page_title: Rocker (subculture)
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Rocker (subculture) / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Busy-Bee-Rockers
context_page_description: Rockers, leather boys, Ton-up boys, and possibly café racers are members of a biker subculture that originated in the United Kingdom during the 1950s. It was mainly centred on British café racer motorcycles and rock 'n' roll music. By 1965, the term greaser had also been introduced to Great Britain and, since then, the terms greaser and rocker have become synonymous within the British Isles although used differently in North America and elsewhere. Rockers were also derisively known as Coffee Bar Cowboys. Their Japanese counterpart was called the Kaminari-Zoku.
context_section_description: Until the post-war 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. The name "rocker" came not from music, but from the rockers found in 4-stroke engines, as opposed to the two stroke engines used by scooters and ridden by mods.
  During the 1950s, they were known as "Ton-Up boys" because doing a ton is 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.
  The Rocker subculture was associated with 1950s and early-1960s rock and roll music by artists such as Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry, music that George Melly called "screw and smash" music.
caption: 1960s Rockers under canopy outside Busy Bee Café, Watford, England, UK
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