Heart and Mind

Not Everything is a Mullet

I told someone a while back that I was going to post something about mullets on my blog. I never got around to doing so.

Fast-forward a little while in time, though, and I saw that Angela at TrippySWELL had made a post about 80s movies in which she discusses what a good time the 1980s were for mullets. I began going into my mullet observations in a comment to her post, but the whole thing just got too long. So, I had to move the discussion over here.

I'm not sure if younger people know this or not (or if people my age remember), but no one called them "mullets" back in the day. "Mullet" was a derisive term that came about after the fact in an effort to mock what was a then-more-acceptable hair cut. At least around these parts that's how it was. It's kind of like the phrase "hair band" being used to describe any pop-oriented hard-rock band circa 1986 through 1989. No one called them "hair bands" back then. People said, "They look like girls," but no one called them "hair bands."

I have no problem with people making fun of the mullet, but I do think the term has become overused. I don't know any of the mullets that were referenced in Angela's post, so I'm not commenting specifically on the authenticity of any mullets named there. However, in general, I think a few years back, people started referring to practically anything but an entirely short male hair cut as a "mullet," especially if the subject did not have long bangs.

For my money, a mullet is about extreme differences between the hair that rides down your neck and everything else above.

Let's talk about "legitimate" long, male hair for a minute. I'm talking about non-mullet hair, the hair that was sort-of rock-star long. It wasn't until about 1989-ish that long-haired hard-rock musicians (as a generalized trend) started adopting a style where they'd grow the entire thing to length and just sort-of flop their bangs over the top of their head so they could see. Prior to that, even long-hairs tended to have bangs that were either short or shorter than the back and sides.

Yeah, the sides. That is the factor that people forget to include into the equation when they're classifying every non-short-haired-individual as a guy with a mullet. The true mullet has short sides and bangs with the unproportionally long back. Long hair with long layers or with some-sort of bangs but something of an overgrown shag cut at the ears is not a true mullet.

Also, notice that I italicized "unproportionally" in the description above. That's also key. Some people these days are calling reasonably short hair cuts "mullets" simply if they aren't practically shaved in the back. You have to have that unproportional-thing going on.

To me, there were/are basically two really distinct "true" mullets, and all the others are either slight variants of these two styles or something non-mullety entirely.

Number 1 was basically an '80s sort of short male haircut (short by 80s standards, not 90s and beyond) where you had this "poof" of hair in the back that either hung down (for straight hair) or puffed out (for curly and wavy hair) or did something in between.

Number 2 was the most extreme mullet, where the top was practically a crew cut and the back was long enough to be in the same league as, perhaps, members of Motorhead. I knew two guys, in particular, in college who always had long-ass hair, and yet they were ridiculously meticulous about keeping the front so tightly groomed and the follicles were so damn short that they barely needed to be brushed at all. If you lifted up the hair off their neck, they looked like they were going on a job interview for a big corporate position.

Those are mullets, man. Everything else is something different.

Now, all this talk about mullets might make someone wish to ask if I ever had a mullet? Of course I did! As someone who spend many years—well over a decade—either having long hair or attempting to grow it out and have it do things that it probably had no business doing, I've pretty had my fair share of all sorts of longish styles of varying types. And although I never really aspired for mullet-dom since the early wannabe-long-hair-days of about 1986, mullets sometimes happened. You came back from a hair-cut and it ended up looking a little weird. It used to happen to me all the time.

I definitely had plenty of number 1s (see above) in my day. Thankfully, I never did the number 2 job. Mostly, I just always have needed a hair cut.

But....there's nothing about me and the mullet. Frankly, I am an equal opportunity bad-hair-day kind of guy. I've had plenty of bad hair all throughout my life.

posted by Steve @ 3:18 PM