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MP3 Monday: MiSanDao

Oi = A working class music, nothing more, nothing less - By Morgan Short, Oct 26, 09

Today's MP3s are from Beijing Skinhead punks MiSanDao. Forming way back in 1999, MiSanDao, along with SMZB, Brain Failure, and Reflector, are one of the oldest Punk bands in China, and also one of the most active today. They play constantly in Beijing, they've done lots of China tours, they come to Shanghai once or twice a year, and they've even managed to do a European tour in 2007. These songs, way down at the bottom, are off their European demo EP thing.

MiSanDao were in town just this past Friday, playing at MAO Shanghai, along with Shanghai's most underrated band -- punk or otherwise -- Mortal Fools. I unfortunately was unable to go, but you can read a concert review of that show right here. According to that write-up, the show didn't have the turnout it should have had, so maybe you can download these songs and keep tabs on MiSanDao, so when they come back you don't miss them.

Chinese Skinheads? What? Yeah, absolutely. What a lot of people don't know is that the Skinhead sub-culture basically has nothing to do with white power, street violence, or basically politics of any kind really. It first started being a thing in the 60's in the UK, about 15 years before the first punk bands, and was originally coming out of the British street tough Mod scene and Jamaican Rudeboy music/culture. The style was a bit of a reaction to the Hippie culture of the 60's, and musically, Skinheads were down with Ska, Rocksteady, Soul, and RnB.

The style tapered off in popularity in the early 70's, but experienced a revival at the end of the decade with English punk bands like The Business and The 4-Skins, who reappropriated the style and working class ethos of the Skinhead movement as a reaction to what they saw as the commercialization of Punk rock. This brief window between Punk in the mid 70's and Hardcore in the 80's saw the rise of Oi! music from bands like Cock Sparrer, Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, Blitz, The Templars, Skin-Deep, and Red Alert, who pretty much defined what Skinheads would be into musically for the next 30 years. Most of these bands were explicitly apolitical, and for their crowd, being a Skinhead meant nothing more than being proudly blue-collar, 100% working class. The gang "us against them" mentality was there as it is in all Punk rock, but pretty much the main thing Skinheads were down for was getting drunk, fighting each other, and spazzing out at Oi! shows. Around that period it got wrapped up in ardent regional pride and football hooliganism -- Skinheads used to wear the colors of their local football team in their "braces and laces". It was also during this period that some members from the Skinhead scene started being active in the rising White Power and Ultra Nationalist movements in UK in the late 70's and early 80's.

Extreme right wing political factions and white power groups began tapping into Skinhead groups -- or "gangs" -- as the younger, street-level thugs to their evil fucking agenda. The rage of the have-nots was perverted into racial hatred, and some very real violence, mainly against the rising immigrant population in the UK in the 70s, made "Skinhead" synonymous with White Power, bigotry, and racial violence.

The whole situation was imported wholesale to the US, Continental Europe, and everywhere else, and for the last 40 years, there's been three types of Skinheads, coming from this one scene in the late 70's in the UK: Extreme Leftist or Anarchist Skinheads who are a direct reaction to the perversion of the movement (often called SHARPs -- "Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice"), Nazi Skinhead boneheads that are, unfortunately what the popular conception of what all Skinheads are, and apolitical Skinheads who trying to reassert the non-racial roots of Skinhead culture -- "Spirit of 69" types.



There have always been more Skinheads in the first and third categories, but they don't really sell newspapers and movie tickets, so you basically never hear about them.

Of course, this is all an over-simplification of about 50 years of culture, but it gives you a little bit of context to this band MiSanDao, who are Chinese Skinheads, and, actually, there's nothing weird about that at all. Here's some songs.





And here's a bonus one from Cock Sparrer.



Check out MiSanDao's MySpace right here.

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