Letter: ‘Skinhead’ bands without skinheads

A reader’s letter has reached us last week:

“Hey guys, first of all: I love your blog! Keep up the good work!

I got a question: there are quite some bands out there mocking the skinhead subculture, some bands do it with style like Hard Skin, but some are quite annoying like Oidorno. But there’s this new phenomenon coming from the hardcore scene with bands like “Conservative Military Image” and “Skinhead” (!) with not one single skinhead in the band but they make it their whole topic. Me and some friends are left in the dark about this. So I decided to ask your opinion about this, since you are the last defenders of the cult!”

Our reply:

While we’re no experts on the US, it seems to us there’s always been variants of ‘skinhead’ populating the American scene that didn’t have a great deal to do with what the term means to Brits or Europeans.

Hardcore punk gigs around Los Angeles had ‘skinheads’ slam-dancing and fighting as early as 1979-80 (see The Decline of Western Civilisation Part 1), and this kind of leather-jacket or flannel-shirt sporting ‘skinhead’ with army boots remained a fixture on the hardcore scene through the 80s. Clearly, these types were just punks who wanted to be seen as ‘tough’ rather than ‘freaks’. What did they have to do with skinhead? Very little, even if they were often referred to as that.

Of course, all sorts of other skins appeared in the US in the course of the 80s, including very traditional, UK-fixated ones as well as Oi types. And then you had the whole NYHC scene, which was somewhere between the two poles: very American, very different to the UK blueprint, but with authentic links and knowledge through people like Harley Flanagan, who had encountered the UK scene first-hand in the very early 80s.

Where does Conservative Military Image fit in? Hard to say. Our own Girth/Gareth, who has been double-dealing with American Oi!, did an interview with Adam of CMI for that website.

Adam doesn’t seem to be a skinhead at all, but the word ‘skinhead’ appears in almost every record title. He says what he’s doing is “punk” and “poking the hornet’s nest” – hence also the band name.

So what are CMI – just punks/hipsters trying to be edgy? Hardcore types genuinely trying to “bridge the skinhead scene and hardcore scene closer together”, as he also states in the interview?

We don’t have an answer. Over to you.

PS – We know nothing about that other band actually named Skinhead, except that they seem to be wearing shorts on stage… yeuch.