From the great and depressing height of middle age i have witnessed the two subcultures that nurtured and nourished me, become assimilated and swallowed almost entirely, both cultures steadily sanitised and repackaged for consumption, to be bought and sold, to be controlled..the revolutionary zeal of that generation murdered in its bed and the tough working class terrace culture disappear with a corporate sweep of the hand and flourish of the cheque book. I see the misappropriation of Football culture in exactly the same way I see how hip hop culture was appropriated in the 90s.
After the Hillsborough disaster, while everyone was looking the other way, Sky stole the soul. We thought it was ours, but it wasn’t, it was bought and sold, repackaged and gentrified. They moved kick off times around and fucked around with it.
Hip Hop reached a nadir in around 1993, with Marxist groups like The Coup, and Dead Prez espousing political activism, building on the seditious sermons of Chuck D and his contemporaries, a new generation arrived moving beyond enraged rhetoric into organising and deciphering power structures. Within a year everyone was a gangster and the whole thing as seen on MTV and devoured en masse was posturing and alpha male nonsense.
My Genesis:
Hip Hop Culture from America and Football Culture over here are the two loves of my life and i’ve never separated them, as I’ve grown older I’ve lost touch with what new hip hop records are coming out granted, but in its golden era roughly 1987 to 1992 the extent to which Hip Hop informed my world view and aesthetic cannot be overestimated. The same can be said of the Football Culture that I felt, experienced and lived first hand as a young man.
I stood on those hallowed terraces with the old man and then with my mates, it was a rite of passage that has sadly gone forever. Who would have thought that a bit of concrete would come to mean so much? That terrace world of exclusive knowledge, when before the internet you had to pay attention, because asking someone where they got their jacket made you look a prick and a wannabe.
I would listen to Big Daddy Kane, Lord Finesse, Public Enemy, Schoolly D, Boogie Down Productions and loads more while reading the programme,Match magazine and writing out my fantasy Wrexham FC Xll nosing the back pages. What can I say, I’m diverse..seriously though,
these are the two things that have continued to nourish me throughout my adult life. Everything that Hip Hop Culture entails (The Four Elements) and Football Culture (Collecting, watching, talking about, writing about, travelling) have been a constant joy to me since I was a kid.
They explained the world to me in a way I understood. Nothing I heard in school told me about anything relevant to me, my early stirrings of political awareness were shaped by the terraces, and was left sided, elitist (as far as fashion was concerned) and Welsh (to this day i have never seen a Union Jack in the Cae ras)..
The Roots..
Both of these Cultures came from working class people, with energy, wit, creativity and a desire to make sense of themselves and their place in the world, and both very obviously frightened the life out of the powers that be…until they could gentrify it, sanitise it and sell it.
The first music I encountered that levelled everything was Hip Hop, it was a year zero for me and in many ways more political than punk. Where punk espoused a DIY ethos and certain bands were overtly political, on the whole it
seemed to me to be a lot of teen angst and posturing. Hip Hop stormed the barricades and stood its fucking ground. When I was 12 years old I was sat in my bedroom in a Welsh border village listening to ‘It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold us Back’. And i knew that the same establishment and infrastructures that separated black people from an understanding of their heritage and kept in ghetto’s , flooding those ghettos with crack just as seriously political hip hop was everywhere, were the same as the powers that black listed working class people here, ruined the miners, the unions, demonised Irish republicans and vilified Football fans.
Nothing would ever be the same.
The roots of Hip Hop Culture are deep within African American folklore ie drums and griots, the spoken word, the sound systems of Jamaica and the genesis being the austerity measures of New York municipalities and brutal disruption of long standing communities, this led directly to large areas of the Bronx being a hotbed of gang activity in the 60s/70s. A gang culture was the beginning of organisations that pulled together the strands of youth activity in the 70s and would become what we now refer to as Hip Hop Culture. The Zulu Nation were one ‘gang’ that adapted from street fighting to breaking (breakdancing)
and presided over the emergence and unification of the four elements. Graffiti writing, breakdancing, deejaying and rapping..all of these things appeared fully formed, full of wonder and gift wrapped on my lap in the late 80s on the Welsh borderlands via my older cousin Lee. I felt like it was made for me and the same applied to Football. We were proud Working Class Welsh boys obsessed with everything about Hip hop and we lived and breathed Footy.
I was born in 1975 so by 1986 I was entering my teenage years. We lost my Taid (Grandfather) who had been a collier in that year to a coal related disease, Wrexham played Real Zaragoza at Cae Ras in the European Cup (a night that joined me spiritually to Wrecsam) and the following year Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and Eric B and Rakim released their first albums. I owned them all and listened to them until I knew the lyrics verbatim.
I can still name Wrexham sides from before I was born, I know who the club secretary was and who the groundsman was and I think that kind of knowledge has enriched my life. My Wife may not agree.
The hands off wildness and carefree New York of the 70s (echoed on the terraces of British Football) gave birth to an entire subculture created by young people basically as a result of them being neglected and left to create their own entertainment. The pieces of the jigsaw were there, black and Puerto Rican teenagers put the pieces together. Music programmes in schools were stopped through austerity measures at the same time that Jamaican sound systems were finding their way into Bronx Ghettos. No kids had the option to learn instruments in those tough neighbourhoods, but they loved music and improvised, which would eventually see them embrace technology and create sampling after the idea of looping a sound was created. This idea of the loop went hand in hand with the ‘break’ the drum break in a song became the part where the dancers would ‘go off’ and showcase there moves, the beginning of breakdancing, the beginning of turntablism and at the same time the deejay throwing together some phrases to hype the crowd would lead to the poetry of someone like Rakim. Incredible.
Football Culture developed over a period of time in a similar way. Through class and societal restraints, the working class of Britain had few outlets, Football grounds became institutions. Many initially as a means of leisure for the workers. West Ham for instance ‘The Hammers’
are called this because they were initially made up of Thames Ironworkers, the same can be said in many places. If teams were not founded by local industry they appeared via local churches or as an alternative in the winter when there was no cricket. Celtic FC was founded to provide alms to the local poor and support the Catholic immigrant population, Celtic FC in particular their fanbase have retained a very strong working class socialist and Irish nationalist identity. They are unique in many ways.
The popularity of Football among the working class, as with Hip Hop would cross over into the mainstream and when it did, the money would become astronomical. At first Football Clubs would be run by ‘custodians’ local business people for the most part generation after generation of privileged families, but occasionally the odd local impresario would be at the helm.
Of course any subculture can be seen as a microcosm of the society it exists within, and Football has been referred to as the Opiate of the masses, after religion and God died. The Football stadiums our Cathedrals. Revolutionaries would loathe the benign mass of proletariat ploughing their energies into following their local teams when they could be planning and getting involved in trade unionism. But most folk want to be
entertained when they’re not working, they want to watch not do, the masses are passive. The changes taking place within society such as more equality after the second world war when Atlee came to power. The biggest drive in Social Housing ever and building of huge council estates, the Welfare state and creation of the NHS, greater access to education and widespread access to media ie television and radio , would help people to have an idea of themselves and see themselves as part of something. Heavy Industry was coming to an end and the culture that grew up around Mining, steelworks etc was dying out. Huge communities whose very existence depended entirely on the local colliery would be left to die slowly and painfully by successive governments , in particular kicked to death by Margaret Thatcher in the early 80s.Toxteth went up, Brixton, Handsworth, the Miners strike polarised opinion and Football was ‘A slum game for slum people’.
Synopsis.
When I saw black kids rioting on the streets of LA,I knew what was happening, the same as when Police were used as an arm of the state against working men at Orgreave. We were there to be kicked and pushed until we kept quiet and doffed our cap. Know your place. We were the enemy
within, Working Class People, Miners, Irish Republicans, Trade Unions and Football Fans.
It took a while but eventually i realised that these two hugely divergent subcultures that informed me aesthetically and spiritually through my entire life were cut from the same cloth, to the point that these responses to cultural development, socio economic systems, council estates and ghetto’s they derived from became a powerful critique and kicked back at what wouldn’t allow them to thrive. The establishment and the money men knew the dangers and saw Hip Hop and terrace culture flourish in such an unadulterated manner in the 80s and early 90s. Both these movements grew as a result of targeted neglect by respective governments and huge cut backs in working class communities. The detritus of a post industrial wasteland here, and the children of an unspoken apartheid in America.
This piece is for Wrecsam,Cymru and the Working Class Cultures that gave me a pulse.
Peterloo,Tonypandy, Merthyr,Jarrow,Toxteth, Orgreave,Hillsborough,Grenfell.
The same struggle.
AntiFascist Football 