Wonderful vintage clip of mod girls dancing to Desmond Dekker's "Israelites"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/09/wonderful-vintage-clip-of-mod.html

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Obligatory:

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skanking-5

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when i see stuff like this, i always wonder where those cool kids are now, if they are still alive, etc. – and then i think, “ohhh, right… boomers.”

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I was lucky enough to have seen the legend Desmond Dekker play in Chicago in the 90’s. Go feet!

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Is it weird that the title describes the women as being skinheads? The Oi/Ska/Skinhead thing is always confusing to me.

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No, not really, but I totally agree that it is confusing considering the popular image of skins.

The title seems to have been changed to mods now, which is inaccurate.They may have looked like mods, but they weren’t.

This is from wikipedia (I kind of knew this stuff but I’m too tired and lazy rn, so wikipedia will have to do :stuck_out_tongue:

" The first skinheads were working class youths motivated by an expression of alternative values and working class pride, rejecting both the austerity and conservatism of the 1950s-early 1960s and the more middle class or bourgeois hippie movement and peace and love ethos of the mid to late 1960s. Skinheads were instead drawn towards more working class outsider subcultures, incorporating elements of early working class mod fashion and black Jamaican music and fashion, especially from Jamaican rude boys.[1] In the earlier stages of the movement, a considerable overlap existed between early skinhead subculture, mod subculture, and the rude boy subculture found among Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant youth, as these three groups interacted and fraternized with each other within the same working class and poor neighbourhoods in Britain.[2] As skinheads adopted elements of mod subculture and Jamaican British and Jamaican immigrant rude boy subculture, both first and second generation skins were influenced by the heavy, repetitive rhythms of dub and ska, as well as rocksteady, reggae, and African-American soul, rhythm and blues and funk music.… During the early 1980s, political affiliations grew in significance and split the subculture, distancing the far right and far left strands, although many skins describe themselves as apolitical. As a pro-working class movement that was initially highly regionalised and excluded by society’s moral norms, skinhead culture sometimes attracted hard-line far-right radicals, and was eventually tainted in the mid-1980s by violent fringe elements espousing extreme racism.[6] From the 1990s, disaffected, Neo-Fascist or Neo-Nazi youths in the former nation of East Germany, Spain, Finland, Central and Eastern European countries such as Russia adopted the style. However, many skinheads remain influenced by dissident, left-wing, syndicalist, or center-left type politics or otherwise independent pro-working class politics that have been part of the movement since the beginning, particularly in the U.K. and the U.S., while others continue to embrace the subculture as a largely apolitical working class movement."

Personally, the first skin I met, in late 80’s England, was a redskin i.e. a socialist skin. He looked scary but was an absolute diamond of a bloke. So, weirdly, in my case, the first impression I had of a skinhead was an open-minded left wing person.

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One of my favorite moments of coincidence came a few years ago when I was having lunch at Amer’s Falafel in Studio City and this song came over the sound system. I cracked up; the counter guy (a sabra from Tel Aviv) didn’t quite see what was so funny.

Obligatory:
Q: What’s the difference between Israelis and Israelites?
A: 50% fewer calories.

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No, they were definitely skinheads. True only the boys had cropped hair but their girlfriends dressed like the ones here. Skinhead was more than fashion, they were a kind of youth tribe, like their predecessors the mods, who existed in opposition to the other tribe, the rockers (or greasers as they were being called then).

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Isn’t that the plot of Absolute Beginners?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoScx5FUkas

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