Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1977

Oi! / street punk

Emerged 1977 Origin United Kingdom Subgenres — Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
4
Speed
7
Melody
7

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

Working-class punk with terrace choruses and lyrics about the pub, the factory and football.

How it sounds

  • Simple choruses built to be shouted by a full room.
  • Thick guitar tone but rock and roll riffs rather than hardcore ones.
  • Mid tempos, plain drumming and lyrics about everyday life.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
150-190 bpm
Song length
2-3 min
Tuning
E standard, played on cheap equipment, with a deliberately unpolished tone. Nothing in this genre is technically demanding and that is a stated position.
Production
Rough and live, mixed so the gang vocal is the loudest thing on the record. These are made to sound like a room full of people rather than a band.
Written about
Work and unemployment, Class, Football and the pub, Solidarity

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Simple barre-chord progressions, mid-paced by punk standards, with a rock-and-roll swagger that hardcore removed entirely.
  • Bass Driving root notes, loud, and frequently the clearest instrument on a badly recorded single.
  • Drums Straight, heavy and unhurried, built for a crowd to move to rather than for speed.
  • Vocals Shouted in an undisguised regional accent, with a gang chorus behind them. The mass singalong is the genre's structural device, not a decoration.

What it isn't

That it is a far-right genre. A small number of bands and a larger number of hangers-on made that association stick in the early 1980s, and it has been fought over ever since by a scene that is substantially anti-racist and always has been. The music itself is about class and place, and the encyclopedia's job here is to record the fight rather than to pretend it did not happen.

Told apart from

  • Punk rock Oi kept punk's simplicity and aimed it at a working-class audience the London art-school scene had drifted from. Slower, and built around a chorus a crowd can shout.
  • Hardcore punk Hardcore went faster and more austere; Oi went slower and more anthemic. They are the two answers to the same question about where punk goes after 1978.
  • Anarcho-punk Anarcho-punk shares the class politics and pushes them toward anarchism and vegetarianism. Oi is more concerned with immediate circumstance than with ideology.
  • Celtic punk Celtic punk uses the same singalong chorus with folk instruments, and much of its audience overlaps.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

The term was coined by the journalist Garry Bushell in 1980 for England's working-class punk, as opposed to art-school punk. Cock Sparrer and The Business supplied the sound. The scene was long associated with football violence and with extremist groups attempting to recruit within it — which is why the SHARP movement emerged from inside it as a counterweight.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.