Oi! is a working class street-level subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.
The music and associated subculture had the goal of promoting unity between punks, skinheads and other non-aligned working class youths (sometimes called herberts). The Oi! movement was partly a response to a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy uni...
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Oi! is a working class street-level subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.
The music and associated subculture had the goal of promoting unity between punks, skinheads and other non-aligned working class youths (sometimes called herberts). The Oi! movement was partly a response to a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic...and losing touch”.
In the words of André Schlesinger, “Oi shares many similarities with folk music, besides its often simple musical structure; quaint in some respects and crude in others, not to mention brutally honest, it usually tells a story based in truth.”
The Oi! genre became a recognized genre in the latter part of the 1970s, emerging after the perceived commercialization of punk rock, but still before the soon-to-dominate hardcore punk sound. It fused the sounds of early punk...
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