Rude Boys, Rival Crews, and Boxcutter’s New Book

“A few thoughts.

1. Rude Boy has always been a counter-culture and not a subculture. Rude Boys in both Jamaica and in England were a scorned, distrusted class (as you correctly call out in regards to the music), but at a certain point, being a rude youth became a badge of courage / defiance, a culture of resistance onto itself. That’s when you start to see ‘Rudie don’t fear’ and other pro-rude, proud rude tunes. And by the time Rhygin comes along, it’s a legitimate mentality.

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Skinheads of Chicago (SHOC): an interview with Corky ‘Boxcutter’

There are some varieties of skinhead that we prefer to others – but overall, we enjoy the culture’s different facets. We appreciate how aspects of skinhead change over time and vary from country to country, reflecting their environment while still retaining that basic essence that is hard to pin down. We also like the fact that such a broad range of different music styles has somehow become associated with skinhead over the years.

And we like that the skinhead world can be as surprising and contradictory as life itself. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a bunch of skins to head to the Nation of Islam headquarters to watch Public Enemy (the hip-hop one) – especially if some of them were white and Jewish. But that’s just one of the things that Corky’s mates got up to back in the 80s.

Corky is bit of a legendary character from the Chicago scene. Back in the day, he ran with SHOC (Skinheads of Chicago), a multi-ethnic crew that stood on the opposite side of Christian Picciolini’s nazi skins, CASH (Chicago Area Skinheads – we interviewed Christian about them here)
. Our own Girth first came across Corky on Instagram under @BoxcutterBrigade, where he documents his memories of characters with photos and interesting stories – and he decided to interview the bloke.

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