Let’s face it. Punk rock was never for the kids, the streets, or the masses. It was, on both sides of the pond, largely a movement of middle class art students, their hangers on, and elitist rock fans. Which is not to say that it didn’t yield a great deal of quality rock and roll. Bands like The Ramones, Generation X, The Clash, and even the much-maligned Sex Pistols make great rock music for discerning rock fans that holds up really well thirty years later. But down on the streets, the kids, as usual, knew what was what. As punk drifted further and further into art school wankery and glam rock pretensions, there were two reactions. In America, it took the form of hardcore, a style of punk rock where melody and song structure took a back seat to energy, anger, and simplicity. In Britain, the yobs retook punk rock and remade in their own image as Oi!, a style which fused American hardcore’s emphasis on energy uber alles with touches of the football sing along, and that most British style of rock and roll, pub rock.

The forefathers of Oi! are indisputably Sham 69. Reviled by the British rock press for being yobs, for their working class (as opposed to art school) fan base, and for being rougher than anything else in the scene at the time, Sham instantly stood apart from their contemporaries. Later Oi! band Cockney Rejects laid this division out most simply with their lyric “I like punk / And I like Sham.” While Sham 69 were very much a part of the first wave of punk rock, they also clearly stood outside of it. They were the first band to integrate the football singalong with rough, heavy punk rock. Lead vocalist Jimmy Pursey doesn’t so much sing so much as he shouts into the microphone with all the restraint of The Clash’s tour bus crashing into a concrete embankment on the M1. Their fan base dried up significantly when Sham came out explicitly against the National Front,  British nationalism, and other forms of Anglo-fascism. For that, BSG gives them a huge thumbs up.

The aforementioned Cockney Rejects were one of the first bands to pick up the torch laid down by Sham. I might make some enemies here, but for me, the Rejects are better than Sham and possibly the winners of “Best in Genre.” While Sham’s lyrics were vaguely political and amorphously populist, the Rejects focused almost exclusively on working class life both quotidian and grand. Football hooliganism, street fighting, and being broke as fuck cover about 99% of the Rejects oeuvre. They were often unfairly maligned as having a following in the British Movement (which they mockingly called the “German Movement”) despite physically confronting fascists with fans early on and praising many Black boxers as personal heroes. And let’s not forget their music which took Sham’s screaming yobbo punk to new levels of artistic sophistication… such as it is.

There was one Oi! band that basically went on to become what Oi! originally set out to despise. While Blitz wrote what is arguably the definitive Oi! anthem with “Someone’s Gonna Die Tonight.” The song evokes just about every musical trope of the genre from the riffs to the lyrics to the “Oi! Oi! Oi!” chant at the chorus. It wasn’t long until they degenerated into sounding like a crappy Wire / New Order tribute band. No matter. Their anthemic “Someone’s Gonna Die” is so good that I’m reproducing it here as one of those shitty still photo + song = YouTube video. It sounds a bit like a film composer tried to make a song for a football firm street fight scene.

If Blitz were the band that moved forward into everything that sucked about punk after 1978, Cock Sparrer are the band who took it all back- way back, to about 1973. For every two Cock Sparrer fans you find, there’s going to be at least one who will instantly object “Cock Sparrer aren’t Oi! Cock Sparrer are a pub rock band!” In a sense, this is true. Cock Sparrer were definitely a band out of time. They were an original ‘77 band who, as legend has it, refused to be signed by Malcolm McLaren because he refused to buy them a round of beers. Breaking up after little interest, Cock Sparrer reformed in the early 80s after their songs began appearing on several Oi! compilations. Decide for yourself what they after after you hear this classic track. But no matter what you decide, there’s no disputing that Cock Sparrer are just a kick ass street rock and roll band.

Another band that were a bit of a throwback were The 4-Skins. It wasn’t that there sound was rooted somewhere in the past. Indeed, they sound as 1980 as anything else in the Oi! movement. But The 4-Skins were founded by the man who more than any other can be credited with a revival of the skinhead cult. “Hoxton” Tom McCourt was the consummate gentleman thug. The music isn’t anything terribly spectacular, but it does read (hear?) as what you would play for aliens who just landed and were desperate to know what Oi! sounded like. They reunited, but “Hoxton” Tom would have none of it, saying simply that the band was about youth. Much of the energy and power of the movement is captured below.

Finally, we have a band that was never terribly good, but I feel the need to plug for a hot minute mostly because I like their (incredibly vague) politics. I can’t bring myself to like Angelic Upstarts no matter how hard I try. That said, I like that there was an Oi! band who were not merely vaguely anti-fascist, but militantly so, and socialist (sort of) to boot. A lot of people like them… as I’ve said, I can’t get into them no matter how hard I try. But I do like the following song, mostly because it’s a bit silly, but also because if the Afghan rebels in question had won the war there wouldn’t be the mess in Afghanistan that there is today. They don’t play this song anymore, unfortunately.

Oi! is far from my favorite kind of music. I am only into a handful of bands enough to allow them precious limited space on my iPod. But as a cultural phenomenon I feel that it’s worthy of attention. Particularly when put in contrast to the moronic punk pathetique movement which celebrated everything puerile about the original punk movement and was reaching the top of the English pop charts around the same time the aforementioned bands were banging out folk-punk anthems to the brutal realities of working class life. You certainly weren’t going to find too many assholes dressed like the cast of A Clockwork Orange at an Oi! show, or anyone engaged in the ridiculous peacocking of street punk. If Britain ever had a punk movement by and for the mythical kids, it was Oi!

Oh, and the first Skrewdriver record sucks. Stop pretending it doesn’t.