Beukey on Pop Culture

This blog will focus on pop culture, with an emphasis on views outside, overlooked, or ignored by the mainstream. I may veer off-topic. We are all grown-ups, so don't act shocked at occasional bad language. This blog is not the place for those of you who stood in line to see "The Lake House".

Saturday, December 08, 2007

We get it, The Mullet sucked, can we attack something else now, please? (I have a suggestion)

Like The Spice Girls, I am back in time for the holiday season.

Unlike The Spice Girls, something else that should have gone away in 1998 is continuing strong to this day, unironically, and it's time to Stop The Madness (I guess this is going to be heavy with 90's pop culture references).

I saw a book the other day devoted to the now most maligned of male hairstyles, the mullet. Of course, now everyone ridicules the mullet as something that is totally out of place. To wear one shows that you live in the past, relishing your past glory (if you had any). You are an unsophisticated Joe-Dirt type that spends your days wearing a wife-beater and drinking beer out of a can.

Yes, like all fashion choices, the mullet's time has come and gone. Put it on the shelf with knit belts, ties and scarves that look like piano keyboards, and satin Starter jackets.

What I don't get is all this focus on the mullet when there is another male hairstyle choice that has lived, nea, thrived, well beyond its expiration date. Everyone knows the mullet is ridiculous, let's turn our collective energy to stigmatizing something else that is equally outdated, and shows that the wearer wants to live in the past.

I am talking about the goatee, and its cousin, the soul patch.

If you wore a goatee 20 years ago, you looked like a disciple of Charles Manson, who, up until that point, was probably the only man who consistently sported a goatee. Then grunge and Kurt Cobain happened, and the goatee was as hip as Seattle and designer coffee.

Now it is 2007. Kurt Cobain is dead and buried, and people no longer look at Seattle as if it were Mecca. The 90's are over. Time to get rid of the goatee, which, in case you didn't notice, is starting to turn gray.

I cannot understand why this has stayed popular for 15 years. The only things I can think of is that people that wear it think they look cool, or look like what cool was 15 years ago. Or they have lost so much hair on their scalp, and they lack the ability to grow a proper beard, that they are looking to maintain some hair on their head.

Recently, Robert Plant has taken to wearing one. Robert Plant now looks like your grandfather, except he still goes to the beauty salon everyday to get his curls dyed, washed, and set. If an early 70's rock icon is growing a goatee in order to try and maintain a "hip" image with the "kids" of today, that tells you all you need to know about the goatee being played out.

The outdated mullet is ridiculed, but the equally outdated goatee goes on and on. We've done overkill on the mullet, it's time to turn our attention to the goatee.