No Nazi’s Friend: New Podcast Coming Soon

In the early 1980s, rock and roll had a serious hangover. The failed revolution of the 60s paired with the arena filling excess of the 1970s had rock and roll waking up to a personality crisis that has yet to resolve itself.

On the rock side of the dial there were two options: the arena rock brand remained in fashion, and hair sprayed, publicly intoxicated dandies in spandex filled the TV screen. Conversely, synth-heavy anthems were sung by artsy “outsiders” whose personal fashion sense borrowed heavily from a 1970s punk rock aesthetic- but whose music was easily digestible to the pop craving public- was presented in a way that could be easily sold to powder sniffing Wall Street Reaganites.

But there was a blowback to the cynical over-marketing of the big labels: working class kids needed a musical home that reflected their own material reality. So they invented it, and they called it hardcore.

Blooming out of the wreckage of the punk rock boom of the late 70s, and defined unquestionably by a DIY ethos, teenagers all over the US recorded demos out of garages and basements and invented a tape trading network that, unknown to them, would define the next generation of rock and roll.

That DIY mentality, paired with a latchkey unruliness made rock and roll exactly what it was supposed to be again: loud, fast, youth centered, and dangerous. Everything a teenage kid wants out of life.

The word “latchkey” isn’t used lightly here. The product of the Reagan-Thatcher economy was the protracted death of the one-income household, meaning a new generation of kids were largely left to their own devices. These kids- like all kids- needed a place to find community, and for many, hardcore provided exactly the family they needed.

One of the byproducts of this scene building itself was the presence of predatory actors who would co-opt the aesthetic and rebellious tendencies of this new scene and attempt to bend it to their own ends. These boneheads- as they came to be called- infiltrated many of the underground scenes across the country. Due to the overwhelmingly anti-intellectual and unsubtle nature of these right-wing submentals, they were easy to identify and quickly the justice-minded kids organized themselves across backgrounds in order to keep themselves and their friends safe.

So, across the country groups like Anti-Racist Action and most notably a decentralized network of traditional style skinheads, known as Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPS) sprang into being. This was the case everywhere- and it was no different in the city of St. Louis- a city that literally had a parade every year to celebrate its own racist ruling class. This is the oral history of the people who saw a problem and handled it on their own.

This is the story of the start of a tradition of anti-racism and solidarity in our city.

Because here in St. Louis, we are No Nazi’s Friend.