Bikers - Resistance through Ritual

I was at a stop light in LA with a biker on my right, gunning his noisy Harley. I couldn't resist commenting, maybe I should have, but soon found myself on the losing side of a mild argument with my eight year old granddaughter about tolerance and prejudice. I acquitted myself none too well...

Bikers, particularly Hells Angels, can be an "in your face' element of the road. I guess that's their charm. Popularized by the movies "The Wild Ones" and "Rebel without a Cause," they have invaded the social consciousness. Marlon Brando, James Dean and, in a suitably safe form, the Fonze of "Happy Days' have become icons of the biker subculture.

And it is in the States that the motorbike gang, the resistance to authority through ritual, has persisted past adolescence to form a permanent, sometimes criminal, subculture. The impetus was the emergence of a youth culture after WWII. Drugs, particularly LSD and Meth, were the sacrament. The priesthood, led by people such as Sonny Barger, rode Harleys, wore Nazi regalia, disliked cops, and were famous for not backing down. They were all white, often racist, and with a nationalist patriotism for the USA, Jerry Garcia, and the Grateful Dead. They provided a model of rebellious sub-culture for other youth to emulate.

Les Blouson Noirs (The Black Jackets) were the bikers in France, named because of their dress. They briefly crested in popularity around the years 1958-61 with their home grown icon, the actor Johnny Halliday.

In Germany, they adopted the disparaging phrase used to describe them, Halbstarke (Half-Strong) and had as their icon, Horst Bucholz. In the late fifties, they protested against society and authority and developed riots in Dortmund and other cities.

Transport cafes and the newly developed arterial roads provided the venue for the British Rockers who wore the leather uniforms and touted uniquely British bikes -- the Triton hybrid, Vincent 1000, and Matchless. There were no drugs and their anti-social activity took the form of speed trials and races. They finally eclipsed as a movement after mass confrontations with another indigenous group, the Mods -- one can trace the style change as personified by the Beatles transformation from rockers to mods in the sixties. 

The influence of the Hells Angels even reached Japan where the Kaminari Zoku (Thunder Tribe) took to wearing Tokko-Fuku (Secial Attack Uniforms). They were popular from the 80's and provided a kindergarten for the Yakuza (organised crime) until they withered on the vine as more extensive arrest laws were passed and money dwindled.

Now a peculiar emanation has developed in Russia. Peter Pomerantsev tells us, in the current issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), that a group of bikers has evolved, the Nochnye Volki (Night Wolves). Hells Angels, but with a difference. They are nationalistic and ride in cavalcades, as the originals, but...

...have got religion, found a Russian God, have defended the 'honor of the church' after the Pussy Riot affair and...are subsidised by Putin's Kremlin with several hundred million roubles to put on bike shows, concerts, trapeze acts, battle enactments, and go go girls. Their rebellion has been subverted by an unpopular administration to drum up some "grass roots" support.

So the American expression of tribal youth rebellion has been emulated for a time in other societies. Only in America has it persisted and only in Russia has it sadly been infiltrated by the State, surely a harbinger of impermanence.