Who wins?

It was originally for "Sweden, Heaven and Hell" an Italian documentary about alternative sex practices in Sweden. How it became a Muppet thing is beyond me.

!field-baseball !fidel-bat !baseball-crank

Feature Song: Take The Skinheads Bowling by Camper Van Beethoven (February, 1985/IRS Records/Davis, CA)

[Disclaimer: This entry features no links to music, as the bands I'm talking about are hateful. Also, you do not, under any circumstances, have to take any skinheads bowling]

Before Hardcore Havens can cross the Atlantic, I need to address some stuff I glossed over earlier.

The first wave of Skinhead culture sprung up in the UK toward the end of the 60’s, when Jamaican Rude Boys met English Mods. Rude Boys and Mods got on famously, sharing a flare for sharp suits, danceable upbeat music, and cannabis. However, being a Mod was prohibitively expensive. After all, you had to be able to pay for those sharp suits and scooters and stimulants. Plus, Mods tended to have shaggy, long-ish hair, which would have been a safety hazard if you worked an industrial job. So what was a working class Mod to do? Well, they opted for a more practical look, wearing straight cut jeans and work boots but with a nice button-down or polo shirt. If you could afford a sharp suit, you only had one, and you mostly wore it to the dance hall, where you danced to Ska, Soul, and R&B. As for a hairstyle, the Rude Boys often sported a shaven head, which required far less maintenance than the standard Mod haircuts. Working class Mods adopted that look, along with the trilbys and pork pie hats that were common among Rude Boys. The schism between these working class “Hard” Mods and the largely middle-class “Smooth” Mods became apparent in 1966 and by 1968 “Hard” Mods were largely known as Skinheads. The look wasn’t associated with racism (not yet, at least) but they did get lumped in with the alleged violence going on between Mods and Rockers earlier in the 60s. However, as the ages rolled forward into the 70s, Mods and Rockers faded into memory as Psychedelic, Glam, Progressive rock, and other forms and genres came to the forefront. The Skinhead look, however, was incredibly practical, and so it stuck around, migrating to the North. And then it got racist.

Football was among the many vectors that brought the Skinhead subculture out of London and into the North. Skinheads from the South would go see their favorite teams play against teams from the North, where they would encounter non-Skin rival fans. Due to the rowdy nature of English football fans, this often lead to brawls. This was happening around the same time as Enoch Powell gave the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, railing against immigration and emboldening white supremacists up and down the nation. White supremacists mobs formed for the purposes of “[Slur] Bashing,” wherein they go about harassing or assaulting minorities, mainly South Asian ones. They also weren’t as fond of their former Caribbean allies, as Ska had evolved into Reggae, with its Rastafarian and Pan-African themes making it less accessible for white westerners. Tabloid papers ran many stories about white supremacist violence against immigrant communities, always referring to the white aggressors as “Skinheads.”

This inspired hack pulp writer James Moffat to cobble together a Clockwork Orange knockoff about a young man who does similar things to Alex, except it took place in then-contemporary England. The protagonist of the novel, 16-year old Joe Hawkins, is fond of beer, football, sex, and violence, especially violence directed towards racial minorities. Far from the white dress clothes and black bowler hats sported by Alex and his Droogs, Joe Hawkins et al sport a then-modern Skinhead look. To that end, Moffat titled the novel “Skinhead” and published it under the alias Richard Allen. The book’s lurid plot led to much tabloid coverage, as moral guardians railed against the depictions of sex and violence. However, this did more to move copies than Moffat ever could. Just like American white supremacists took after the fictionalized version of the KKK presented in Birth of A Nation, British white supremacists took after the (arguably) fictionalized version of Skinheads presented in Skinhead. In fact, Skinhead sold so well that Moffat wound up writing at least 5 sequels with titles like “Suedehead” and “Bootboys” and “Knuckle Girls,” all of them the same kind of sleazy, foul-mouthed, racist garbage as the first.

Remember the Bromley Contingent and how they took to wearing swastikas? Well these new Skinheads got excited about this new angry aggressive beer-drinking music, and when they saw the swastikas, they took it as an invitation. Punk also had a surprisingly robust network of underground publications in the form of ‘zine culture, which the Neo-Fascist Skinheads used to spread their filth. When Punk “died” in 1977 and began splintering into the myriad styles and sounds we call ‘New Wave,’ the Nazi Skinheads were among the most resistant to the change. They were there for the violence, not for dancing. To that end, they started bands like The Ventz and The Dentists, and peppered right-wing ideology into their songs. The arrival of White Supremacist Skinheads in the Punk scene eventually came to the attention of UK’s National Front, who attempted to capitalize by starting a youth outreach group called The Punk Front in 1978. When they shut down the program, less than a year later, Nazi Skinheads responded by launching Rock Against Communism. This new contingent would continue trying to recruit new members at Punk shows, where they ran into Anti-Racist Skinheads. Clashes between these two groups often turned into small riots, which threatened to tear the Punk and 2-Tone Ska scenes apart.

The Battle for British Hardcore had begun. But what did our side look like?

Who wins?

Who wins?

edit: No More Half-Measures! Forks win!

Who wins?

Awh yeah 2000 AD Drokkposting is back bay-beee!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/261026

> Featured song: Rumble by Link Wray and The Ray Men (March 31st, 1958/Cadence Records/New York, NY) > > I find myself commenting about punk history a lot in this place. Seems a lot of you have questions and misunderstandings about the genre. Thought I'd throw my hat into the "Post something every day" ring, but with an informative twist. Of the things I'm encyclopedic about, punk history might be the one thing I'll never run out of stuff to say about. > > To begin, I'd like to answer the most hotly debated question in punk rock: Who was first? There are a number of oft-cited answers but this one's mine. > > It's winter, early 1958, in Virginia. While trying to lay down a guitar-centric version of The Stroll by The Diamonds, Link Wray's amp makes a noise it's not supposed to. Might have been some faulty electrics, might have been some bizarre environmental variables. All we know is that nobody had ever heard distorted guitar like this before, and that the world just wasn't the same afterward. The resulting instrumental, originally called 'Oddball' becomes a crowd favorite, with audiences requesting it multiple times a night. It also becomes one of Link's favorites, because he gets to make that noise again. > > But it's never quite the same as that first time. Whatever the circumstances led to this early distorted guitar, they were too arcane for 1958 to fathom. Legend has it that Link destroyed a number of speaker cones trying to replicate the sound. Including the studio speaker he used to demonstrate the original sound to producer Archie Bleyer. Bleyer didn't like the song, didn't see the appeal. However, his stepdaughter was enamoured with it and convinced him that it should be released on Cadence Records. > > When you listen to the song, are you picturing a bunch of 50s teenagers squaring off for a fight in an alleyway? If not, why not? Also, what would you call those kids with the greasy hair and leather jackets rolling around in gangs? Would you call them punks, per chance? > > Phil Everly of The Everly Brothers noticed this too, and suggested the title Rumble because it sounded like a street fight. In fact, this imagery was so powerful that, to this day, Rumble remains the only instrumental to ever get banned from US airwaves. Despite being banned, it reached #11 on the R&B charts. > > Rumble is my pick for first punk rock track because it was the first to mix ideas about punks and ideas about rock. When The Ramones got together 16 years later, they based their look and feel on the street toughs that came to mind when people heard the song in '58. > > Further reasoning: > 1. "Punk is about being ugly." - Jehangir Tabari > > Sure, Michael Muhammad Knight isn't the guy to tell the story of punk and Islam, but he made a good point there. The whole point of Rumble is that an electric guitar wasn't supposed to sound like that. But Link went ahead with it anyway, because despite being "ugly" it was cool and slightly menacing. What's more punk than that? > > 2. They banned an instrumental! > > It's the hysteria surrounding rock music and juvenile delinquency in its barest form. Rumble was so in-your-face for the time that it got banned for indecency despite having no lyrics. It pissed off parents across the nation and what's more punk than that? > > Recommended Reading: > None (homework is for squares, anyway) > > Recommended Viewing: Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (2017) > > Tomorrow, Punk Goes West

Can't wait to see Ravnica get compleated.

"WATCH OUT GUILDLESS! THE PHYREXIANS ARE RIGHT BEHIND YOU! oh no they all have airpods in they cant hear us oh shit oh fuck"

Edit: Wait I just realized this means Krenko is at risk :kitty-cri-screm:

They coulda just called it England