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Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and "Nazi Rock" in England and Germany
- Journal of Social History
- George Mason University Press
- Volume 38, Number 1, Fall 2004
- pp. 157-178
- 10.1353/jsh.2004.0079
- Article
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This article takes a comparative and transnational approach to a key phenomenon of the late-20th century: the dovetailing of music-based youth subcultures with radical politics. First prominent in the "Counterculture" of the 1960s and 70s, the phenomenon has become increasingly salient with the rise of right- wing-extremist rock music and racist skinhead violence in Europe since the fall of Communism. Examining the evolution of the "skinhead" from a fusion of West Indian immigrant and white working class youth styles in 1960s England into a vehicle of right-wing extremism in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, the article combines history and theory in an exploration of how an originally-English subculture was transformed through its contact with German social, cultural and historical traditions.