Episode Transcript
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with Marc Jacobs. Hi.
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So a few years a few years ago, we
1:06
aired an episode about a hairstyle. The mullet.
1:08
As you're As you're about to
1:10
hear, it's actually about way more than
1:12
a hairstyle. It's It's about the mullet
1:15
as a word, word, as a symbol,
1:17
as as a mystery, as as something
1:19
we collectively misremember. in the And in the
1:21
four years since it first aired, some some things
1:23
have changed. Like mainly the mullet has
1:25
has gotten a lot cooler in the And I
1:27
think And I think this episode is a
1:29
pretty good job of explaining why. why.
1:32
Other things haven't changed changed
1:34
and the mullet is still
1:36
is still window into just
1:38
how into just how can believe we
1:40
can what we want to.
1:43
to. I I think it's one
1:45
of our best episodes, best
1:47
a truly expansive, satisfying, and
1:49
meaningful investigation into a
1:51
do that won't die. that won't die.
1:53
I I hope you enjoy. This
2:01
podcast contains explicit language. Lauren Wright
2:03
is a DJ and for the
2:06
last three years she's had a
2:08
very particular haircut. You know the
2:10
one, business in the front, party
2:13
in the back. I am the
2:15
proud owner and wearer of a
2:17
mullet. So
2:20
firstly, can you describe what your
2:22
mullet looks like to be? Like
2:24
what nature of mullet is. It's
2:27
pretty short and tight on the
2:29
sides, and I've got some solid
2:31
length in the back. So it's
2:33
kind of getting slowly. I think
2:36
it's more of the mullet that
2:38
makes more people uncomfortable. You know,
2:40
it's a little less feminine. It's
2:42
definitely curly and luscious, and I
2:45
don't know. I'm pretty proud of
2:47
it. Lauren first encountered mulets when
2:49
she was a kid back in
2:51
the 90s. So I grew up
2:54
in Texas and... I remember, I
2:56
think the first moment I ever
2:58
saw in person was in elementary
3:00
school, my PE teacher, who was
3:03
a woman, she was the head
3:05
coach, she had this like long,
3:07
epic curly mullet, and she had
3:09
a really thick country accent, and
3:12
she was always chewing gum, gold
3:14
hoops, just like strong gay woman,
3:16
which I didn't really know at
3:18
the time. at least twice a
3:21
week, she'd say, everybody line up
3:23
and we'd get on the line,
3:25
and she would throw on Billy
3:27
Ray Cyrus, achy-breaky heart, and we
3:29
would, she'd teach us different line
3:32
dances. So
3:39
it was kind of like this
3:41
double mullet experience with you know
3:43
this like strong woman with a
3:46
mullet who everyone respects is having
3:48
a sign up in dance to
3:51
this country star with another epic
3:53
mullet. These were the waning glory
3:55
days of the mullet a hairstyle
3:58
that was once the it not
4:00
only of country stars and lesbians,
4:02
but of rock stars, hockey players,
4:05
soccer players, TV characters, school-age boys
4:07
across the country, and people all
4:10
over the world. From such heights,
4:12
the mullet could only fall, and
4:14
it fell far. By the end
4:17
of the 1990s, it had become
4:19
dramatically uncool, loathed even, considered to
4:21
be uniquely unattractive, trashy, and low-class.
4:24
You can see this in the
4:26
2001 comedy Joe Dirt, in which
4:29
David Spade plays a sweet beleaguered
4:31
loser, whose most distinctive quality is
4:33
his incredible mullet. He's constantly teased
4:36
about it, as by this radio
4:38
shock doc, played by Dennis Miller.
4:40
Hey, Zander, Zander, you gotta see
4:43
this guy. God, almighty, manna from
4:45
inbred heaven. Hey, freak boy! 1976
4:48
called it wants its hairstyle back.
4:50
This sentiment that the mullet is
4:52
particularly classless outmoded and hideous is
4:55
still the dominant one, which is
4:57
exactly what the subcultures that have
4:59
sporadically embraced the mullet over the
5:02
last two decades. Electropunk kids, self-aware
5:04
rednecks, high-end fashionistas, queer people like
5:07
about it. The way it thumbs
5:09
its nose, it mainstream respectability. You
5:11
know, the mullet has been deemed
5:14
like traditionally very unattractive and ugly,
5:16
and so... you know, as someone
5:18
who doesn't necessarily fit into traditional
5:21
norms of beauty, this, I identify
5:23
very much so with this haircut.
5:26
It feels very powerful. The mullet
5:28
is this potent versatile cultural signifier
5:30
that conveys more now, almost 50
5:33
years into its existence than it
5:35
did when it was totally ubiquitous.
5:37
And you know what? That's not
5:40
even the craziest thing about it.
5:42
Were you calling them mullets, you
5:45
remember? No, I don't
5:47
think that I was. I feel
5:49
like I was too young to
5:51
kind of remember like the big
5:54
80s mullet style. What have I
5:56
told you that the word mullet
5:58
didn't exist until 1994? would be
6:01
would be surprising for sure
6:03
because I would think think in
6:05
the think leading into the
6:08
80s, but like leading you just
6:10
saying that we didn't have
6:12
a word for it? It
6:14
just is existing out here
6:16
with no label? a word for it? It
6:18
just is existing out here with no label. This is
6:21
Dakota Ring, a is Decoderang, a
6:23
show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm
6:25
I'm Paskin. You
6:27
may think the mullet is just
6:29
an unfortunate haircut, but let
6:31
me tell you, it is you,
6:33
much more than that. that. in
6:35
this episode, we're going to prove
6:37
it, not just by following
6:39
the story of the mullet as
6:41
a of the but by following
6:43
the story of the word the story
6:45
of figure out how a name
6:47
helped transform an omnipresent do
6:49
into a national joke and altered
6:52
our cultural memory in the
6:54
process. process. So today, on de codering, what I what
6:56
I swear turns out to
6:58
be a tonsorial mystery, an aesthetic
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mystery, a a lexical mystery, a
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want to start at the beginning,
9:18
not of the mullet, but of
9:20
my interest in the mullet, which
9:22
was sparked by an email from
9:24
a listener, with the subject line,
9:26
The Mystery of the Mullet. My
9:28
name is Oscar Sigbertson. I'm a
9:30
software developer and I live in
9:32
Stockholm. Oscar is really interested in
9:34
language and linguistics. So I subscribe
9:36
to all these like weird linguistics
9:38
and lexicography blogs and things like
9:40
that. And one of the blogs
9:42
I was, I'm such, I am
9:44
subscribed to is the Oxford English
9:46
Dictionary's public appeals blog, where the
9:48
Oxford English Dictionary like puts out
9:50
appeals to the public for like,
9:53
oh, we researching this word and
9:55
we hit a wall. And so
9:57
in 2013, they put out this
9:59
blog post about the word mullet.
10:01
In this public appeal, the Oxford
10:03
English Dictionary. OED said they couldn't
10:05
find a documented reference to the
10:07
mullet as a hairstyle prior to
10:09
1994. Which I was very surprised
10:11
to read because 1994 like that's
10:13
so late like mullets are the
10:15
eight like the most 80s thing
10:17
you can imagine like there's nothing
10:19
more emblematic of the ages than
10:21
a mullet. But nobody used that
10:23
word in the entire decade like
10:25
nobody Like it can't
10:27
be like it's so weird. And
10:30
it is so weird. In the
10:32
popular imagination, mullahs are as 80s
10:34
as shoulder pads, dynasty, Ronald Reagan,
10:36
junk abons, and breakdancing. The two
10:38
are totally intertwined. And to explain
10:40
why, I have to go back
10:43
to the other beginning, the beginning
10:45
of the mullit itself. Despite
10:48
its connection to the
10:51
1980s, the modern mullet
10:53
was not actually birthed
10:55
in that decade. It
10:58
was first popularized in
11:00
the early 1970s by
11:02
David Bowie. In
11:05
her memoir, Backstage Passes Angie Bowie, Bowie's
11:07
wife at the time, recalls that while
11:09
David was working on his album, The
11:12
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
11:14
The Spiders from Mars, for which you
11:16
would inhabit the character of Ziggy Stardust,
11:18
an omnissexual glam space alien, he woke
11:21
up on morning wanting a new haircut.
11:23
It was Christmas week and the hair
11:25
stylist who regularly did Bowie's mom's hair
11:27
paid a house call. This stylist Susie
11:30
Ronson, Nay Fussy, told the story of
11:32
what happened next as a storyteller at
11:34
the moth. David and Angie were sitting
11:36
by a large bay window and they
11:39
were discussing the merits of cutting his
11:41
hair short. He had this long blonde
11:43
wavy hair at the time. They asked
11:45
me my opinion. I said, well, you
11:48
know, no one else has got short
11:50
hair. You know, nobody, you'd look really
11:52
different. Bowie showed Suzy a magazine photo
11:54
of a Kansai Yamamoto model. Kansai Yamamoto
11:57
was a Japanese designer, one of the
11:59
first to show his... in London, who
12:01
would in the next few years begin
12:03
a long creative collaboration with Bowie. Can
12:06
you do that? Well as I'm saying
12:08
yes, I'm thinking to myself, it's a
12:10
woman's hairstyle. And
12:13
how am I going to actually
12:15
do that? The answer was some
12:17
scissors, shorts, cough red, red-hot hair
12:19
dye and guard, an anti-dandruff treatment
12:21
that made Bowie's hair stand up
12:23
in the front. When Susie was
12:25
done, Bowie had the famous Ziggy
12:27
haircut, bright red, long and flipped
12:29
out at the back, and short
12:32
and bristling in the front. It
12:34
was the perfect haircut for the
12:36
extraterrestrial Ziggy who was not exactly
12:38
male or female, because the mullet
12:40
was genderless too. It's easy to
12:42
lose sight of this now, but
12:44
the mullet has become so associated
12:46
with a performative, aggressive machismo. But
12:48
it's a haircut that's long and
12:50
short, male and female, both and
12:53
neither at the same time. The
12:55
fact that it's not entirely straight,
12:57
also in the sense of not
12:59
being square, is what makes it
13:01
what makes it cool. But as
13:03
the mullet became more and more
13:05
popular, its essential androgeny faded into
13:07
the background. And that's because the
13:09
people carrying water for the mullet
13:12
in the 70s and early 80s
13:14
weren't just mullet having performers like
13:16
Joan Jet, Paul McCartney, Bono, and
13:18
Prince. They were hockey players. To
13:21
illustrate how the mullet crossed over
13:23
from rock stars to athletes and
13:25
regular people getting bigger all the
13:27
while, I want to highlight two
13:29
figures in particular. The first is
13:32
the hockey player Ron Dugay. Ron
13:34
Dugay awarded a penalty shot and
13:36
here he comes. Dugay,
13:38
a handsome Canadian who was married
13:40
to a model played in the
13:42
NHL from 1979 to 1989 and
13:45
is widely credited with having one
13:47
of the earliest mullats in the
13:49
league. You can see it in
13:51
a 1979 commercial he appeared in
13:53
with three of his teammates for
13:56
Vidal Sassoon Jeans. In this ad,
13:58
the four players around the
14:00
in jerseys and dungarees. Of
14:03
the four, Dugay is the only one
14:05
to have a mullet, but it's
14:07
relatively understated. His sandy, hair is definitely
14:09
longer in the back, but not
14:11
wildly so. It looks wind-swapped and kind of
14:13
sophisticated. It's a casually
14:15
cool haircut. I mean, even the dal sa-su
14:17
thought so. No wonder kids
14:19
cool. so. across the country. model one. As
14:27
the hairstyle caught on with the
14:29
public, so did ad names for it.
14:31
didn't call it mullets. We it hockey
14:34
hair. John
14:37
Warner a writer and market researcher who
14:39
grew up in the Chicago suburbs. He
14:42
was in high school in the mid to late 1980s and
14:44
played on the hockey team. Just
14:46
about every member of his
14:48
team, himself included, had hockey hair.
14:50
though called it something more
14:52
specific. We called it the Dougue,
14:55
after Ron Dugay because he had
14:57
such a good flow. You
14:59
called it flow? It was called the flow, like,
15:01
how's your flow? If somebody came
15:03
in and looking like long and
15:05
good, flapping behind
15:08
the helmet, you say, good flow. It was just like,
15:10
it was what you did. A A guy's
15:12
it. I mean, they got perms
15:14
of only their flow. Guys
15:16
into the locker room for practice
15:18
after the curb and you could smell it.
15:21
You didn't make fun of them. was
15:23
like, oh, cool, know, he he permed
15:25
it. As
15:29
you can tell from the perms, as
15:31
the 80s wore on, the mullet was
15:33
getting increasingly elaborate. By the
15:36
end of the decade, it
15:38
was huge. As a trend, but
15:40
also just physically huge. Please
15:42
see Yeromir Yager. I came
15:44
here and I had the longest hair in
15:46
NHL, but Don't
15:49
forget people, in in 1990, there was a a
15:52
That's Yager, the legendary Czech who would
15:54
play in the NHL for seasons,
15:56
seasons, talking to ESPN in 2016.
15:59
When he first came... into the as an
16:01
an apple-cheeked he had an he had
16:03
an Eastern mullet, this mop of
16:05
dark of hair that cascaded
16:08
down his back in a
16:10
curly a curly It's like the
16:12
mullet a prince in a Disney
16:14
movie would have movie they had
16:16
mullets, had well -conditioned, luxurious, somehow
16:18
sparkly. And Jagger's which he
16:20
kept for his first nine seasons in
16:23
the league, wasn't the only one of
16:25
its kind, though it may be best. though
16:27
it may be best came to I
16:29
.S. the US, you know, for city, I bought,
16:31
I was mostly crew, and Death Leopard and Bonjorie,
16:33
so they all had a long hair, so
16:35
to be to be a like
16:37
them. like them. It wasn't just
16:39
the the hair rocking audacious mullets.
16:41
This is the time of is
16:44
the time of Andre Agassi, Lionel Ritchie, And
16:46
one thing I want to
16:48
underscore thing that these attention -grabbing
16:50
mullets didn't just end with
16:52
the mulets didn't So many of
16:54
the canonical mullets the canonical mulets. Yaggers, Billy
16:57
Ray Cyrus's, — are not Van
16:59
mullets at all. mulets at all. mullets.
17:03
When it comes to to we're suffering
17:05
from a kind of distortion, of
17:07
one familiar from the TV show from
17:09
the TV show series begins in the
17:11
early begins in the which looks so much
17:13
more like the 1950s than what
17:15
we think of as we think of as
17:17
the 60s. The aesthetics we we to
17:19
decades often start mid -decade and then
17:21
run into the next one, the
17:23
we tend to erase tend to erase this
17:25
in favor of a simpler shorthand. shorthand.
17:29
But this simplification can actually change
17:31
how we think about the past,
17:33
and the mullet is an example
17:35
of this. The of mullet belongs as
17:37
much to the early as much to the
17:39
Lauren 90s, to Lauren Wright's class as the
17:41
late as the late even though we
17:44
don't remember it that way. way. This
17:48
brings us back to Oscar Sigvardsen. The
17:50
who had been floored to
17:52
hear the term to hear the not
17:54
exist until 1994, which is
17:56
especially late if you are under the
17:58
mistaken impression. that Mullets or
18:00
less died out in 1989. Confronted
18:03
with a claim that seemed so
18:06
chronologically off, Oscar did what a
18:08
curious language -obsessed person might do.
18:10
He tried to find out for
18:12
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Okay, so from here on out, we're
20:37
going to dig into the lexical
20:40
weeds, but I promise the is worth
20:42
it. So the Oxford
20:44
English Dictionary asked the public for help
20:46
in finding any reference to the
20:48
mullet as a hairstyle from 1994. And
20:51
Oscar set out to find one. You
20:53
know, once or twice in the past,
20:55
I've been able to, you know, find
20:57
something earlier than the Oxford English Dictionary says
20:59
it was printed or something. So I
21:01
started doing that, right? I started just like
21:03
putting in mullet in Google Books just saying, okay, between
21:05
1980 and 1989, find me all usages
21:07
of the word. And, you know, it's
21:09
just fish, right? It's all fish, fish,
21:11
fish. The a family of fish,
21:13
is eaten all over the world. And
21:15
it was like, I I it for like hours
21:18
to find it. And, you know, once in
21:20
a while, you can find like to the
21:22
insult, like mullet head. Paul Newman is called mullet head
21:24
in Cool Hand Zoo. He
21:28
He have a mullet. Like he's called, he's
21:30
called an idiot. And There's a
21:32
clip from Cheers Sam calls Diana
21:34
a mullet head. Who just that sentence
21:37
with two prepositions. Don't
21:39
you have customers to deal with? That
21:41
ended with a preposition too. Don't
21:44
you have customers to deal with mullet
21:46
head? So
21:48
like, that's, that's it, right? You can actually find it.
21:50
At that point, it became like, oh, this is
21:52
a fun fact. I parties. less efficient to
21:54
use in Sweden though. It's not that
21:56
efficient in Sweden because in Sweden,
21:58
as in many of the... where it
22:00
it was a phenomenon, This hairstyle
22:02
is not called a mullet. The Swedish word for it is
22:05
hockey which means which means hockey hair.
22:07
Hockey is, a whole thing
22:09
in Sweden. There's even
22:11
a well -known 1993 Swedish about about
22:13
it. There was a very big hit
22:15
from the Swedish group, the lykliga kompisarna. which
22:18
translate as the happy it was huge
22:20
it was something that everyone
22:22
knew because it's like a
22:24
real knew because it's like a funny And
22:26
it has like the chorus
22:28
is just a guy has like
22:30
the chorus is just a guy singing, oh, ho, ho,
22:33
ho, ho, ho, ho, vila! Anyway,
22:39
even though it wasn't always
22:41
a smash with other Swedes, Oscar
22:43
often shared this mullet And then in
22:45
then in 2015, for no
22:47
particular reason, share he decided to
22:49
share it. on Reddit. about
22:52
mullet posted the information about Mullet
22:54
to the a kind of gathering place for kind
22:56
of gathering place for fun tidbits.
22:58
on the ready never had anything on thing blew but
23:00
that thing the up like it was on
23:02
the front for Reddit for like an
23:04
entire entire day, was was the most fun
23:07
24 hours I've ever had on the internet.
23:09
just because like everyone like whoa and then trying
23:11
to solve this problem with you? problem
23:13
with you like that was my favorite part
23:15
right because the comments right many comments
23:17
were like this is total many comments were
23:19
like this is told horseshit mud all the time
23:21
80s you is exactly what some of the
23:24
comments on his post sound like. on
23:26
his post I grew up in
23:28
Queens, New York up in the
23:30
term City way before 1994, way
23:32
before reads. reads. Another goes, I call
23:34
bullshit. When When breaky heart came out
23:36
in 1992, I knew everyone
23:38
I knew in North Dakota to his
23:40
referring to his haircut as a
23:42
mullet. those. lots of those, lots but
23:44
anyway, lots of people like doing the research
23:47
the research, and it was so much fun. with with
23:49
all these people digging around though,
23:51
no no one could turn up
23:53
an earlier reference. then But then got
23:55
got cross an to an Australian Where was
23:57
where it was framed as get a
23:59
little. this nonsense. And one of the
24:02
people reading that post, he found
24:04
something. A user named Top's Maid,
24:06
like posted a comment, yeah, that
24:08
today I learned is full of
24:10
shit, and the perfect example of
24:12
group thing. Took me under an
24:14
hour of browsing through my street
24:16
machine collection to find this reference
24:18
to a mullet as a hairstyle
24:20
from 1991. And yeah, and he
24:22
posted this image of a magazine
24:24
that he found in his garage.
24:26
The image that Topsmate posted is
24:28
of two pages from an Australian
24:30
hot rod magazine called Street Machine.
24:32
They're from a piece about a
24:34
teenager named Craig Parker, who built
24:36
his own muscle car. The story
24:38
includes a picture of him sitting
24:40
on the ground, his back against
24:42
the grill of a red sports
24:44
car, in which he has an
24:46
unmistakable mullet. And then there's an
24:48
arrow added by Top's mate pointing
24:50
to this picture and another arrow
24:52
pointing to a line in the
24:54
text of the piece that reads,
24:56
three years ago, Craig Parker was
24:58
a mullet-haired teenager who wanted to
25:00
build a car that could rival
25:02
the best. it seemed
25:05
to be a piece calling a mullet
25:07
a mullet in 1991. I remember reading
25:09
that and like my jaw drops like
25:11
that was the coolest thing I've ever
25:13
seen Oscar immediately replied to Top's mate
25:15
comment and said this is amazing you
25:17
should submit this to the OED this
25:19
is great work. Part of me was
25:21
like dismissed that my cool day I
25:23
learned had been disproven by this Australia
25:25
guy, but like part of but the
25:27
bigger part was so happy that I
25:29
could like make it like I had
25:31
had like a small part in making
25:33
the contribution to the history of this
25:35
term. Now
25:39
if you're saying to yourself, 1991,
25:42
that's still so late, that's not
25:44
even the 1980s, is this really
25:46
that big a contribution to the
25:48
history of the term? Please keep
25:50
this in mind about slang. Often
25:52
it's used in spoken language years
25:54
before it ends up in the
25:57
documentary record. So in 1991 usage,
25:59
maybe that does mean the mullet
26:01
goes back. the late 1980s. And
26:03
also, this was such a big
26:05
deal to Oscar because he was
26:07
just way down the rabbit hole.
26:09
I had totally internalized this fact,
26:12
right? Like I had done the
26:14
research and I had like lived
26:16
with this for two years and
26:18
I had like just spent hours
26:20
defending this thesis in the comments.
26:22
And then this guy comes and
26:24
like, no, yeah, I just went
26:27
out to my garage and found
26:29
the Holy Grail, which is essentially
26:31
what I think of as any
26:33
pre-94 references to mullet. Oscar wasn't
26:35
the only one who would feel
26:37
this way about the street machine
26:40
article. The Oxford English Dictionary was
26:42
about to jump back into the
26:44
picture. So the OED had been
26:46
on the mullet case way before
26:48
Oscar. The OED, the Oxford English
26:50
Dictionary, it covers the whole thousand-year
26:52
history of English. Catherine Connor Martin
26:55
is the head of product for
26:57
Oxford Languages, the Dictionary Division of
26:59
Oxford University Press, which publishes the
27:01
OED, and what she began working
27:03
in 2003 as an editor working
27:05
on the dictionary. And for every
27:07
word in the OED, we give
27:10
the first known documentary evidence for
27:12
its use, not just for the
27:14
word overall, but for every single
27:16
meaning that the word has. In
27:18
2001, the dictionary added the word
27:20
mullet, or specifically mullet noun nine.
27:22
It's mullet noun nine because there
27:25
are eight earlier words called mullet
27:27
in English, each of which has
27:29
a different etymological origin. But the
27:31
people at the OED weren't totally
27:33
satisfied with the etymological portion of
27:35
the mullet now nine entry, because
27:37
like everybody else, 1994 sounded late
27:40
to them. There seemed to be
27:42
a disconnect between the lexical history
27:44
of the mullet and the cultural
27:46
and social history of the mullet,
27:48
and furthermore we had anecdotal evidence
27:50
from people who were sure that
27:53
they had heard or used that
27:55
term in the 1980s and as
27:57
an editor I myself felt like
27:59
well obviously we knew this term
28:01
in the 1980s. in 2013, we
28:03
decided to launch what we call
28:05
an appeal to the public for
28:08
further information on this word. The
28:10
OED has been launching these appeals
28:12
since it was founded, and now
28:14
they do that on the internet,
28:16
hoping that people like Oscar will
28:18
find something they couldn't. For a
28:20
few years, though, no one found
28:23
anything. And then they got a
28:25
lead. Then in 2015, the plot
28:27
thickened. because someone posted a TIL
28:29
thing I learned thread on Reddit.
28:31
The OED people don't know Oscar,
28:33
but Catherine is talking about Oscar.
28:35
Someone on staff had come across
28:38
his post, which had been updated
28:40
with a link to the street
28:42
machine article. That was really exciting,
28:44
and when we found out about
28:46
it, we were thrilled. But the
28:48
OED's policy, because these first dates
28:50
are so important to us, we
28:53
really have to verify them. And
28:55
we typically want to verify them
28:57
in print in a library, which
28:59
is the gold standard. So the
29:01
OED reached out to a number
29:03
of Australian libraries, and the librarian
29:06
at the National Library of Australia
29:08
found a copy of Street Machine
29:10
from January 1992, which would have
29:12
come out in late 1991. Catherine
29:14
read me the email the librarian
29:16
sent to her. They said, I've
29:18
checked our copy of Street Machine
29:21
from January, February 1992. On page
29:23
31 there is some wording that
29:25
is very similar to the quote
29:27
you provided, but it doesn't mention
29:29
the word mullet. Nothing if not
29:31
persistent. The OED has several other
29:33
Australian librarians to track down this
29:36
article. None of them could find
29:38
a version of it with the
29:40
word mullet, but they also could
29:42
find a January 1992 issue of
29:44
street machine. They could only find
29:46
a January-February 1992 double issue, which
29:48
instead of making the whole thing
29:51
shadier, actually introduced some doubt. research
29:53
librarians are the greatest people. And
29:55
so one of them took it
29:57
upon themselves to contact the editors
29:59
of street machine. magazine themselves. And
30:02
they also didn't know of a
30:05
January 1992 issue, but they couldn't say
30:07
for certain that there might not
30:09
have been some kind of special early
30:11
version with limited circulation for a
30:13
special event that might have had a
30:15
slightly different text. Street ended
30:17
up posting about all of this on
30:19
their Facebook page, and none of their
30:21
readers could find this mention of
30:23
the mullet or this January 1992 issue
30:25
either. All of this sounds
30:28
pretty sketchy, and that's why
30:30
it didn't go into the OED. It
30:32
was not definitive documentary proof.
30:34
But for all that was
30:36
suspicious of it, it still
30:38
at her. She couldn't completely
30:40
dismiss it, and that's
30:42
because she knows too much
30:44
about how language works.
30:46
Australian English has a history
30:48
of kind of punching
30:50
above its weight it comes
30:52
to colloquial English. So for example,
30:54
the word selfie originated in
30:56
Australian English and then
30:59
infiltrated the rest of the world. It's
31:01
entirely plausible that this word originated
31:04
in Australian slang in the late 1980s
31:06
and early 1990s, like all of
31:08
these Australians say it did, and that
31:10
it was only popularized by the Beastie
31:12
Boys than coined by them. That
31:14
wouldn't be surprising at all. So
31:16
yeah, the first documented usage
31:18
of mullet now 9 from 1994.
31:21
It doesn't come from some random
31:23
Usenet page. It comes from the
31:26
Boys. The
31:32
The Boys, the rap rock
31:34
consisting of Adam Adrock Harvitz,
31:36
Mike Mike D Diamond, and Adam
31:38
MCA Yow, who died in
31:41
2012, released the song
31:43
Mullet Head June 1994. The
31:45
lyrics, which reference late stage mullet sporter Jean-Claude Van
31:47
Damme, Billy Ray Cyrus, Kenny G,
31:49
and Joey Buttafuco, get the idea, still
31:51
with us, of of the mullet
31:53
-haver as a particular kind of
31:55
macho sleazebag. They skewer condescend. send to
31:57
a stereotype of lower lower bridge
31:59
and tunnel tunnel guys. with with jeans
32:01
and mullets, driving into New
32:03
York into start fights and hook
32:05
up with and girls. underage The song
32:08
also includes the lines, the lines,
32:10
to know what's a mullet a
32:12
I got a little story to
32:14
tell to a hairstyle that's a
32:16
way of life. a way Have
32:18
you ever seen a mullet wife?
32:20
a mullet words are in the OED. in the OED.
32:30
The second documented reference to the to the
32:33
in the OED in the OED-2 also comes
32:35
from Beastie Boys. It arrived It arrived in
32:37
1995 in their storied, short -lived magazine, a
32:39
big enough deal at the time which was a
32:41
big enough deal at the time to
32:43
be featured on MTV has now come out with
32:45
its trio has now come out with its own
32:47
magazine of turns out to be one of the funniest
32:49
reads around. is, as Grand Royal is,
32:51
as its proprietors acknowledge, a celebration of
32:54
humor, basketball slang, blatant blatant
32:56
opinions, and half -baked notions. The
32:58
second issue issue on the on the
33:00
it contains a collection of articles
33:02
gathered under the headline, under the over
33:04
the mullet. the Its opening essay begins,
33:06
essay nothing as bad as a
33:08
bad haircut. bad And perhaps the worst
33:10
haircut of all is a cut
33:12
we call is a cut we call the
33:14
mullet. It goes on to include
33:16
a series of mini about
33:18
the the origins and cultural significance,
33:21
focusing largely on the cheesy
33:23
the cheesy mullet. Though it has
33:25
one section section called the political
33:27
correctness of the mullet, which
33:29
notes its popularity among among Hispanics,
33:31
indigenous people, and women. women.
33:33
There's also a Q &A with
33:35
a mullet head, a defense
33:38
of the mullet, and synonyms
33:40
for the hairstyle, including for the
33:42
hairstyle, including, soccer neck bi-level, neckworm, ape-flap, hack-job, the
33:44
Missouri Compromise, and the Kentucky Waterfall. Only some only
33:46
some of which were jokes. Fahey
33:48
is a novelist, but is a novelist,
33:50
but in the was freelance writing
33:52
and running a movie database in San
33:54
Diego. He'd gone to to high school with
33:56
Grand Royal's who got in touch about
33:59
the project. Or as Warren
34:01
tells it, about the mission. Everyone
34:03
from porn stars to Superman were
34:05
sporting it suddenly. And Masterstroke was
34:07
to tag it with a word
34:09
that would, you know, forever, hopefully
34:11
abolish it from the human race.
34:13
The editor asked Warren to write
34:15
an ancient history of the mullet,
34:18
a kind of anthropological satire. Warren
34:20
agreed, even though no one knew
34:22
what a mullet was. At the
34:24
time, it was utterly completely new
34:26
and nobody had heard of it
34:28
and everybody thought it was nuts
34:30
to do it. What are you
34:32
naming a hairstyle after a fish?
34:35
What? For the piece, he went
34:37
up to a Los Angeles to
34:39
get a leather-bound tome that he
34:41
says had been permanently borrowed from
34:43
the LA County Library System about
34:45
the history of hairstyles going back
34:47
to the Samarians. I drove up
34:49
to the Beastie Boy's office. They
34:52
had like a half-court basketball court
34:54
in their office. While I was
34:56
there, Mike D actually came in.
34:58
He had just gotten a wig
35:00
on Hollywood Boulevard and went to
35:02
a barber shop and got it
35:04
cut into a mullet. And
35:07
the barber was really upset about it.
35:09
But he then drove around Hollywood Boulevard
35:11
in a convertible and they did a
35:14
photo shoot for the magazine with him
35:16
wearing it. These photos would appear in
35:18
a piece called, I was a 20-something
35:21
mullethead for a day by Mike Diamond,
35:23
a chronological account of Mike D and
35:25
the director Spike Jones Day in mullet
35:27
Wigs. With this piece and all the
35:30
rest, the beasties were tapping into and
35:32
crystallizing an already popular sentiment, that this
35:34
hairdo was over. If it had once
35:37
been rebellious, it was increasingly conformist. If
35:39
it had once been a way to
35:41
signal, you were an outsider. Now it
35:44
was just a way to pose as
35:46
one. Yes, it was still common, but
35:48
it wasn't cool. Tangentially, I think this
35:51
may help explain one of the odder
35:53
coincidences of all this, which is that
35:55
in a period of two years, there
35:57
were as many songs this one
36:00
hairstyle. Please recall that
36:02
Swedish hockey song from
36:04
1993. ["Hockey Hair
36:07
Song"] In
36:09
1993 and 1994, hockey
36:12
hair was in a deeply
36:14
transitional moment where it
36:16
was popular and yet also
36:18
played out, making it curious
36:20
of note in a way it hadn't
36:23
been for years. And these songs,
36:25
they noticed. Anyway,
36:27
getting back on track, if
36:29
the Beasties didn't originate disdain for
36:31
the they mainstreamed it and its
36:33
new insulting name. But
36:36
doesn't mean they came up
36:38
with this name. As Catherine Connor
36:40
said, it's totally plausible that the
36:42
term mullet from somewhere else, likely
36:44
in the slang of some
36:46
subculture, somewhere on the English -speaking
36:48
globe. So now I want
36:50
to turn back to the only
36:52
subculture that had any promise, however piddling.
36:54
I want to turn back to
36:56
that lead we left dangling somewhere
36:58
over Australia. I want to turn
37:01
back to the elusive 1991 street machine. street
37:03
machine. As
37:09
far as we could tell, the
37:11
only stone the OED OED had left unturned
37:13
was Topsmate himself, the Reddit user who
37:15
had originally posted the street pages. So
37:17
we decided to reach out to
37:19
him. We didn't expect him to respond,
37:21
but we figured it was worth
37:23
a try. While we were waiting
37:25
for him to get back to us, Benjamin
37:27
Benjamin Frisch, the producer of decodering, started digging
37:29
around. First, he tried to
37:31
find other places online Topsmate hung out,
37:33
but his only lead were the
37:36
images that Topsmate had posted on Reddit.
37:38
Those images were all collected on
37:40
the popular image site called Imgur, or Imgur,
37:42
depending on how you want
37:44
to pronounce it, which allows you
37:46
to click through everything someone
37:48
has uploaded. Ben started clicking
37:50
through Topsmate's other Imgur posts,
37:52
looking for something that might give
37:55
him another username or an email address.
37:57
And then he that one post had been
37:59
uploaded three years after the original post. According
38:01
to According to has it has only
38:04
been viewed about 300 times, far and
38:06
as far as we can tell, it
38:08
has never been linked anywhere. Not Not
38:10
on Reddit, not not on Twitter. Oscar had
38:12
had never seen it, had had never
38:14
seen it. It had never popped
38:16
up in any of the research we
38:18
did for this piece. piece. The name The
38:20
name of the post is. an apology to
38:22
to the Oxford English Dictionary. Okay, so hi.
38:24
So yeah, so I called Catherine called tell to
38:26
tell her about it. Can I
38:28
just like read it to you? to
38:31
you? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's from
38:33
April April 2018, and it's
38:35
called An Apology to the
38:37
Oxford English Dictionary. What?
38:39
And it is a few years ago, I saw a post
38:41
few years ago, I saw a
38:43
post the it about the origin of the
38:45
word mullet. a 1992 magazine I had
38:47
a 1992 magazine I had laying around to
38:50
make it look like it referred to
38:52
the term it was was first used in
38:54
print. I I the the cover to make
38:56
it more to trace to an issue in
38:58
the in the add more to my
39:00
edits, I also edited the
39:02
publication copyright date to 1991 to
39:04
it may have appeared as
39:07
a special early edition.
39:10
It says, why would I do this? I was
39:12
a It says, why would I
39:14
do this? I was a founding
39:16
member of an online community
39:18
called for arguments on looks for arguments on
39:20
the internet and then creates fake proofs
39:22
as evidence that the person who
39:24
is correct in the thread is actually
39:26
wrong. We pick arguments that
39:28
we have no personal stake in
39:31
stake no people we know we know. And
39:33
for create images, photos, websites and
39:35
interviews with false information supporting the
39:37
incorrect side. side. Why am I am I admitting
39:39
to this? I recently came across an entry in
39:41
the own own blog and there was a lot
39:43
of work by OED staff behind the scenes trying
39:45
to hunt down the down the special issue of the
39:47
magazine, I Photoshop. also into it
39:49
were what were stream machine and staff multiple
39:52
libraries in Australia, in I
39:54
think they should know I'm sorry for what I
39:56
have done. what I I respect the OED the OED and
39:58
I should not have publish the edits that I did. did.
40:01
Well, I have very
40:03
mixed emotions to hearing
40:06
this. I mean, first
40:08
of all, there's like
40:11
validation that this always felt sort
40:13
of hinky and the likelihood of
40:16
it being real seemed vanishingly small.
40:18
And I have to respect the
40:20
game here because those things that
40:23
he mentions like changing the copyright.
40:25
So it would be hard. Those
40:27
were exactly the right things to
40:29
do to keep that tiny shred
40:32
of possibility alive that this was
40:34
real. And it worked. But then
40:36
also it's kind of sad when
40:39
a mystery ends. Catherine also pointed
40:41
out another thing, that the whole
40:43
thing is pretty dark. There's an
40:45
additional paragraph in the apology in
40:48
which Top's Mate says he's become
40:50
disillusioned with a NOi club because
40:52
it's, quote, full of people whose
40:55
only purpose in life is trolling
40:57
vaccination supporters and US political discussions.
40:59
He goes on to say he
41:01
almost died in the 80s from
41:04
an infection, for which there's now
41:06
a vaccine, and he thinks that
41:08
the political work is just empowering
41:11
those who would prefer a confused
41:13
populace. I want no part of
41:15
the community anymore. Between
41:17
2015, when he posted the Photoshop
41:20
image and 2018 when he apologized,
41:22
Top's mate, like so many people,
41:24
seems to have been confronted with
41:26
what it means to live in
41:28
a post-truth world, one he was
41:31
actively contributing to, only to find
41:33
out he didn't like it that
41:35
much. Still, he only saw fit
41:37
to apologize in a hard-defined image
41:39
gallery that the people he was
41:42
apologizing to might never have found.
41:44
Is it really an apology if
41:46
you don't deliver it? Still, Catherine's
41:48
happy to have the whole thing
41:51
resolved. So we put to this
41:53
appeal, we wondered about this question,
41:55
does the word mullet go back
41:57
as far as our brain? it
41:59
does or only as far as
42:02
the documented evidence shows. And I
42:04
guess from our perspective that that's
42:06
still not answered but we're always
42:08
open for new for new data.
42:10
At this one I'm just like
42:13
you are open to new data
42:15
but like I just feel like
42:17
you guys got it. We never
42:19
say never in in this business
42:22
there are always there are always
42:24
new things that come up but
42:26
yes I don't think this is
42:28
active anymore. I want to gently
42:30
suggest that there was something going
42:33
on to keep it active for
42:35
so long, something besides lexographical plausibility.
42:37
Call it a bit of mullit
42:39
confirmation bias. Because it feels so
42:41
much like the term ought to
42:44
have existed before 1994, the OED
42:46
put out this appeal. And then
42:48
when evidence of it existing before
42:50
1994 popped up, it was taken
42:52
seriously, really seriously, and then ultimately,
42:55
perhaps more seriously than it deserved.
42:57
like multiple librarians more seriously than
42:59
it deserved. And so many people
43:01
in this tale behaved this way.
43:04
Read it readers, librarians, street machine
43:06
editors, and readers. Definitely me. We
43:08
all kept digging because we couldn't
43:10
quite believe that what we thought
43:12
we knew was true. wasn't true.
43:15
One thing I noticed is that
43:17
many of the people most devoted
43:19
to the idea that the term
43:21
mullet existed in the 1980s. Catherine,
43:23
Oscar, read it commenters, me again,
43:26
weren't even fully sentient in the
43:28
1980s. It wasn't personal experience or
43:30
individual memory that was driving our
43:32
certainty. It was just a cliched
43:35
sense of the era, which was
43:37
all we had to go on.
43:39
In this regard, the mullah is
43:41
a fun, low-stakes iteration of something
43:43
that is often not fun or
43:46
low-stakes at all. People's warped but
43:48
strongly held perceptions of the imagined
43:50
past and the length they will
43:52
go to hold on to them.
43:54
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They let him use his existing
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45:41
we've almost fully excavated the mullet,
45:43
but there's a little more to
45:45
this mystery. If the term mullet
45:47
wasn't coined in Australian car culture,
45:49
who actually coined it? Did the
45:51
Beastie Boys pluck it out of
45:53
thin air? Or did they get
45:56
it from somewhere else? Honestly, it
45:58
seems like they plucked it. It
46:00
was definitely coined by my... the
46:02
Beastie Boys. Warren Fahey, the writer
46:04
who contributed to the Grand Royal
46:06
Mullet Package again. Who had noticed
46:08
that this hairstyle was impinging on
46:10
civilization to a monstrous degree at
46:12
that point in time. And he
46:14
came up with the word mullet
46:17
and said, this is what we're
46:19
going to do. We're going to
46:21
devote an issue to making that
46:23
word stick. So it was all
46:25
quite intentional and completely planned. by
46:27
super genius Mike D. No, obviously,
46:29
I would have liked to ask
46:31
Mike D about this. Still would,
46:33
if anyone has an in, please
46:35
consider this my public appeal. But
46:38
he declined to speak with us.
46:40
But Warren is adamant Mike D
46:42
coined the term, and the Grand
46:44
Royal Peace itself suggests everyone working
46:46
on it at the time thought
46:48
so too. The article says, we're
46:50
not sure where the term mullet
46:52
came from, but as usual, Mike
46:54
D was the first to use
46:56
it around here. If that implies
46:59
he might have gotten it from
47:01
somewhere else, the possibilities listed for
47:03
where he might have gotten it.
47:05
Maybe he was thinking of a
47:07
muskrat, for example. Don't suggest he
47:09
was borrowing slang from a buddy.
47:12
Still, Mike was the beastie most involved
47:14
with the magazine. Maybe the staff just
47:16
hadn't talked mullets with the other members.
47:18
When I ran the theory that Mike
47:20
D had coined the term by the
47:22
Beastie Boys Publicist, a man named Steve
47:25
Martin, who has known them forever, and
47:27
did the real-life interview with a mullet
47:29
head for the grand royal mullet package,
47:31
he'd never heard that it came specifically
47:33
for Mike D. Steve said he first
47:35
heard the term from Adam Yauk, likely
47:37
in the early planning stages for this
47:40
piece. He asked him if it had
47:42
anything to do with a fish. And
47:44
Adam said, no. Whatever beastie came up
47:46
with it, the timeline supports the theory
47:48
that one of them birthed it outright.
47:50
I explained this all to Catherine. This
47:52
is just fully like too much detail,
47:54
but one of the things that is
47:57
also interesting is that song mullet head.
48:04
Like it was a deep B-side, like
48:06
it was originally released in 1994 in
48:08
June at like an additional track on
48:11
the single for the third single off
48:13
ill communication, which is to say it's
48:15
not an album track, but it actually
48:18
also makes more sense of the Grand
48:20
Royal piece because it's like, this song
48:22
came out in mid-94, but it would
48:24
have like only been for B-C- Boy
48:27
Heads or people who'd bought that single.
48:29
That's such an important part of slang
48:31
too. So like the appeal of slang
48:34
when it comes out is that it's
48:36
an indicator of in-group identification. So, like,
48:38
the exclusivity is what makes it tantalizing?
48:41
The other thing that is sort of
48:43
interesting about, just date-wise, is that Grand
48:45
Royal, so the issue that has this
48:47
article about the moment, which is so
48:50
much more detailed than the song, is
48:52
a yearly. So it came out in
48:54
1995, but it's, like, famously a yearly.
48:57
Oh, like the publication process was way
48:59
longer than it was supposed to be.
49:01
Yes. And so that actually means it
49:04
probably had been originally conceived in time
49:06
to come out with the album, which
49:08
came out in mid-94. But then, like,
49:11
you're tying this up to that to
49:13
make it so, like, it's seeming, like,
49:15
very straightforward. Well done. You solved the
49:17
moment mystery. Well, you had already solved
49:20
it. That's the joke. It was already
49:22
solved. Please bear with me while I
49:24
suggest there is a real mystery left.
49:27
That's answer also has to do with
49:29
the Beastie Boys. And it's why do
49:31
we think the mullet is so hideous?
49:34
Because why do we think the mullet
49:36
is so hideous? Because we do. I
49:38
want to go back to something that
49:40
Lauren Wright, the woman with the mullet,
49:43
who I spoke with at the top
49:45
of the show, said. You know, the
49:47
mullet has been deemed like traditionally very
49:50
unattractive and For decades,
49:52
we have seen, the
49:54
mullet was not
49:57
thought to be unattractive
49:59
and ugly at
50:01
all. and happened? all. What
50:04
I think I of
50:06
the answer is of the
50:08
term term itself. When
50:12
the beasties were clowning on it, the
50:15
mullet was reaching the end of its
50:17
natural end of its So everywhere, so
50:19
mass, that mass, that hip the
50:21
beasties were sneering at it.
50:23
But that's not unique. that's This
50:25
fate awaits most trends. trends. Most
50:27
seem seem unstailish falling out of style.
50:29
of But that's not when
50:31
most of them get their
50:33
names. their We don't call don't call
50:36
pants. But this is exactly what
50:38
happened to the happened to the Is
50:40
it crazy to think that
50:42
matters? If If the beastie boys
50:44
hadn't named the mullet, doesn't it
50:46
seem entirely possible that we
50:48
wouldn't remember it so clearly? Some
50:50
random hairdo with no agreed
50:52
upon name. no if the name
50:54
changed And if the see it, and
50:56
when we see it, we see it?
50:58
it it changed how we see
51:01
it? Maybe one
51:03
of the ways this term
51:05
retrofitted the past is to make
51:07
us primarily associate this hairstyle
51:09
with the objects of the beasties'
51:11
of the beastie's ire. guys still rocking
51:13
it in 1994. in And not
51:15
think of it as what it
51:18
had been for years. been surprisingly
51:20
pan -gender, pan-gender, global haircut that
51:22
had a really good run, good
51:24
whose time was just was just up. The
51:27
mullet, the term blotted out the
51:29
mullet, the hairstyle, which despite everything meant
51:31
continues to mean many different
51:33
things to different groups of people.
51:36
of What I'm saying is, maybe
51:38
the solution to this last
51:40
mystery, last is the mullet so
51:42
ugly, is that it isn't really
51:44
at all. at all. the people
51:46
that really get in and appreciate
51:48
it, it's a powerful thing
51:50
to have. to have. This
52:02
is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If
52:04
you have any cultural mysteries
52:07
you want us to decode,
52:09
please email us at decoderring at
52:11
Slate.com. This episode was
52:13
written by me. It It
52:15
was edited and produced by
52:17
Benjamin Frisch. Decoder Ring is produced
52:20
by me, Evan Chung, Max Friedman,
52:22
and Katie Shepherd. Derek is executive
52:24
producer. Merit Jacob is senior
52:26
director. Thanks to
52:28
Barney Hoskins, Jerry Slater, Daniel L. Schachter,
52:30
Alicia Montgomery, June Thomas, Forrest Wickman, and
52:32
everyone else who gave us help
52:35
and feedback along the way.
52:37
If you aren't already a Slate
52:39
Plus member, I want
52:41
to strongly encourage you to become
52:43
one. You can subscribe now on
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52:52
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52:57
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clicking try free visit Slate.com/decoder plus
53:18
sign up. We'll see you
53:20
in two weeks. Hi,
53:42
I'm Josh Levine. My
53:44
podcast, The Queen, tells the story
53:46
of Linda Taylor. She
53:48
was a con artist, a see kidnapper, and
53:50
maybe even a murderer. She
53:53
was also given the title The Welfare
53:55
Queen, and her story was used
53:57
by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to
53:59
the the poor.
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