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Oi!
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Oi! is a working class street-level subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.
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".
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Encyclopedia
Oi! is a working class street-level subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.
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".
In the words of André Schlesinger, "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."
History
The Oi! genre became a recognized genre in the latter part of the 1970s, emerging after the perceived commercialization of punk rock, but still before the soon-to-dominate hardcore punk sound. It fused the sounds of early punk bands such as Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Ramones and The Jam with influences from early British rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who; football chants; pub rock bands such as 101ers and Eddie and the Hot Rods; 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.
Originally the music style was called street punk, streetpunk, new punk or real punk. Other terms that have been used at certain points are street rock, street rock 'n' roll, Oi!/street punk and streetpunk/Oi!. In 1980, writing in Sounds, 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. The word Oi is an old Cockney expression, simply meaning hey or hello.
Some of the first bands to be explicitly labelled as Oi! were Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts and The 4-Skins. The first wave of Oi! bands was followed by bands such as The Business, Blitz, The Blood, The Last Resort, Combat 84, Infa Riot, The Burial, Condemned 84 and The Oppressed.
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. 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.
The Oi! movement lost momentum in the United Kingdom, but 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 bands such as U.S. Chaos, 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.
Other notable bands that have been heavily influenced by the original British Oi! scene include: The Press, Anti-Heros, The Templars, Wretched Ones, Those Unknown, The Bruisers, Dropkick Murphys, Roger Miret and the Disasters and The GC5.
In the mid-1990s, there was a revival of interest in Oi! music in the UK, with new bands emerging such as Pressure 28, Another Mans Poison, Boisterous, Argy Bargy, Straw Dogs. This led to older Oi! bands receiving more recognition. In the 2000s, many of the original UK Oi! bands have reunited to perform and/or record, and some of the bands never broke up in the first place. Some of those bands are: Peter and the Test Tube Babies, Cock Sparrer, Angelic Upstarts, The Business, Cockney Rejects, Red Alert and Sham 69.
Controversy
Because some fans of Oi! were involved in white nationalist organisations such as the National Front and the British Movement, some histories of rock music dismiss Oi! as racist. 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. The white power skinhead movement developed its own separate music genre called Rock Against Communism, which had some musical similarities to Oi!, but was not connected to Oi! scene.
The mainstream media 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 Hamborough Tavern in Southall. Asian youths firebombed the tavern, mistakenly believing that the concert was a neo-Nazi gathering, partly because some audience members had written National Front slogans around the area. In the aftermath, many Oi! bands condemned racism and fascism. These denials were met with cynicism from some quarters because of the Strength Thru Oi compilation album, released May 1981. Not only was its title a supposed play on a Nazi slogan (Strength Through Joy) but the cover featured Nicky Crane, a British Movement 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. 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. Bushell, who was a socialist at the time, noted the irony of being branded a far-right activist by a paper who "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."
Fashion
Oi!-related clothing items include traditional British punk and skinhead-oriented items such as: rocker jackets (sometimes customized with paint and metal spikes or studs); flight jackets; Harrington jackets; denim jackets or vests; T-shirts (often with images or text related to the skinhead or punk subcultures); Ben Sherman or Fred Perry shirts or sweaters; jeans (sometimes splattered with bleach); bullet belts; studded leather belts; braces; combat boots or Dr. Martens boots; and flat caps. Hairstyles associated with Oi! include shaven heads or spiked hair, including Mohawks (sometimes dyed).
Notable Oi! bands
Footnotes
External links
- -includes interviews and news about Oi! bands
- -includes information about the original Oi! compilation albums
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