LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Skinhead
built 214 days ago
The second wave of the Skinhead movement took shape in the 1980s.This was the period in which Ian Stuart founded the neo-Nazi organization called the British National Front. He became the lead singer in the band called Skrewdriver. The music of Skrewdriver, and other bands that followed, along with the organizational skills of people like Stuart, contributed to the growth of a distinctive Skinhead subculture in the early 1980s.They identified with the ideology of Nazism and white power. Their shaved heads, T-shirts, boots, tattoos, and aggressiveness comprised a visible and confrontational style. It was this second wave that was to cross the Atlantic to the United States.
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Today, Skinhead continues to be a thriving international youth subculture. Though still retaining a lot of the racist elements it has in the past, thanks to the efforts of dedicated anti-fascists both in and out of the scene, the nazi Skins have been (often literarily) kicked to the sidelines. Large fascist gigs have been smashed up and prevented, shops distributing nazi music were attacked until they stopped and the entire nazi Skinhead scene was driven underground. To this day in Britain, nazi Skinheads have to organise their gigs in secret, book venues under false names and often ask the police to provide protection for them on the night!
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The most popular music for the late 70's Skinhead was Two-Tone, named after a Coventry-based record label that featured such bands as The Specials, Madness, and Selecter. Two-Tone was the musical integration of Ska, Rocksteady and the spirit of Punk music. The label was initially very successful scoring many Top Twenty hits and eventually a number one. During this time (1979 - 1981) Skinheads were a common sight on the UK highstreets.
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Estimates of the size of the Skinhead movement are made periodically by the Anti-Defamation League and by Klanwatch. Estimates (1998) are that there are approximately 3,500 Skinheads spread across 40 states. (Unfortunately, neither group publishes their methodology for these estimates, and establishing the size of right-wing groups in general is difficult.) There may be as many as 160 Skinhead gangs in the United States. Most of them are small groups, though many are associated with gang federations. The Hammerskin Nation, Fourth Reich, and the Northern Hammerskins are the larger federations. Individual membership and the number of gangs seem to have declined during the 1990s... there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that they may have increased in the northwest.
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[T]o say that Skinhead died in the early 70s is wrong and by the late 1970s, Skinheads were back and had spread internationally, across Europe and to North America. Sadly, the resurgence of Skinhead culture in Britain had seen a fundamental political shift within the scene. Skins no longer danced side-by-side with Jamaican rude boys, were more connected to the emerging Punk movement and had become fertile ground for recruiting for far-right groups like the National Front and the more radical neo-Nazi group, the British Movement. Fascist groups began consciously recruiting racist Skinheads (who anti-racist Skins called ‘Boneheads’) to be foot soldiers in their street fights with immigrants, ethnic minorities and the far-left. This process was helped by the media’s portrayal of this new subculture as an explicitly racist one. Also, by the mid-1980s a far-right music movement, Blood & Honour, had become the main distributor of nazi Skinhead and Punk bands across the world holding big international gigs and publishing magazines.
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Like other Los Angeles gangs, Skinhead gangs cannot be lumped together in one homogenous style. SHARP Skinheads are "Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice." They claim to be more of what those early English Skins were about. "Unity" is their logo and it can often be seen on their clothing or tattooed on their bodies along with the crossed out swastikas. But Sharps believe in the use of violence to settle disputes, drink lots of beer, and listen to the same Oi bands, although they may have mixed racial band members. Sharps traditionally war with the Nazi Skinheads.
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