CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK by Stewart Home

CHAPTER VII: BACK STREET KIDS
Oi! and the unfolding of the Punk Rock dialectic

By 1980, it was obvious to music journalist Gary Bushell that because Oi! did not yet exist, it was necessary to invent it. To qualitatively transform Punk Rock, bands such as Sham 69, Menace and the Cockney Rejects had quantitatively increased the level of rhetoric about being working class until they brought about a major mutation within the subgenre. When Sham 69 sang 'I don't need no flash car to get me around / I can take the bus to the other side of town' in Hey Little Rich Boy, they were aiming at an even lower common denominator than the Clash on the potentially incendiary White Riot. If the arrival of late seventies ideological Punk Rock had been announced by a Star in the West (despite rehearsing in North London, the Clash promoted their music as the 'sound of the Westway' and their first album featured a picture of rioting in Notting Hill Gate), then the resurrection of this subgenre as Oi! took place in the proletarian East (End).

It should go without saying that as a subgenre of ideological Punk Rock, Oi! has no fixed point of origin. Many bands now considered a part of the Oi! canon were recording long before the term had been invented. Oi! The Album features a number of bands who, at least initially, were known as New Punk, for example the Cockney Rejects, Peter And The Test Tube Babies and the Exploited. Other bands included on this sampler, for instance the Angelic Upstarts and Slaughter And The Dogs, are difficult to reconcile with the Oi! label because their initial success dates from the British PUNK ROCK explosion of the late seventies which preceded the New Punk phenomena, and the latter band simply don't sound rough enough to merit the 'street rock' description. Likewise, another Oi! favourite, Cock Sparrer, are hard to fit into any notion of PUNK ROCK whatsoever, their arrangements and playing are too articulate and too close to mainstream rock to sit easily within the genre. It was their lyrics and image that retrospectively earned them the PUNK ROCK and Oi! labels.

Obviously, the genesis of any genre or subgenre is going to be confused. Different things are thrown together in an attempt to create a fresh cultural formation but much of what is initially associated with the new term is abandoned as the canon evolves over time and simultaneously sinks its roots deeper and deeper into the past. While there were various 'revival' movements in the wake of the British PUNK ROCK explosion of the late seventies, the majority of these failed to bear fruit of any significance because they were unable to bring together elements that, at least initially, appeared to be fantastically antagonistic towards each other. The Mod revival, for instance, produced a handful of great records, the output of the Purple Hearts immediately springs to mind, but since it simply went back to the influence of the Who and Small Faces on late seventies PUNK ROCK and added a bit of amphetamine frenzy to that sound, it was incapable of producing anything of great novelty. There was more mileage in the ska revival which combined the musical muscle of the 'new wave' explosion with Jamaican sounds of the mid-sixties, but since there had already been much talk of a PUNK/reggae crossover, the results were not as surprising as they might otherwise have appeared.

The original skinhead movement had not produced a music of its own, although it was happy to dance to Tamla Motown and early reggae. Thus the combination of skinhead fashion and PUNK music was at first quite a novelty, although it was natural enough that those ideological Punks who were looking for a sartorial rhetoric to emphasise their theatrical immersion in the working class would gravitate towards this look, which was perceived as being uncorrupted by 'middle class' influences. I do not wish to suggest here that there were no middle class skinheads. Even if they happened to be downwardly mobile, a small percentage of boot boys enjoyed privileged upbringings. Although, at least until recently in the UK, the bulk of youths adhering to the cult have come from working and lower middle class backgrounds, there are notable exceptions. For example, 'Nazi Chris Henderson', singer with the band Combat 84, admittedly more of a bonehead than a skinhead, was educated at the exclusive Charterhouse school.

The only skinhead band to make it from Oi! The Album onto the follow up Strength Thru Oi! were the 4 Skins. Both of this band's contributions to the first Oi! album are certified rhetorical Punk Rock classics, Wonderful World was typically sarcastic, while Chaos featured the deadpan delivery of lyrics such as 'people that we don't beat up we're gonna fucking shoot.' The band's contributions to Strength Thru Oi! were 1984 and Sorry which are good but not brilliant. Nevertheless, the group quickly established their output as central to the Oi! genre. Their cynical 'street' humour is evident in both the name 4 Skins, not the most subtle of puns, and the words to songs like Clockwork Skinhead:

"Wearing braces and red, white and blue / Doing what he thinks he ought to do / Used to be a punk and a Mod too / But it's just a phase he's going through / He's a clockwork Skinhead / Just a clockwork Skinhead / Clockwork Skinhead / Got no choice / Clockwork Skinhead / Just a clockwork Skinhead / Clockwork Skinhead / One of the boys / Take him in a pub buy him a beer / Tell him what he wants to hear / Wind him up like a clockwork toy / Wants to be a man but he's just a boy / He's a clockwork Skinhead... Believes everything the papers say / What's he gonna be today / What is it, it to be / Will he be himself or will he copy me? / He's a clockwork Skinhead..."

The other notable contributors to Strength Thru Oi! are the Last Resort, with the tracks Working Class Kids and Johnny Barden. The latter song is about a friend of the band banged up for killing a bloke who offered him a place to stay and then wanted to have sex with the kid. The lyrics are uncharacteristically coy, avoiding the obvious rhyme in the chorus when the group sing 'Killed his fear / When he killed the man.' Obviously sensitive to the possibility that they might be accused of being 'right-wing', the band also changed the title of one of their songs from Stormtroopers In Sta-Press to the tautologically more satisfying Skinheads In Sta-Press. Lyrically, the group are heard to best effect on numbers such as Soul Boys:

"Out they go wearing baggy slacks / Shiny shoes, flasher Macs / The way they dance makes me sick / They don't half look like a bunch of pricks / Soul Boys with Hawaiian shirts / On the lookout for teenage flirts / Did you get it? / Did you score? / Did you fuck the little whore? / I don't care, no not a bit / I don't give a fucking shit / About you... Soul Boys are a bunch of cunts / They're just a load of fucking runts / They can't fight, they can't scrap / All they do is run, run, run, run / Soul Boys in Hawaiian shirts... with pointy shoes and purple hair / Go to a disco stand and stare / When you get there you stand and pose / What you need is a punch on the nose..."

If I have quoted these lyrics at length it is precisely because this is necessary to illustrate the nature of Oi!'s street level posturing. In qualitatively transforming Punk Rock by quantitatively increasing the amount of self-conscious rhetoric based on socially constructed notions of what it is to be working class, Oi! bands were protecting their music from arty farty trendies such as Groovy Greil Marcus, who might otherwise have attempted to appropriate and deform it as something that could be incorporated into high cultural discourse. Of course, the fact that Marcus is repelled by Oi! is simply a mark of his lack of intellectual sophistication, since its very theatricality and deliberately crude articulation make this particular subgenre an easy target for any individual who has mastered the necessary codes and wishes to present themselves as operating at the cutting edge of 'serious culture'. Oi!'s transgressive qualities, particularly its alleged 'sexism' and 'nationalism', are its sole protection against such a calamity. These qualities are seen as being in very poor 'taste' by those 'middle class' bureaucrats who are very adept at fucking people over but dislike social antagonisms interfering with their oppressive administrative practices.

However, to move from this to the conclusion that all Oi! is 'right-wing' or even 'fascist' is absurd, as I will show by examining the output of two 'leftist' Oi! groups, the Oppressed and the Blaggers. We can in any case be certain that 'street rock' is not in fact 'Nazi' because the overt use of racism within the Punk Rock discourse marks the transformation of Oi! into so called 'white power rock and roll', a later stage in the dialectical unfolding of the discourse. Returning to the subject at hand, the Blaggers are not a typical Oi! band and only their early recordings can be placed within the genre. The group went on to integrate PUNK, rap and ska, using lots of samples to create a sound that enticed major label EMI to sign them up, although they were later dropped. The Blag (fun) side of their first album On Yer Toez, features standard Oi! lyrics such as 'Gonna go crazy if I don't go insane' and 'War on the terraces / Blood on the streets today.' The titles on the Serious side of the platter speak for themselves, Jail House Doors, Freedom Fighters, Britain's Dream, Ireland, Greetings From Ireland, Save Your Hate and House Of The Fascist Scum. The subject matter of these songs is too specific to fit in with the political rhetoric of Oi!, the Blaggers' ideological commitments are equally clear on Victory To The ANC or It's Up To You:

"Down in a city where a ghetto thrives / A concrete jungle where fear multiples / Anger, frustration, are everywhere / Shotgun eyes blast a deadly glare / Time is now, they're coming for you / Time is now, it's up to you / It's up to you / Racist sadists in uniform / Think they can take the city by storm / The thin blue line wanna storm the streets / But the kids from the ghetto won't face defeat."

The Oppressed's first long player Oi! Oi! Music, a classic of this subgenre, is one of the best skinhead records ever made. However, avoid their 1994 comeback album We Can Do Anything, which features nothing but PUNK and Oi! covers, because it's a real turkey. The band's sound is raw and crude but Oi! Oi! Music features one unlikely innovation, the use of electronic drums. Now don't fret, because the songs are dumbcore classics with archetypal Oi! lyrics, as is evident from the group's theme song We're The Oppressed:

"Born to fight / Born to win / We were all born to be Skins / Born with Martens on our feet / Face the truth there's no retreat / People fear us / Think we're strange / Boots and braces we won't change / We will never be second best / You know us we're the Oppressed / We are Skinheads / We are proud / Playing music for the crowd / Music for the working class / Stick your disco up your arse..."

A handful of subjects recur in Oi! lyrics. These are violence, drinking, police oppression and references to skinhead fashions. The lyrical concerns of a band like the Oppressed are so minimal that they make the Ramones look like Genesis. Another typical song is Urban Soldiers:

"Urban soldiers back out on the street / Kids in braces with their hair cropped neat / You don't know them but you know their name, Boot Boys, Suedeheads, they're all the same / Urban soldiers on the street / Urban soldiers kids you meet / Urban soldiers they don't run / Urban soldiers got no one / Coz they're Skinheads... up the town for a drink on Friday night / They'll be ready if you start a fight / They're the new breed and they get stuck in / Urban soldiers they're gonna win..."

What lets the listener know this band is left-wing, or at least anti-racist, is the fact that they cover the old reggae standard Skinhead Girl, although they do PUNK it up. Oppressed singer Roddy Moreno is hated by Nazi boneheads because he set up the British branch of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. However, beyond his stand against racism, there is little to differentiate Moreno's political outlook from that of the bonehead bands since the ideology of both camps is largely rhetorical. Certainly, lyrics such as 'Magistrate, magistrate, you're the cunt we all hate' and 'The Tory party's got no soul / Three and a half million on the dole / Maggie's boys don't give a damn / About the plight of the working man,' are pretty standard skinhead fare. The same is true of any of the Oppressed's songs, I'll give Joe Hawkins as a final example:

"See him walking down the street / Doctor martens on his feet / Levi jeans, Ben Sherman shirt / Fuck with him and you'll get hurt / He's a Skinhead he don't care / Marten boots and short cropped hair / He's a Skinhead he don't care about you / Walking down on Brighton pier / Long haired hippies go in fear / Crunch of bone as the boot goes in / Joe's so proud to be a Skin... He isn't gonna change his ways / Skinhead's back it's here to stay / So if you think you've got the suss / Be a Skinhead be like us..."

Now there can be little doubt that Roddy Moreno is basically a nice bloke who did everything he could to stamp out sectarianism and racism on the skinhead scene. He sank some insurance money from a motor accident into the Oi! Records label, which issued product by everyone from the self-consciously left-wing Blaggers to bonehead band Condemned 84. The latter group's mini-album Battle Scarred, put out by Moreno, boasted such Oi! classics as Skinhead, featuring the following words:

"We wear our boots with pride and laces / Combat greens held up by braces / We've got our hair in a number one crop / We'll kick you in the head until you drop / We're on the streets looking for a fight / We're down the pub every night / We hate the Soulies, Mods and Teds / All we like is kicking heads / Skinheads, Skinheads, running in the night / Skinheads doing everyone in sight / We're all Skinheads through and through / We're all Skinheads who the fuck are you? / The Union Jack is our flag / And when we wear it / It makes us proud / And when the commies slag us down / We kick them all to the ground..."

The other standout track on Battle Scarred, both musically and lyrically, was Teenage Slag:

"If you pick on a nice young virgin / Will she be the best of the bunch? / Coz after you've laid her a few times / She'll like it ever so much / And then when you try some other position / She'll think it's so obscene / But she'll soon find out how good it is / And she'll still feel pure and clean / And she'll end up driving you mad / Probably end up with your dad / She's a teenage slag / After she's had a good time / She'll probably pass you by / And then all your mates and everybody / In the street will have a try / Passing round all the pubs / Get as many as she can / And when she's been round them all once / She'll go back round again..."

Klaus Theweleit makes the following observation about Friekorps literature in Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, floods, bodies, history (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1987) but it applies equally well to the song Teenage Slag:

"The description of the proletarian woman as a monster, as a beast, that unfortunately cannot be dealt with merely by 'planting a fist' in its 'ugly puss,' hardly derives from the actual behaviour of women in situations such as those described above (even here, they are hardly let off lightly). Rather, it can be traced to an attempt to construct a fantastic being who swears, shrieks, spits, scratches, farts, bites, pounces, tears to shreds; who is slovenly, wind-whipped, hissing-red, indecent; who whores around, slaps its naked thighs, and can't get enough of laughing at these men. In response to some secret need, this monster is identified with the proletarian woman..."

Other Condemned 84 songs include Gang Warfare, Keep The Faith, Face The Aggression, Strength To Strength, The Nutter, Oi! Ain't Dead, We Will Never Die, The Boots Go Marching In, Kick Down The Doors, Our Time Will Come, Warriors With Pride, In The Gutter, All Out Attack and Pride And The Pain. It seems, at times, as if the band are obsessively driven to assert their masculinity because this is the only way in which they are able to reinforce the extremely vague boundaries that mark off their bodies, gender, identity, sexuality. Since Condemned 84 were boneheads rather than skinheads, it was no great surprise when they completely abandoned the Oi! subgenre and adopted a heavy metal musical style on their 1992 album Storming To Power. Heavy metal, in terms of appearance at least, is more self-consciously 'white' and 'male' than the PUNK ROCK genre, which carries within it a provocative ambiguity, as we shall see as we examine its four stage unfolding.

A band whose musical 'development/degeneration' followed a remarkably similar pattern to that of Condemned 84 is Close Shave. While neither band used racist lyrics on vinyl, both favoured a rhetorical nationalism and Close Shave were even willing to play on the same bill as openly Nazi bands; in the past they have gigged with Skrewdriver. Nevertheless, the comic book approach on songs such as Sunday Sport make early Close Shave recordings typical Oi! fodder:

"Sex and scandal all the way / It's the paper for you on a Sunday / All the slags and the old bags / Showing their tits in the Sunday rag / Maria Whitaker bearing her all / Great big tits of Tina Small / Well these girls they can't be real / I for one wouldn't mind a feel, Oi! / Sunday Sport, it's the Sunday Sport / Don't get caught with the Sunday Sport / Girls with big tits on the cover / Don't you show it to your mother / Buy the paper every Sunday morn / In the paper rack amongst the porn / Centre spread goes straight to my head / I wanna get them into my bed / There's the letters from the readers wives / Telling the stories of their kinky lives / The agony aunt is Fiona Wright / She knows what to do in the night, alright!"

If the group's first long player Oi! Kinnock Give Us Back Our Rose! sounded musically incompetent and was very poorly produced, it nevertheless worked within the context of the PUNK ROCK genre, whose devotees are predisposed to considering raw and absurdly premature recordings to be not only highly desirable, but a mark of ideological distinction. By the time they recorded their second album, Hard As Nails, Close Shave sounded like a competent rock band, although the lyrics remained absurdly infantile:

"It would solve a lot of problems / If death was enforced here / It would put the shit up murders, rapists and the queers / If death was made the sentence / Then sex crimes they may drop / The pervert would be no more / And that would be no loss / Death row, death row / Just four walls nowhere to go / Waiting for the day that you meet your maker / You're in a cell on death row / An alternative to prison at the rate-payers loss / A noose around the neck or an electric shock / What gives a man a right to live / If he takes another's life? / He's killed once, he'll kill again / So lets end this bastard's life... Standing in a court room the verdict it is death / He killed an innocent person / Put a cord around his neck / It happens all the time on American city streets / Murders, rapes and muggings / Keep Britain free from this..."

Oi! is sometimes called street rock by those immersed in the discourse, but despite the rhetoric about knowing the 'reality' of living on council estates surrounded by the constant threat of violence and crime, in songs such as Red Light Girl, Close Shave leave the casual listener with the impression that they subsist in a cotton wool world:

"Staring at the punters in their cars / Blowing them a kiss and flashing your arse / Giving them an address so you can meet / In a dark house on a lonely street / Straining in your wig in a looking glass / Ready for a dildo up your arse / Bloke comes in and he looks so tough / Says he wants you to play it rough / Red light girl you're living a lie / Wrecking the lives of your husbands and wives / Red light girl I want you to know / Using your body while you're breaking the law / Social security you could get by / You could get a job if you really tried / No need to use your body for a job / Go out cheating for the working slobs / Black shiny leather bondage stripes and whips / Pick the wrong bloke and you've had your chips / Going to the men do you like what you see? / Do you get nicked by the CID?"

The term do-gooder is usually applied to liberals but in an equally derogatory fashion it makes perfect sense to affix it to Close Shave. The band's absurd rhetorical defence of family values is so completely entangled with their repressed fantasies and fears they often end up celebrating the very things that they imagine they are against. There is a great deal of unconscious humour here and one is not laughing with the band, but at them. By the time of their third long player, Lone Riders, Close Shave had abandoned the Oi! subgenre for heavy metal and were singing about Alfred The Great and Insomnia. No doubt the singer spent a great many sleepless nights pondering the strange desires he felt towards other men. The group had already thanked 'a self-confessed gay' for his help and support on a previous album.

One band that didn't degenerate into a heavy metal outfit was Combat 84. This was partly because only the singer, 'Nazi Chris Henderson', was an extremely sad bastard, but also thanks to the fact that they broke up during the recording of their first album. The band appeared on a TV documentary with upper class windbag 'Nazi Chris' doing a ham impersonation of a racist 'yob', while the guitarist was very articulate in expressing his anti-racist beliefs. After the programme was broadcast, venues cancelled gigs and Combat 84 were forced to call it a day. The group's music was brickwall Oi! and their theme song, a classic example of the subgenre, runs as follows:

"Ten hole DMs on your feet / Well polished and looking neat / Paramilitary is the score / We're the band Combat 84 / Come on you Skinheads / No-one's safe when we walk by / That's why we won't fade and die / Short hair and braces hanging down / There'll always be a Skinhead in town / That's why we rule the street / That's why we've gotta be discreet... Skinheads will never die!"

It should go without saying that Combat 84 wrote and performed a song called Skinhead:

"We will never fade and die / Whatever you try to do / We're the first of today / And the last of tomorrow / Skinhead's not a fashion / It's a way of life / Skinhead, Skinhead never give up / Stick together and act as one / You never never never give up / You stick together and act as one / You see us on the telly / You read about us in the news / We will never fade and die / Whatever you try to do..."

While there was nothing deliberately offensive about this or several other songs, 'Nazi Chris' hoped to wind people up with ditties such as Right To Choose:

"Fuck off CND / The end of the world is coming in too / We are ready to fight - are you? / When you're on your knees with a gun to your head / It's better to be dead than fucking red / We have the right, the right to choose / We want defence and we want the Cruise / They gave their lives and they bled / Remember the Falklands don't forget our dead / The right to choose, we want the Cruise / The right to choose, we want the Cruise / Bigger and better bombs!"

However, rather than winding up lefties, 'Nazi Chris' pissed off his mates on the far-Right. Rumour provides us with one of the best thick bonehead stories of all time and it doesn't really matter whether or not it's literally true because despite his exclusive Charterhouse education, the Combat 84 singer doesn't have two brain cells to rub together. The band put Right To Choose out on their own Victory label and 'Nazi Chris' took it along to the National Front's White Noise Club to see if this outfit would distribute it. The record was given the thumbs down because the NF opposed what they described as 'American imperialism', believing that 'foreign' Cruise missiles should be removed from Britain's shores and replaced with our own 'independent' nuclear deterrent! In fact, British and American military operations are so entangled that this position was as absurd as the rest of the National Front's pathetic programme.

Henderson had really screwed up because the fascist White Noise Club doubtlessly loved Rapist, the A-side of this maxi-single:

"He's a dirty and evil man / Who no one wants to know / He could be living in your town / Coz the sign of the rapist doesn't show / Young girls come to me / Stalking victims in the street / When it happens no one sees / You're just dragged down off your feet / Capital punishment / Stronger government / Plastic mask and hairy wig / You're too scared to show your face / You're acting like a dirty pig / You're a cancer of the human race / Filth of society should all die / We need a stronger government / All you've gotta do is hang 'em high / Bring back capital punishment / Capital punishment / A stronger government / We need a stronger government / Bring back capital punishment... Hang 'em, hang 'em, hang 'em high / You watch those fucking bastards die... Capital punishment / Stronger government!"

Although Henderson gave up music to concentrate on being an amateur football hooligan and full time idiot, it comes as no surprise to learn that the group's second drummer went on to join heavy metal outfit April 19th. Another Oi! idol who attempted to pursue a career on the HM scene was Millwall Roi Pearce, formerly of the Last Resort and the 4 Skins. The Last Resort had specialised in cod nationalism and their song Red, White And Blue was a masterpiece of rhetorical underkill:

"England, England is my land / It's the only place I understand / From Carlisle down to the Dover Straits / Our forefathers made us great / All that's true is the red, the white and blue / You took us in Europe it wasn't our choice / We the people must have our voice / No other flag will hold us back / Because our flag's the Union Jack / All that's true is the red, the white and blue / Call us hooligans, call us yobs / In the war its us that do the job / No other country will make us slaves / Britannia will rule the waves / All that's true is the red, the white and blue."

Now it doesn't take a 'genius' to work out that by using Carlisle and Dover as marker points in the lyric, Pearce is demarcating England. Logically the blue of Scotland should be excluded from the lyric but then 'all that's true is the red and the white' wouldn't scan and lacks emotive impact. When the Last Resort broke up after recording their first album, Pearce became the last singer to handle vocals for the 4 Skins. At the end of the eighties he put together a new band called the Resort and on a tune entitled Rock 'N' Roll declared: 'Back street heroes are dead and gone / We have no intention of the same old song / We was caught up in political rows / Now we're in control it's rock 'n' roll now.' The Resorts' 1989 album is an attempt at making mainstream rock and doesn't belong within the Oi! subgenre, the group didn't last long in any case.

In 1992, Pearce made another stab at a musical career with the Heavy Metal Outlaws who released two maxi-singles before folding. The first of these bore the title Sex For Sexism's Sake and featured the classic Get Your Tits Out:

"Ever since I was eight years old / I was a fan of the centrefold / Girl's good looking, she's got class / Stick my cock right up her arse / Me mate's doing time or so I heard / So I'm going round there to shag his bird / Don't like oral makes her sick / Never mind slag get on my dick / Come on the heat I'm a sex machine / I'm a really going down like a submarine / Girl next door she just don't care / Gonna get buried in her pubic hair / She's got long legs and wears pink socks / I've had my tongue right up her box / I know some nice wenches, some pretty maids / You gotta be careful you don't catch AIDS / Get them home and back to their place / Get them upstairs and come in their face... Bend me, break me, any way you take me / All you've gotta do is masturbate me!"

This was an attempt to cross rap, heavy metal and PUNK, with 'sexism' being the ideological point at which they were all supposed to meet. Of course, as a consumer come on it failed miserably, although it did at least prove that not every 'patriotic' bonehead is destined to turn into a racist bore. It is nevertheless unfortunate that most Oi! 'musicians' who failed to introduce elements of ska into their sound ended up embracing some form of grease, that old enemy of the original hard mods who mutated into skinheads back in the sixties.

Anyone who (mis)reads this text as containing an account of skinheadism will already have a very lopsided view of that particular subculture. In these pages I am dealing with PUNK ROCK as a musical genre, of which Oi! is just one strand. It should be equally obvious from what I've written that Oi! is simply one element in a broad spectrum of skinhead musical tastes, which also embrace ska and soul. Since Oi! is particularly attractive to boneheads, who are neither boot boys nor grease but a cross between the two, this particular musical subgenre is very unrepresentative of skinhead culture in general and inferences about the latter cannot be drawn from the former. It should not need restating that Oi! became the standard form of 'ideological' Punk Rock during one phase of its dialectical unfolding. And having qualitatively transformed Punk Rock by quantitatively increasing the level of 'proletarian' rhetoric in and around the genre, Oi! was overwhelmed by something else altogether, as its emphasis on a 'working class' identity became increasingly 'racial' in nature...

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