SHARP – Skinheads against racial prejudice) and apolitical skinheads.
Project outline:
My aim for this project is to confront the audience with their prejudices and stereotypical beliefs. I want to do this in an online exhibition setting that is constantely expanding with user contributed material (photos, stories, videos) depicting the underexposed apolitical skinhead subculture. The website is thus both an exhibition as well as an online platform to gather audiovisual material depicting traditional skinheads. The user cannot directly edit the exhibition, the curators do, but his uploaded content can end up in the constantly expanding exhibition.
The exhibition will be narratively and chronologically ordered, and can be accessed from two entry points resulting in two different routes. The visitor can either trace back the history of the skinhead subculture, beginning by their own prejudices as visualized by contemporary media, or the visitor can start with the roots of this movement to explore how popular conceptions surrounding the skinhead subculture came about.
To explain that the apolitical skinheads are not a group of the past, but a group still active today it is important to show both what the media highlighted as well as what they left underexposed in their depiction of the skinhead subculture. What is central in this exhibition is the fact that the traditional or apolitical skinheads did not disappear the moment racist skinheads presented and expressed themselves. What I want to highlight with this exhibition is, thus, that these two radically different divisions of the same subculture existed alongside each other, while only the extremist section sought and received media attention, leaving the other, sections underexposed.
In the end both the visitor who takes route 1 as the visitor who takes route 2 will be confronted with their own prejudices and generalizations. They will learn that the academic and media depictions present one-sided generalizations, leaving a whole (more positive) part of this subculture underexposed and most importantly they will realize that their own ideas about this subculture are grounded in stereotypes and prejudices based on this one-sided representation.
Resources:
Books:
Skinhead (Nick Knight, Omnibus Press: 1982)
Skinhead Nation (George Marshall, S.T. publishing: 1996)
Spirit of ’69: A Skinhead bible. (George Marshall, S.T. publishing: 1994).
Photography:
Skins (Gavin Watson, Independent music press: 2007)
Skins and Punks: Lost archives 1978-1985. (Gavin Watson, Vice books: 2008)
PYMCA (Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive)
Documentary:
Skinhead cross culture (Bryan Davis 2009)
Skinhead attitude (Daniel Schweizer 2003)
World of Skinhead (Doug Aubrey 1995)
Film:
Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platt-mills 1969)
This is England (Shane Meadows 2006)
16 years of alcohol (Richard Jobson 2004)
Television:
This is England ’86. (Shane Meadows 2010)
S.O.U.L.-Sounds of underground London. (2003)
Skinhead farewell. (Richard Allen 1996)
Music:
Symarip – Skinhead Moonstomp (Deluxe edition 2008)
Trojan skinhead reggae box set (2002)
The Aggrolites – Aggrolites (2006)
Ignorance
Project background: A personal anecdote
Four years ago I won tickets for a concert of a reggae band I was listening to for a while called The Aggrolites. I did not really know what to expect from the gig, but what I saw there troubled me at first hand. The biggest part of the audience consisted of white men with short-cropped hair wearing a combination of army boots, rolled up jeans, polo-shirts and braces, which I recognized as being part of a skinhead apparel. At that time I was fooled by the contemporary conception of skinheads and believed that I was part of some kind of racist meetup, which worried me because the friend I was with that evening was of Surinam descent. He was the only coloured person in this crowd of supposed to be neo-Nazi’s.
The Aggrolites – Time to get tough (Live, 2006)
I was able to suspend my worries during The Aggrolites performance (which I really enjoyed: I went to see them two times more), but it made me think afterwards. I really did not want to be associated with these people and their, as I thought at that moment, extreme right-wing worldviews. What kind of band was The Aggrolites, where there may be hidden messages in their lyrics I did not know of and since when was reggae neo-nazi music? The next morning I looked it up on the internet and found out that Aggrolites where making self-proclaimed dirty reggae, or a contemporary derivative of the skinhead reggae from the 60s.
It was thus not a coincidence that skinheads turned up at the show, because there was an actual connection between the band and the, which I still believed, racist skinhead movement. This made my worries even greater, but when I continued searching I found out about traditional skinheads who where part of an apolitical movement or subculture where people of all colour and religion where welcome to join. At that moment I realized I was fooled by the popular conceptions which had fueled my ignorance for a long time. Not all skinheads were politically engaged, racist or neo-nazi’s; this was only a small separated division that used the apparel of the traditional skinheads to propagate their messages of hate and violence. I was fooled and I did not like it. I felt the obligation to find out who these traditional skinheads really were without being tricked by contemporary stereotypes and prejudices.
Skinhead reggae (a clip from Skinhead attitude)
Traditional (apolitical) skinhead subculture
Curator: Jasper Hokken
Subject: Traditional (apolitical) skinhead subculture
Inspiration: Dick Hebdige / The Aggrolites
Skinhead reggae (a clip from Skinhead attitude)
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