Pop/Rock » Punk/New Wave » Oi!

By the end of the '70s, British punk was splintering into several distinct strains, most of them arty or ambitious in their own ways. Oi! music was an attempt to keep punk a populist, street-level phenomenon; most of it came from the Cockney working class of London's East End. Likely taking its name from the Cockney Rejects' 1980 song "Oi! Oi! Oi!" (before which it was simply known as street-punk), Oi! was loud, brutal, and extremely simple, with loads of shout-along, almost football-chant choruses. In essence, it was punk rock that was most at home in a rowdy pub. It was somewhat similar to hardcore, but not quite as extreme; Oi! stuck much more closely to the original punk blueprint laid out by the Sex Pistols and early Clash. In fact, critics frequently disdained the style for its punk-purist lack of adventurousness, and the way its political statements often replaced the Pistols' wit and intelligence with angry rabble-rousing. The latter wasn't universally true, but all the same, Oi! acquired a bad reputation when it was adopted by racist skinheads aligned with the neo-fascist National Front organization. Most bands (and skinheads) took pains to distance themselves from this unsavory element, especially after a number of violent incidents at live gigs; however, a few genuine white-supremacist bands (most notoriously Skrewdriver) were enough to give Oi! a stigma which it never completely shed. The band that brought Oi!/street-punk to prominence in 1978-79 was Sham 69, and they in turn gave career pushes to Oi! stalwarts like the Angelic Upstarts and the Cockney Rejects. The mid-'90s punk revival led to a renewal of interest in Oi!; many favorite early albums were reissued, and a number of new bands popped up both in the U.K. and overseas.