Origins
See also: Mods and RockersUntil the post-World War II period motorcycling held a prestigious position and enjoyed a positive image in British society, being associated with wealth and glamour. Starting in the 1950s, the middle classes were able to buy inexpensive motorcars so that motorcycles became transport for the poor.
The rocker subculture came about due to factors such as: the end of post-war rationing in the UK, a general rise in prosperity for working class youths, the recent availability of credit and financing for young people, the influence of American popular music and films, the construction of race track-like arterial roads around British cities, the development of transport cafes and a peak in British motorcycle engineering.
Rocker-style youths existed in the 1950s, but were known as "ton-up boys" because doing a ton was English slang for driving at a speed of 100 mph (160 km/h) or over. The Teddy boys were considered their "spiritual ancestors". The rockers or ton-up boys took what was essentially a sport and turned it into a lifestyle, dropping out of mainstream society and "rebelling at the points where their will crossed society's". This damaged the public image of motorcycling in the UK and led to the politicisation of the motorcycling community.
The mass media started targeting these socially powerless youths and cast them as "folk devils", creating a moral panic through highly exaggerated and ill-founded portrayals. From the 1960s on, due to the media fury surrounding the mods and rockers, motorcycling youths became more commonly known as rockers, a term previously little known outside small groups. The public came to consider rockers as hopelessly naive, loutish, scruffy, motorized cowboys, loners or outsiders.
Rockers, like the ton-up boys before them, were immersed in 1950s rock and roll music and fashions, and became known as much for their devotion to music as they were to their motorcycles. Many favoured 1950s and early-1960s rock and roll by artists such as Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry; music that George Melly called "screw and smash" music.
Two groups emerged, one identifying with Marlon Brando's image in The Wild One, hanging around transport cafes, projecting nomadic romanticism, violence, anti-authoritarianism and anti-domesticity; the other being non-riders, similar in image but less involved in the cult of the motorbike.
Read more about this topic: Rocker (subculture)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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