Trojan skinheads (also known as traditional
skinheads or trads) are individuals who identify with the original British skinhead subculture of the middle 1960s, when
ska,
rocksteady,
reggae, and soul
music were popular, and there was a heavy emphasis on mod-influenced clothing styles. Named after the record label
Trojan Records, these
skinheads identify with the subculture's Jamaican
rude boy and British
working class roots.
Because of their appreciation of
music played by black people, they tend to be non-
racist.
Trojan skinheads usually dress in a typical 1960s skinhead style, which includes items such as button-down Ben Sherman shirts, Fred Perry polo shirts, braces,
… Read more fitted suits, cardigans, tank tops, Harrington jackets and Crombie-style overcoats. Hair is generally between a 2 and 4 grade clip-guard (short, but not bald), in contrast to the shorter-haired
punk-influenced Oi! skins of the 1980s.
Ska is a
music genre that originated in
Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to
rocksteady and
reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with
American jazz and rhythm and blues.
Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the offbeat. It was developed in
Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play
American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s,
ska was the dominant
music genre of
Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many
skinheads.
Music historians typically divide the history of
ska into three periods:
… Read more the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the
2 Tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican
ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of
punk rock forming
ska-
punk; and third wave
ska, which involved
bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.
?
Skinhead reggae? has come to mean a subgenre of
reggae with influences taken from
ska and
rocksteady as well as soul/R?n?B, often with fast Hammond organ leads and danceable beats, loved by
adolescents of the British
working class. But
reggae itself became popular among white British youth after
ska and
rocksteady had receded, more or less as skinhead became an identifiable subculture in the
United Kingdom, in 1968, peaking in
1969, and then disappearing into seudehead, glam/glitter, etc., by the early 70s. Therefore, it is something of a misnomer to speak of ?
skinhead reggae? as separate from the early
reggae that was popular amongst white kids, because those white kids were nearly
… Read more all
skinheads. It was not until at least a year or more into the close association between the musical form and the fashion that the tunes now inextricably linked to the subculture by their lyrics began to emerge. Many of the
skinhead reggae songs were covers or else more well-known early
reggae/
ska/
rocksteady tunes that had been reworked, sometimes with new lyrics specifically about
skinheads. Symarip?s ?Skinhead Moonstomp,? possibly the most classic (and one of the most primitive)
skinhead reggae song.
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