Although some youth subcultures seem to rebel against their parent culture, there are certain groups that seek to preserve and even better their parent culture. According to the article “Subcultures, Cultures and Class”, “some youth subcultures are regular and persistent features of the ‘parent’ class-culture” (Clarke et al. 94). Take, for instance, the Skinheads of nineteen-eighties England.
To gain a bit of background information, it may be helpful to view the trailer to Shane Meadow’s film about Skinhead culture, This is England:
It is evident that the whole basis of the subculture is formed upon its working class background. The youth culture is also suppressed by the hegemony of class struggle, fighting the same battle as their parents. However, it is how the Skinheads fight this battle that sets them apart from their parent culture.
First of all, the Skinheads demonstrate a stronger unity over their parent culture by the exaggeration of working class style:
The adoption by Skinheads of boots and short jeans and shaved heads was ‘meaningful’ in terms of the subculture only because these external manifestations resonated with and articulated Skinhead conceptions of masculinity, ‘hardness’ and ‘working-classness’. This meant overcoming or negotiating, or even, taking over in a positive way many of the negative meaning which, in the dominant cultural code, attached to these things: the ‘prison-crop’ image of the shaved head, the work-image, the so-called ‘outdated cloth-cap image’, and so on.
(Clarke et al. 103)
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Here we see that the working class style of Skinhead culture is not just a symbol of revolt against the dominant culture, but an act of homage toward their parent culture. Although Skinheads are seen to have great pride in their roots, they also seek an escape from the hegemony they face at work and at school. Rebellion is a common method of escape.
In his article “Culture, Institution, Differentiation”, Paul Willis presents a testimonial from a young Skinhead. It reads:
We used to go out of nights, and carrying on from hitting each other with rulers we used to fucking chuck bottles at each other, so the major occupation was roaming around the streets, looking for bottles to lam at each other. And from that came a bit of vandalism here and there like…
(Willis 115)
These acts of rebellion help to shape the ideologies of the subculture as a whole. However, as presented in the film This is England, the rebellion of Skinhead culture goes a little deeper than just trivial violence.
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Historically, there was an undertone of racism behind the Skinhead subculture. Certain groups of Skinheads believed that, in lieu of the rising unemployment rate, immigrants were responsible for taking all of the jobs that were meant for Englishmen. This belief fuelled verbal and physical attacks on many individuals who appeared to be of foreign descent, whether they were direct immigrants or not.
While becoming very territorial and protective of their culture, the Skinheads took matters into their own hands to solve their working class problems. However, their symbolic and operational attempts were merely false solutions to their problems. “When the post-war subcultures address the problematics of their class experience, they often do so in ways which reproduced the gaps and discrepancies between real negotiations and symbolically displaced ‘resolutions’” (Clarke et al. 98).
Since Skinhead culture did not truly present the solutions to the working class problems in nineteen-eighties England, it is now among a collection of subcultures that “command the stage of public attention for a time: then they fade, disappear or are so widely diffused that they lose their distinctiveness” (Clarke et al. 94). Even so, there is no denying that the Skinhead subculture merits a major chapter in England’s history.
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References:
Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts. “Subcultures,
Cultures and Class.” The Subcultures Reader. 2nd ed. Ken Gelder. London:
Routledge, 2005. 94-104. Print.
Willis, Paul E. “Culture, Institution, Differentiation.” The Subcultures Reader. 2nd
ed. Ken Gelder. London: Routledge, 2005. 113-120. Print.
While many of your points are spot on, I think there are somethings that need to be addresses. The Skinhead cult was born in the late 1960s from the ashes of the mod cult as it went hippie. You're right that it was homage payed to their class roots, even to a level of defiance, however it was also greatly influenced by the West Indidan immigrant rudeboy culture as well. There was no undercurrent of racism in the early skinhead movement. There were many incidents of "paki bashing" perpetrated by white and black skins alike, but that in the long run had little to do with race. It was as you, pointed out, a social tention come to a head. Had the immigrants who didn't learn the language and took the lads jobs at a much lower wage been white German immigrants we likely would have seen the same response. My statement isn't ment to try to mitigate the violence toward immigrants, just to point out that the issue was not really one of race, that was just a convenient focal point for a much more complex issue.
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