| Oi! | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Punk rock Glam rock Pub rock Drinking songs Football chants Folk Music Ska Music |
| Cultural origins | Late 1970s United Kingdom (particularly the east end of London). |
| Typical instruments | Vocals - Drums - Electric guitar - Bass guitar |
| Mainstream popularity | underground following among punks, skinheads, Herberts and casuals |
| Derivative forms | Street punk |
| Subgenres | |
| Punk pathetique | |
| Other topics | |
| Garry Bushell - Sounds magazine - working class - punk ideologies - football hooliganism - UK 82 - Street punk - mod revival | |
Oi! is a working class street-level subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.[1] The music and associated subculture had the goal of promoting unity between punks, skinheads and other non-aligned working class youths (sometimes called herberts).
The Oi! movement was partly a response to a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic...and losing touch”. [2] André Schlesinger, singer of The Press, said, “Oi shares many similarities with folk music, besides its often simple musical structure; quaint in some respects and crude in others, not to mention brutally honest, it usually tells a story based in truth.”[3]
Contents |
Oi! became a recognized genre in the latter part of the 1970s, emerging after the perceived commercialization of punk rock, and before the soon-to-dominate hardcore punk sound. It fused the sounds of early punk bands such as Sex Pistols, the Ramones, The Clash, and The Jam with influences from 60s hard-mod British rock bands such as The Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, and The Who; football chants; pub rock bands such as Dr. Feelgood, Eddie and the Hot Rods, and the 101ers; and glam rock bands such as Slade and Sweet. Direct precursors to the first Oi! bands included Sham 69, Cock Sparrer and Menace, who were around for years before the word Oi! was used retroactively to describe their style of music.
In 1980, writing in Sounds magazine, rock journalist Garry Bushell labeled the movement Oi!, taking the name from the garbled "Oi!" that Stinky Turner of Cockney Rejects used to introduce the band's songs.[4][5] The word Oi is an old Cockney expression, simply meaning hey or hello. In addition to Cockney Rejects, other bands to be explicitly labeled as Oi! in the early days of the genre included: Angelic Upstarts, The 4-Skins, The Business, Blitz, The Blood and Combat 84.[6]
The general ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough sort of quasi-socialist working class populism. Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers' rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government.[2] Oi! songs also covered less-political topics such as street violence, football, sex and alcohol. Although Oi! has come to be considered mainly a skinhead-oriented genre, the first Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fit neither the skinhead nor punk label.
After the Oi! movement lost momentum in the United Kingdom, Oi! scenes formed in continental Europe, North America, Asia and other locations. Soon, especially in the United States, the Oi! phenomenon mirrored the hardcore punk scene of the early 1980s, with Oi!-influenced bands such as Agnostic Front, Iron Cross and S.S. Decontrol. Although similar in spirit and influence to Oi! (particularly in the earlier stages), hardcore expounded itself in an American middle class (rather than working class) fashion as its influences spread. In the mid-1990s, there was a revival of interest in Oi! music in the UK, leading to older Oi! bands receiving more recognition. In the 2000s, many of the original UK Oi! bands reunited to perform and/or record, and some of the bands never broke up in the first place.
Some fans of Oi! were involved in white nationalist organisations such as the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM), which resulted in some histories of rock music to dismiss Oi! as racist.[2] However, none of the bands associated with the original Oi! scene promoted racism in their lyrics. Some Oi! bands, such as Angelic Upstarts, The Burial and The Oppressed were associated with left wing politics and anti-racism.[7][8] The white power skinhead movement had developed its own separate music genre called Rock Against Communism, which had some musical similarities to Oi!, but was not connected to the Oi! scene.
The mainstream media especially associated Oi! with far right politics following a concert by The Business, The Last Resort and The 4-Skins on July 4, 1981 at the Hambrough Tavern in Southall. Local Asian youths threw firebombs and other objects, mistakenly believing that the concert was a neo-Nazi event, partly because some audience members had written National Front slogans around the area.[2][9] Although some of the skinheads were NF or BM supporters, among the 500 or so concert-goers were also left-wing skinheads, black skinheads, punk rockers, rockabillies and non-affiliated youths.[10] Five hours of rioting left 120 people injured — including 60 police officers — and the tavern burnt down.[9][11] In the aftermath, many Oi! bands condemned racism and fascism.
These denials, however, were met with cynicism from some quarters because of the Strength Thru Oi! compilation album, released in May 1981. Not only was its title a play on a Nazi slogan (Strength Through Joy) but the cover featured Nicky Crane, a BM activist who was serving a four-year sentence for racist violence. Garry Bushell, who was responsible for compiling the album, insists its title was a pun on The Skids album Strength Through Joy, and that he had been unaware of the Nazi connotations.[7][8] He also denied knowing the identity of the skinhead on the album's cover until it was exposed by the Daily Mail two months later.[7] Bushell, who was a socialist at the time, noted the irony of being branded a far right activist by a newspaper that "had once supported Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two." [7]
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