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1981

Rebels in Society? Ethnographic Moments of ‘Street Politics’ and Organic Intellectuals in the Historical and Contemporary UK Oi! Punk Scene

image of Rebels in Society? Ethnographic Moments of ‘Street Politics’ and Organic Intellectuals in the Historical and Contemporary UK Oi! Punk Scene

The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the socio-political shift towards neoliberalism was a major shift in British politics and society. The tactics used to counter hegemonic practices of Thatcherism were embodied in the social knowledge of working-classness as a form of social and cultural praxis under a specific hegemonic order. Oi! (also known as Street Punk) is one example of the extension of what could be termed working-class folklore in the Gramscian sense. Drawing on a critical folklore perspective and based on data taken from the use of ‘traditional’ ethnographic (group and individual) interviews with UK-based Oi! Bands this chapter discusses the development of the UK Oi! scene as an enactment of a type of Gramscian dialect - a localised musical stylistic response towards the shifting socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions – which is part of a broader working-class folklore of national resistances to Thatcherism among working class communities.

Keywords: Bourdieu ; Ethnographic methods ; Folklore ; Gramsci ; Miners Strike ; Oi! ; Organic Intellectuals ; Street Politics ; Street Punk ; Working classness

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References

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References

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     [Google Scholar]
  2. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Bradley, Harriet (2008), ‘No more heroes? Reflections on the 20th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike and the culture of opposition’, Work, Employment and Society, 22:2, pp. 337–49.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Bushell, Gary (1981), ‘Oi!: The debate’, Sounds, 24:January, pp. 30–31.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Clarke, John (2006), ‘The skinheads and the magical recovery of community’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 80–83.276
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Clarke, Victoria and Braun, Virgina (2014), ‘Thematic analysis’, in T. Teo (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology, New York: Springer, pp. 1947–52.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Glasper, Ian (2014), Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984, Oakland, CA: Cherry Red.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Goffman, Erving (1956), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, London: Harmondsworth.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Gramsci, Antonio ([1929] 1971), The Modern Prince: Selections from The Prison Notebooks (ed. and trans. Q. Horace and G. Nowell-Smith), New York: International Publishers Co.
  10. Harrison, Anthony Kwame (2018), Ethnography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Harrison, Anthony Kwame (2021), ‘Spending time together outside of the clubs: Cross-gender rapport building and interview recruitment in music scene ethnography’, Sociological Inquiry, 92:4, pp. 1329–51.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Joyce, Peter and Wain, Neil (2014), Palgrave Dictionary of Public Order Policing, Protest and Political Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Kane, Bethany (2020), ‘Ain't what I call Oi!: How politics have shaped the modern day scene’, in M. Grimes and M. Dines (eds), Punk Now!!: Contemporary Perspectives on Punk, Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 98–101.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Lenin, Vladimir ([1902] 2018), What Is to Be Done?, London: Wellred Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. McRobbie, Angela and Garber, Jenny (1977), ‘Girls and subcultures’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchinson, pp. 209–22.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Milne, Seamus (2015), The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners, London: Verso.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred (1978), Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, London: Macmillan.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Spradley, James P. (1979), The Ethnographic Interview, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
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  19. Valente, Joseph Michael (2014), ‘An “in-betweener” ethnographer: From anxiety to fieldwork methods in a cross-cultural study of bilingual deaf kindergartners’, in D. Conner, J. Valle and C. Hale (eds), Practicing Disability Studies in Education, Acting Toward Social Change, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 103–20.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Walby, Sylvia (1989), ‘Theorising patriarchy’, Sociology, 23:2, pp. 213–34.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Way, Louise (2019), ‘“I don't go to the gigs to go to the gigs – I don't give a shit about the gigs!”: Exploring gig attendance and older punk women’, Punk & Post-Punk, 8:2, pp. 257–69.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Worley, Matthew (2012), ‘Shot by both sides: Punk, politics and the end of “consensus”’, Contemporary British History, 26:3, pp. 333–54.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Worley, Matthew (2014), ‘“Hey little rich boy, take a look at me”: Punk, class and British Oi!’ Punk & Post-Punk, 3:1, pp. 5–20.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Infa Riot (1981), ‘Kids of the 80's’, Kids of the 80's, Vinyl, London: Secret Records.
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