The White Surpremists Takeover in the Metal and Punk Music Scenes

     This week I read an article about how white supremacists have slowly made a place for themselves in the Metal scene. This article is caused "How White Supremacists Infiltrated the Metal Community". For those who don't know Metal is a genre of music that's very aggressive. Loud screaming vocals, heavy drumming, and a mix of very aggressive guitar riffs make up the majority of the average metal song. But for some reason this style of music has become popular for white supremacists, with a lot of normal white supremacist bands being metal bands. Author Elizabeth King writes that "Metal's association with white power types extends back to the 1970s". This was caused by a mass influx of white supremacist skin heads in the metal and punk communities in the United Kingdom. Most of them came from the National Front a fascist organization based out of the U.K. 

    White Supremacist bands became under fire by music streaming websites recently too. After public pressure Spotify got rid of all the white supremacist bands from their streaming services. King writes that "in 2014, Apple removed 30 of 54 bands on iTunes that were deemed racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center". So this means that these bands aren't getting cracked down on and streaming services are actually doing something about it.  

    But the metal community aren't the only music scenes being ransacked by white supremacists and Neo Nazi's. In fact the punk community has been going through stuff like this too. Where Steve Knopper of the GQ writes that "Every hardcore band you loved in the '80s and beyond, from Black Flag to Minutemen to Fugazi, had one unfortunate thing in common: Nazi skinheads occasionally stormed their concerts". So metal wasn't the only thing getting taken over by racists. Punk bands like the Black Flags, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedy's, and M.D.C. All reported on their experiences with racists in the community.

UCLA Library Special Collections. “Henry Rollins of Black Flag, 1983.” File:Henry Rollins of Black Flag, 1983.Jpg, Wikimedia Commons , 11 Sept. 2020, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Rollins_of_Black_Flag,_1983.jpg.

    Henry Rollins lead singer of the Black Flags to the GQ with his experiences with Nazi skinheads. "When I was able to get the audience to turn on them, it was interesting to often see how upset that made them, like they had no idea how much people hated them. I found this approach to be effective. It's not for me to instruct someone to go hit someone else, but if I can say something that makes everyone laugh at these guys, it empowers the right people and diminishes the right people." In this he tells us how he got audiences at his shows to turn against the Nazi skinheads at his shows and that was able to get them out of there instead of using violence like most would. I highly suggest that you read this article, as it tells a lot of great stories from some big names in the punk rock community and how they dealt with the Neo Nazi's in the community. 

King, Elizabeth. “How White Supremacists Infiltrated Metal.” Pacific Standard, Pacific Standard, 26 Sept. 2017, psmag.com/social-justice/how-white-supremacists-infiltrated-metal.

Knopper, Steve. “How Black Flag, Bad Brains, and More Reclaimed Punk from White Supremacists.” Nazi Punks F**k Off: How Black Flag, Bad Brains, and More Took Back Their Scene from White Supremacists, GQ, 16 Jan. 2018, www.gq.com/story/punks-and-nazis-oral-history.