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Episode: Decoder Ring | Mystery of the Mullet (Encore)

Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:54:18

Episode Shownotes

The mullet, the love-to-hate-it hairstyle, is as associated with the 1980’s as Ronald Reagan, junk bonds, and breakdancing. But in at least one major way, we are suffering from a collective case of false memory syndrome. In this episode we track the rise and fall of the mullet, and also

the lexical quandary at its heart: Who named the mullet? We learn how David Bowie, hockey players, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Beastie Boys, a mysterious Reddit user named Topsmate, and a group called Annoy Club all played a part in the strange history of the mullet. Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include proud mullet-wearer Lauren Wright, amateur mullet-sleuth Oskar Sigvardsson, writer, market researcher, and 1980’s hockey teenager John Warner, head of product for Oxford Languages Katherine Connor Martin, and novelist and Grand Royal contributor Warren Fahy. This episode was produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this encore episode of Decoder Ring, Willa Paskin investigates the mullet hairstyle, which became a cultural symbol tied to the 1980s but has its roots in the early 1970s with figures like David Bowie. The term 'mullet' itself was coined only in 1994 by the Beastie Boys, revealing the complexities of cultural memory and societal perceptions around this hairstyle. The episode discusses the hairstyles' historical significance, its various names across cultures, and the contributions of different cultural icons, all while examining how language and stereotypes shape our understanding of trends over time.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Decoder Ring | Mystery of the Mullet (Encore)) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:01:04 Speaker_13
Hi. So a few years ago, we aired an episode about a hairstyle, the mullet. As you're about to hear, it's actually about way more than a hairstyle. It's about the mullet as a word, as a symbol, as a mystery, as something we collectively misremember.

00:01:20 Speaker_13
And in the four years since it first aired, some things have changed. Like, mainly, the mullet has gotten a lot cooler in the mainstream. And I think this episode does a pretty good job of explaining why.

00:01:32 Speaker_13
Other things haven't changed, though, and the mullet is still, surprisingly, a window into just how strongly we can believe exactly what we want to.

00:01:44 Speaker_13
I think it's one of our best episodes, a truly expansive, satisfying, and meaningful investigation into a do that won't die. I hope you enjoy.

00:02:01 Speaker_12
This podcast contains explicit language.

00:02:06 Speaker_13
Lauren Wright is a DJ, and for the last three years, she's had a very particular haircut. You know the one. Business in the front, party in the back.

00:02:14 Speaker_14
I am the proud owner and wearer of a mullet. So firstly, can you describe what your mullet looks like to me? Like, what nature of mullet is it?

00:02:24 Speaker_14
It's pretty short and tight on the sides, and I've got some solid length in the back, so it's kind of getting flowy. I think it's more the mullet that makes more people uncomfortable. You know, it's a little less feminine.

00:02:37 Speaker_14
It's definitely curly and luscious, and I don't know, I'm pretty proud of it.

00:02:45 Speaker_13
Lauren first encountered mullets when she was a kid, back in the 90s.

00:02:51 Speaker_14
I remember, I think the first mullet I ever saw in person was in elementary school. My PE teacher, who was a woman, she was the head coach. She had this like long, epic, curly mullet. And she had a really thick country accent.

00:03:11 Speaker_14
And she was always chewing gum, gold hoops, just like strong gay woman, which I didn't really know at the time.

00:03:19 Speaker_14
At least twice a week, she'd say, everybody line up, and we'd get on the line, and she would throw on Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart, and she'd teach us different line dances.

00:03:39 Speaker_14
So it was kind of like this double mullet experience with, you know, this like strong woman with a mullet who everyone respects is having us line up and dance to this country star with another epic mullet.

00:03:56 Speaker_13
These were the waning glory days of the mullet, a hairstyle that was once the it-do not only of country stars and lesbians, but of rock stars, hockey players, soccer players, TV characters, school-age boys across the country, and people all over the world.

00:04:11 Speaker_13
From such heights, the mullet could only fall, and it fell far. By the end of the 1990s, it had become dramatically uncool, loathed even, considered to be uniquely unattractive, trashy, and low class.

00:04:24 Speaker_13
You can see this in the 2001 comedy Joe Dirt, in which David Spade plays a sweet beleaguered loser whose most distinctive quality is his incredible mullet. He's constantly teased about it, as by this radio shock doc played by Dennis Miller.

00:04:39 Speaker_06
Hey, Zander, Zander, you gotta see this guy. God almighty, manna from inbred heaven. Hey, freak boy, 1976 called. It wants its hairstyle back.

00:04:49 Speaker_13
This sentiment that the mullet is particularly classless, outmoded, and hideous is still the dominant one, which is exactly what the subcultures that have sporadically embraced the mullet over the last two decades, electropunk kids, self-aware rednecks, high-end fashionistas, queer people, like about it.

00:05:06 Speaker_13
The way it thumbs its nose at mainstream respectability.

00:05:09 Speaker_14
You know, the mullet has been deemed, like, traditionally very unattractive and ugly. And so you know, as someone who doesn't necessarily fit into traditional norms of beauty, this, I identify very much so with this haircut. It feels very powerful.

00:05:27 Speaker_13
The mullet is this potent, versatile cultural signifier that conveys more now, almost 50 years into its existence, than it did when it was totally ubiquitous. And you know what? That's not even the craziest thing about it.

00:05:43 Speaker_13
Were you calling them mullets, do you remember?

00:05:46 Speaker_14
No, I don't think that I was. I feel like I was too young to kind of remember the big 80s mullet style.

00:05:54 Speaker_13
What if I told you that the word mullet didn't exist until 1994?

00:06:01 Speaker_14
It would be surprising for sure, because I would think maybe in the 70s, like leading into the 80s, but are you just saying that we didn't have a word for it? It just was existing out here with no label?

00:06:21 Speaker_13
This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin. You may think the mullet is just an unfortunate haircut, but let me tell you, it is so much more than that.

00:06:34 Speaker_13
And in this episode, we're going to prove it, not just by following the story of the mullet as a hairstyle, but by following the story of the word mullet to figure out how a name helped transform an omnipresent do into a national joke and altered our cultural memory in the process.

00:06:52 Speaker_13
So today, on Decoder Ring, what I swear turns out to be a tonsorial mystery, an aesthetic mystery, a lexical mystery, a chronological mystery, and maybe even an existential mystery. Who named the mullet?

00:07:31 Speaker_13
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00:09:16 Speaker_13
I want to start at the beginning, not of the mullet, but of my interest in the mullet, which was sparked by an email from a listener with the subject line, the mystery of the mullet.

00:09:26 Speaker_12
My name is Oskar Sigvartsson. I'm a software developer and I live in Stockholm.

00:09:31 Speaker_13
Oskar is really interested in language and linguistics.

00:09:34 Speaker_12
So I subscribe to all these like weird linguistics and lexicography blogs and things like that.

00:09:40 Speaker_12
And one of the blogs I am subscribed to is the Oxford English Dictionary's Public Appeals blog, where the Oxford English Dictionary puts out appeals to the public. Oh, we're researching this word and we hit the wall.

00:09:54 Speaker_12
And so in 2013, they put out this blog post about the word mullet.

00:09:57 Speaker_13
In this public appeal, the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED said they couldn't find a documented reference to the mullet as a hairstyle prior to 1994.

00:10:07 Speaker_12
Which I was very surprised to read because 1994, like that's So late, like mullets are the most 80s thing you can imagine. There's nothing more emblematic of the 80s than a mullet. But nobody used that word in the entire decade.

00:10:27 Speaker_12
Like, it can't be, like, it's so weird.

00:10:29 Speaker_13
And it is so weird. In the popular imagination, mullets are as 80s as shoulder pads, Dynasty, Ronald Reagan, junk bonds and breakdancing. The two are totally intertwined.

00:10:41 Speaker_13
And to explain why, I have to go back to the other beginning, the beginning of the mullet itself. Despite its connection to the 1980s, the modern mullet was not actually birthed in that decade.

00:10:53 Speaker_13
It was first popularized in the early 1970s by David Bowie.

00:11:05 Speaker_13
In her memoir, Backstage Passes, Angie Bowie, Bowie's wife at the time, recalls that while David was working on his album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, for which he would inhabit the character of Ziggy Stardust, an omnisexual, glam space alien, he woke up one morning wanting a new haircut.

00:11:24 Speaker_13
It was Christmas week, and the hairstylist who regularly did Bowie's mom's hair paid a house call. This stylist, Susie Ronson, nay Fussy, told the story of what happened next as a storyteller at the Moth.

00:11:36 Speaker_04
David and Angie were sitting by a large bay window, and they were discussing the merits of cutting his hair short. He had this long, blonde, wavy hair at the time. They asked me my opinion. I said, well, you know, no one else has got short hair.

00:11:50 Speaker_04
You know, nobody. You'd look really different.

00:11:53 Speaker_13
Bowie showed Suzie a magazine photo of a Kansai Yamamoto model. Kansai Yamamoto was a Japanese designer, one of the first to show his work in London, who would in the next few years begin a long, creative collaboration with Bowie.

00:12:05 Speaker_04
Can you do that? Well, as I'm saying yes, I'm thinking to myself, it's a woman's hairstyle. And how am I going to actually do that?

00:12:15 Speaker_13
The answer was some scissors, Schwarzkopf red, red hot hair dye, and GARD, an anti-dandruff treatment that made Bowie's hair stand up in the front.

00:12:23 Speaker_13
When Susie was done, Bowie had the famous Ziggy haircut, bright red, long and flipped out at the back, and short and bristling in the front.

00:12:32 Speaker_13
It was the perfect haircut for the extraterrestrial Ziggy, who was not exactly male or female, because the mullet was genderless too.

00:12:40 Speaker_13
It's easy to lose sight of this now that the mullet has become so associated with a performative, aggressive machismo, but it's a haircut that's long and short, male and female, both and neither at the same time.

00:12:54 Speaker_13
The fact that it's not entirely straight, also in the sense of not being square, is what makes it cool. But as the mullet became more and more popular, its essential androgyny faded into the background.

00:13:08 Speaker_13
And that's because the people carrying water for the mullet in the 70s and early 80s weren't just mullet having performers like Joan Jett, Paul McCartney, Bono, and Prince. They were hockey players.

00:13:21 Speaker_13
To illustrate how the mullet crossed over from rock stars to athletes and regular people, getting bigger all the while, I want to highlight two figures in particular. The first is the hockey player Ron Duguay.

00:13:34 Speaker_00
Ron Duguay awarded a penalty shot, and here he comes.

00:13:38 Speaker_13
Duguay, a handsome Canadian who was married to a model, played in the NHL from 1979 to 1989 and is widely credited with having one of the earliest mullets in the league.

00:13:48 Speaker_13
You can see it in a 1979 commercial he appeared in with three of his teammates for Vidal Sassoon Jeans. In this ad, the four players strut around the ice in jerseys and dungarees.

00:14:03 Speaker_13
Of the four, Duguay is the only one to have a mullet, but it's relatively understated. His sandy, curly hair is definitely longer in the back, but not wildly so. It looks windswept and kind of sophisticated. It's a casually cool haircut.

00:14:16 Speaker_13
I mean, even Vidal Sassoon thought so. No wonder kids across the country wanted one. As the hairstyle caught on with the public, so did ad hoc names for it. We didn't call it mullets. We called it hockey hair.

00:14:37 Speaker_13
John Warner is a writer and market researcher who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. He was in high school in the mid to late 1980s, and he played on the hockey team.

00:14:46 Speaker_13
Just about every member of his team, himself included, had hockey hair, though they called it something more specific.

00:14:54 Speaker_05
We called it the DuGay, named after Ron DuGay, because he had such a good flow.

00:14:59 Speaker_13
You called it flow?

00:15:00 Speaker_05
It was called the flow, like, how's your flow? If somebody came in and was looking long and good, flapping behind the helmet, you say, oh, good flow. It was just like, it was what you did. Guys permed it. I mean, they got perms of only their flow.

00:15:16 Speaker_05
Guys like walking into the locker room for practice after the perm and you could smell it. You didn't make fun of them. It was like, oh, that's cool. You know, he permed it.

00:15:29 Speaker_13
As you can tell from the perms, as the 80s wore on, the mullet was getting increasingly elaborate. By the end of the decade, it was huge. As a trend, but also just physically huge. Please see Jaromir Jager.

00:15:44 Speaker_08
I came here in 1990. I had the longest hair in the NHL. But don't forget people, in 1990 there was a style.

00:15:52 Speaker_13
That's Jäger, the legendary Czech who would play in the NHL for 28 seasons, talking to ESPN in 2016.

00:15:59 Speaker_13
When he first came into the league as an apple-cheeked 18-year-old, he had an Eastern European statement mullet, this mop of dark chestnut hair that cascaded down his back in a curly bouffant.

00:16:11 Speaker_13
It's like the mullet a prince in a Disney movie would have if they had mullets, well-conditioned, luxurious, somehow sparkly.

00:16:20 Speaker_13
And Jäger's hairstyle, which he kept for his first nine seasons in the league, wasn't the only one of its kind, though it may be best in class.

00:16:28 Speaker_08
I came to U.S., you know, first city I'll buy, there was Motley Crue and Def Leppard and Bon Jovi, so they all had long hair, so I want to be a rock star like them.

00:16:38 Speaker_13
It wasn't just the hair metal bands rocking audacious mullets. This is the time of Andre Agassi, Lionel Richie, Michael Bolton. And one thing I want to underscore is that these attention-grabbing mullets didn't just end with the 1980s.

00:16:52 Speaker_13
So many of the canonical mullets—Yaggers, Billy Ray Cyrus's, Jean-Claude Van Damme's—are not 80s mullets at all. They're 1990s mullets. When it comes to mullets, we're suffering from a kind of distortion, one familiar from the TV show Mad Men.

00:17:09 Speaker_13
That series begins in the early 1960s, which looks so much more like the 1950s than what we think of as the 60s. The aesthetics we assign to decades often start mid-decade and then run into the next one.

00:17:22 Speaker_13
But we tend to erase this decade straddling in favor of a simpler shorthand. But this simplification can actually change how we think about the past, and the mullet is an example of this.

00:17:35 Speaker_13
The enormous mullet belongs as much to the early 90s to Lauren Wright's line-dancing gym class as the late 80s, even though we don't remember it that way.

00:17:48 Speaker_13
This brings us back to Oskar Sigvartsson, the Swede who had been floored to hear the term mullet might not exist until 1994, which is especially late if you are under the mistaken impression that mullets more or less died out in 1989.

00:18:04 Speaker_13
Confronted with a claim that seemed so chronologically off, Oskar did what a curious language-obsessed person might do. He tried to find out for himself. AI is storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested.

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00:20:43 Speaker_13
So the Oxford English Dictionary had asked the public for help in finding any reference to the mullet as a hairstyle from before 1994, and Oskar set out to find one.

00:20:53 Speaker_12
You know, once or twice in the past, I've been able to, you know, find something earlier than the Oxford English Dictionary says it was printed or something. So I started doing that, right?

00:20:59 Speaker_12
I started just like putting in mullet in Google Books and just saying, okay, between 1980 and 1989, find me all usages of the word. And, you know, It's just fish, right? It's all fish, fish, fish.

00:21:11 Speaker_12
The mullet, a family of fish, is eaten all over the world. And it was like, I did it for like hours trying to find it. And, you know, once in a while you can find, like, reference to the insult, like mullet head.

00:21:23 Speaker_12
Paul Newman is called mullet head in Kulhandu. He doesn't have a mullet. Like, he's being called an idiot. There's a clip from Cheers where Sam calls Diana mullet head.

00:21:35 Speaker_07
who just ended that sentence with two prepositions.

00:21:39 Speaker_10
Don't you have customers to deal with?

00:21:42 Speaker_07
That ended with a preposition, too.

00:21:44 Speaker_10
Don't you have customers to deal with, mullet head?

00:21:48 Speaker_12
So that's it, right? You can't actually find it. At that point, it became like, oh, this is a fun factor, use of parties. Less efficient to use in Sweden, though.

00:21:56 Speaker_13
It's not that efficient in Sweden, because in Sweden, as in many of the countries where it was a phenomenon, this hairstyle is not called a mullet.

00:22:04 Speaker_12
The Swedish word for it is hockeyfilla, which means hockey hair.

00:22:06 Speaker_13
Hockeyfilla was, is, a whole thing in Sweden. There's even a well-known 1993 Swedish rock song about it.

00:22:14 Speaker_12
There was a very big hit from the Swedish group, De Lyckliga Kompisarna. translate as the happy friends, like it was huge.

00:22:21 Speaker_12
It was something that everyone knew because it's like a real earworm and it's like funny and it has like the chorus is just a guy singing.

00:22:39 Speaker_13
Anyway, even though it wasn't always a smash with other Swedes, Oskar often shared this mullet factoid. And then in 2015, for no particular reason, he decided to share it on Reddit.

00:22:52 Speaker_13
Oskar posted his information about mullet to the Today I Learned subreddit, a kind of gathering place for fun tidbits.

00:22:59 Speaker_12
So I've never had anything on Reddit blow up, but that thing blew up. Like it was on the front page of Reddit for like almost an entire day. Like it was the most fun 24 hours I've ever had on the internet.

00:23:09 Speaker_13
Just because like everyone like, whoa, and then trying to solve this problem with you like that.

00:23:13 Speaker_12
Exactly. Yes, that was my favorite part. Right. Because the comments, most many comments were like, this is total horseshit. Like I was in the 80s. All the time.

00:23:22 Speaker_13
This is exactly what some of the comments on his post sound like. Bullshit. I grew up in Queens, New York City, and use the term mullet since way before 1994. One reads another goes, I call bullshit.

00:23:35 Speaker_13
When Achy Breaky Heart came out in 1992, I, and everyone I knew in North Dakota, was referring to his haircut as a mullet.

00:23:47 Speaker_12
doing the research, and it was so much fun.

00:23:49 Speaker_13
Even with all these people digging around, though, no one could turn up an earlier reference. But then Oscar's post got cross-posted to an Australian subreddit, where it was framed as like, get a load of this nonsense.

00:24:01 Speaker_13
And one of the people reading that post, he found something.

00:24:05 Speaker_12
A user named TopsMate Posted a comment, yeah, that today I learned is full of shit and a perfect example of groupthink. Took me under an hour of browsing through my street machine collection to find this reference to a mullet as a hairstyle from 1991.

00:24:22 Speaker_12
And yeah, and he posted this image of a magazine that he found in his garage.

00:24:26 Speaker_13
The image that ToppsMate posted is of two pages from an Australian hot rod magazine called Street Machine. They're from a piece about a teenager named Craig Parker, who built his own muscle car.

00:24:38 Speaker_13
The story includes a picture of him sitting on the ground, his back against the grill of a red sports car in which he has an unmistakable mullet.

00:24:48 Speaker_13
And then there's an arrow added by ToppsMate pointing to this picture and another arrow pointing to a line in the text of the piece that reads, three years ago, Craig Parker was a mullet-haired teenager who wanted to build a car that could rival the best.

00:25:04 Speaker_13
It seemed to be a piece calling a mullet a mullet in 1991.

00:25:10 Speaker_12
I remember reading that and, like, my jaw dropped. Like, that was the coolest thing I've ever seen.

00:25:15 Speaker_13
Oscar immediately replied to Toppsmate's comment and said, This is amazing. You should submit this to the OED. This is great work.

00:25:23 Speaker_12
Part of me was dismissed that my cool theory I learned had been disproven by this Australian guy, but the bigger part was so happy that I had had a small part in making the contribution to the history of this term.

00:25:39 Speaker_13
Now, if you're saying to yourself, 1991, that's still so late. That's not even the 1980s. Is this really that big a contribution to the history of the term? Please keep this in mind about slang.

00:25:51 Speaker_13
Often it's used in spoken language years before it ends up in the documentary record. So in 1991 usage, maybe that does mean the mullet goes back to the late 1980s.

00:26:02 Speaker_13
And also, this was such a big deal to Oscar because he was just way down the rabbit hole.

00:26:07 Speaker_12
I had totally internalized this fact, right? like I had done the research and I had like lived with this for two years and I had like just spent hours defending this thesis in the comments.

00:26:17 Speaker_12
And then this guy comes and like, no, yeah, I just went out to my garage and found the Holy Grail, which is essentially what I think of as any pre-1994 references to mullets.

00:26:27 Speaker_13
Oscar wasn't the only one who would feel this way about the Street Machine article. The Oxford English Dictionary was about to jump back into the picture. So the OED had been on the mullet case way before Oscar.

00:26:42 Speaker_02
The OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, it covers the whole thousand year history of English.

00:26:48 Speaker_13
Catherine Connor Martin is the head of product for Oxford Languages, the dictionary division of Oxford University Press, which publishes the OED, and where she began working in 2003 as an editor working on the dictionary.

00:27:00 Speaker_02
And for every word in the OED, we give the first known documentary evidence for its use, not just for the word overall, but for every single meaning that the word has.

00:27:11 Speaker_13
In 2001, the dictionary added the word mullet, or specifically mullet noun nine.

00:27:19 Speaker_02
It's mullet noun nine because there are eight earlier words called mullet in English, each of which has a different etymological origin.

00:27:27 Speaker_13
But the people at the OED weren't totally satisfied with the etymological portion of the mullet noun nine entry, because like everybody else, 1994 sounded late to them.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
There seemed to be a disconnect between the lexical history of the mullet and the cultural and social history of the mullet. And furthermore, we had anecdotal evidence from people who were sure that they had heard or used that term in the 1980s.

00:27:54 Speaker_02
And as an editor, I myself felt like, well, obviously we knew this term in the 1980s. So in 2013, we decided to launch what we call an appeal to the public for further information on this word.

00:28:11 Speaker_13
The OED has been launching these appeals since it was founded, and now they do that on the internet, hoping that people like Oscar will find something they couldn't. For a few years, though, no one found anything. And then they got a lead.

00:28:24 Speaker_02
Then in 2015, the plot thickened. because someone posted a TIL, Thing I Learned, thread on Reddit.

00:28:33 Speaker_13
The OED people don't know Oscar, but Catherine is talking about Oscar. Someone on staff had come across his post, which had been updated with a link to the Street Machine article.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
That was really exciting, and when we found out about it, we were thrilled. But the OED's policy, because these first dates are so important to us, we really have to verify them.

00:28:55 Speaker_02
And we typically will, we want to verify them in print in a library, which is the gold standard.

00:29:00 Speaker_13
So the OED reached out to a number of Australian libraries, and the librarian at the National Library of Australia found a copy of Street Machine from January 1992, which would have come out in late 1991.

00:29:13 Speaker_13
Catherine read me the email the librarian sent to her.

00:29:16 Speaker_02
They said, I've checked our copy of Street Machine from January, February 1992. On page 31, there is some wording that is very similar to the quote you provided, but it doesn't mention the word mullet.

00:29:30 Speaker_13
Nothing if not persistent, the OED asked several other Australian librarians to track down this article. None of them could find a version of it with the word mullet, but they also couldn't find a January 1992 issue of Street Machine.

00:29:43 Speaker_13
they could only find a January-February 1992 double issue, which instead of making the whole thing shadier, actually introduced some doubt.

00:29:52 Speaker_02
Research librarians are the greatest people, and so one of them took it upon themselves to contact the editors of Street Machine magazine themselves.

00:30:02 Speaker_02
And they also didn't know of a January 1992 issue, but they couldn't say for certain that there might not have been some kind of special early version with limited circulation for a special event that might have had a slightly different text.

00:30:17 Speaker_13
Street Machine ended up posting about all of this on their Facebook page, and none of their readers could find this mention of the mullet or this January 1992 issue either. All of this sounds pretty sketchy, and that's why it didn't go into the OED.

00:30:32 Speaker_13
It was not definitive documentary proof. But for all that Katherine was suspicious of it, it still niggled at her. She couldn't completely dismiss it. And that's because she knows too much about how language works.

00:30:46 Speaker_02
Australian English has a history of kind of punching above its weight when it comes to colloquial English. So for example, the word selfie originated in Australian English and then infiltrated the rest of the world.

00:31:02 Speaker_02
It's entirely plausible that this word originated in Australian slang in the late 1980s and early 1990s, like all of these Australians say it did, and that it was only popularized by the Beastie Boys rather than coined by them.

00:31:15 Speaker_02
That wouldn't be surprising at all.

00:31:16 Speaker_13
So yeah, the first documented usage of mullet noun nine from 1994. It doesn't come from some random Usenet page. It comes from the Beastie Boys.

00:31:33 Speaker_13
The Beastie Boys, the rap-rock outfit consisting of Adam, Ad-Rock Horovitz, Mike, Mike D. Diamond, and Adam, MCA Yauch, who died in 2012, released the song Mullethead in June 1994.

00:31:45 Speaker_13
The lyrics, which reference late-stage mullet sporter Jean-Claude Van Damme, Billy Ray Cyrus, Kenny G, and Joey Buttafuoco, get at the idea, still with us, of the mullet haver as a particular kind of macho sleazebag.

00:31:59 Speaker_13
They skewer and condescend to a stereotype of lower-class bridge-and-tunnel guys, douches with stonewashed jeans and mullets driving into New York City to start fights and hook up with underage girls.

00:32:10 Speaker_13
The song also includes the lines, "'You wanna know what's a mullet?' Well, I got a little story to tell, about a hairstyle that's a way of life. Have you ever seen a mullet wife?' These words are in the OED."

00:32:31 Speaker_13
The second documented reference to the mullet, included in the OED2, also comes from the Beastie Boys.

00:32:37 Speaker_13
It arrived in 1995 in their storied, short-lived magazine Grand Royal, which was a big enough deal at the time to be featured on MTV News with Kurt Loder.

00:32:46 Speaker_01
The trio has now come out with its own magazine, and it turns out to be one of the funniest reads around.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
Grand Royal is, as its proprietors acknowledge, a celebration of inside humor, basketball trivia, slang, blatant opinions, and half-baked notions.

00:32:58 Speaker_13
The second issue delivered on the slang. It contains a collection of articles gathered under the headline, mulling over the mullet. Its opening essay begins, there's nothing as bad as a bad haircut.

00:33:10 Speaker_13
And perhaps the worst haircut of all is a cut we call the mullet.

00:33:15 Speaker_13
It goes on to include a series of mini essays about the haircut's origins and cultural significance, focusing largely on the cheesy white guy mullet, though it has one section called the political correctness of the mullet, which notes its popularity among Blacks, Hispanics, indigenous people, and women.

00:33:32 Speaker_13
There's also a Q&A with a mullet head, a defense of the mullet, and synonyms for the hairstyle, including soccer rocker, bi-level, neck warmer, ape drape, mud flap, hack job, the Missouri compromise, and the Kentucky waterfall, only some of which were jokes.

00:33:49 Speaker_13
Warren Fahey is a novelist, but in the 90s, he was freelance writing and running a movie database in San Diego. He'd gone to high school with Grand Royal's editor, who got in touch about the project, or as Warren tells it, about the mission.

00:34:02 Speaker_09
Everyone from porn stars to Superman were sporting it suddenly. And Masterstroke was to tag it with a word that would forever, hopefully abolish it from the human race.

00:34:18 Speaker_13
The editor asked Warren to write an ancient history of the mullet, a kind of anthropological satire. Warren agreed, even though no one knew what a mullet was.

00:34:28 Speaker_09
At the time, it was utterly, completely new and nobody had heard of it. Everybody thought it was nuts to do it. What are you naming a hairstyle after a fish? What?

00:34:37 Speaker_13
For the piece, he went up to Los Angeles to get a leather-bound tome that he says had been permanently borrowed from the L.A. County library system about the history of hairstyles going back to the Sumerians.

00:34:48 Speaker_09
I drove up to the Beastie Boys office. They had like a half-court basketball court in their office. While I was there, Mike D. actually came in. He had just gotten a wig on Hollywood Boulevard and went to a barbershop and got it cut into a mullet.

00:35:07 Speaker_09
And the barber was really upset about it. But he then drove around Hollywood Boulevard in a convertible and they did a photo shoot for the magazine with him wearing it.

00:35:19 Speaker_13
These photos would appear in a piece called I was a 20-something mullet head for a day by Mike Diamond, a chronological account of Mike D and the director Spike Jonze day in mullet wigs.

00:35:30 Speaker_13
With this piece and all the rest, the Beasties were tapping into and crystallizing an already popular sentiment, that this hairdo was over. If it had once been rebellious, it was increasingly conformist.

00:35:42 Speaker_13
If it had once been a way to signal you were an outsider, now it was just a way to pose as one. Yes, it was still common, but it wasn't cool.

00:35:51 Speaker_13
Tangentially, I think this may help explain one of the odder coincidences of all this, which is that in a period of two years, there were as many songs about this one hairstyle. Please recall that Swedish hockey hair song from 1993.

00:36:10 Speaker_13
In 1993 and 1994, hockey hair was in a deeply transitional moment, where it was popular and yet also played out, making it curious, of note in a way it hadn't been for years. And these songs, they noticed.

00:36:27 Speaker_13
Anyway, getting back on track, if the Beasties didn't originate the disdain for the mullet, they mainstreamed it and its new insulting name. But that doesn't mean they came up with this name.

00:36:38 Speaker_13
As Catherine Connor Martin said, it's totally plausible that the term mullet came from somewhere else, likely in the slang of some subculture, somewhere on the English-speaking globe.

00:36:49 Speaker_13
So now I want to turn back to the only subculture that had showed any promise, however piddling. I want to turn back to that lead we left dangling somewhere over Australia. I want to turn back to the elusive 1991 street machine.

00:37:09 Speaker_13
As far as we could tell, the only stone the OED had left unturned was Toppsmate himself, the Reddit user who had originally posted the street machine pages. So we decided to reach out to him.

00:37:20 Speaker_13
We didn't expect him to respond, but we figured it was worth a try. While we were waiting for him to get back to us, Benjamin Frisch, the producer of Decoder Ring, started digging around.

00:37:30 Speaker_13
First, he tried to find other places online Toppsmate hung out, but his only lead were the images that Toppsmate had posted on Reddit.

00:37:39 Speaker_13
Those images were all collected on the popular image hosting site called Imgur, or Imgur, depending on how you want to pronounce it, which allows you to click through everything someone has uploaded.

00:37:50 Speaker_13
Ben started clicking through Topsmate's other Imgur posts, looking for something that might give him another username or an email address. And then he noticed that one post had been uploaded three years after the original Reddit post.

00:38:03 Speaker_13
According to Imgur, it has only been viewed about 300 times. And as far as we can tell, it has never been linked anywhere, not on Reddit, not on Twitter. Oscar had never seen it. Catherine had never seen it.

00:38:16 Speaker_13
It had never popped up in any of the research we did for this piece. The name of the post is an apology to the Oxford English Dictionary. Okay, so hi. Hi. So yeah, so I called Catherine back to tell her about it. Can I just like read it to you?

00:38:31 Speaker_13
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's from April 22nd, 2018, and it's called An Apology to the Oxford English Dictionary. What? And it says, a few years ago, I saw a post on Reddit about the origin of the word mullet.

00:38:47 Speaker_13
I photoshopped a 1992 magazine I had laying around to make it look like it referred to the term mullet before it was first used in print.

00:38:54 Speaker_13
I changed the cover to make it more difficult to trace as an issue in the archives and add more credence to my edits. I also edited the publication copyright date to 1991 so it may have appeared as a special early edition. What?

00:39:12 Speaker_13
It says, why would I do this? I was a founding member of an online community called Annoy Club, which looks for arguments on the internet and then creates fake proofs as evidence that the person who is correct in the thread is actually wrong.

00:39:27 Speaker_13
We pick arguments that we have no personal stake in and involve no people we know, and for points, we create images, photos, websites, and interviews with false information supporting the incorrect side. Why am I admitting to this?

00:39:40 Speaker_13
I recently came across an entry in the OED's own blog, and there was a lot of work by OED staff behind the scenes trying to hunt down the special issue of the magazine I photoshopped.

00:39:48 Speaker_13
Also dragged into it were stream machine magazine staff and staff in multiple libraries in australia I think they should know i'm sorry for what i have done.

00:39:56 Speaker_02
I respect the oed oed and I should not have published the edits that I did Well I have very mixed emotions to hearing this I mean first of all, there's like

00:40:12 Speaker_02
validation that this always felt sort of hinky and the likelihood of it being real seemed vanishingly small.

00:40:20 Speaker_02
And I have to respect the game here because those things that he mentioned, like changing the copyright, so it would be hard, like those were exactly the right things to do to keep that tiny shred of possibility alive, that this was real and it worked.

00:40:41 Speaker_02
But then also, it's kind of sad when a mystery ends.

00:40:46 Speaker_13
Katherine also pointed out another thing, that the whole thing is pretty dark.

00:40:50 Speaker_13
There's an additional paragraph in the apology in which Topsmate says he's become disillusioned with Annoy Club because it's, quote, full of people whose only purpose in life is trolling vaccination supporters and U.S. political discussions.

00:41:03 Speaker_13
He goes on to say he almost died in the 80s from an infection for which there is now a vaccine. And he thinks that the political work is just empowering those who would prefer a confused populace. I want no part of the community anymore.

00:41:17 Speaker_13
Between 2015, when he posted the Photoshopped image, and 2018, when he apologized, Toppsmate, like so many people, seems to have been confronted with what it means to live in a post-truth world, one he was actively contributing to, only to find out he didn't like it that much.

00:41:36 Speaker_13
Still, he only saw fit to apologize in a hard-to-find image gallery that the people he was apologizing to might never have found. Is it really an apology if you don't deliver it? Still, Catherine's happy to have the whole thing resolved.

00:41:52 Speaker_02
So we posted this appeal. We wondered about this question, does the word mullet go back as far as our brains think it does or only as far as the documented evidence shows? And I guess

00:42:07 Speaker_02
From our perspective, that's still not answered, but we're always open for new data.

00:42:13 Speaker_13
And this one, I'm just like, you are open to new data, but I just feel like you guys got it.

00:42:17 Speaker_02
We never say never in this business. There are always new things that come up. But yes, I don't think this is active anymore.

00:42:26 Speaker_13
I want to gently suggest that there was something going on to keep it active for so long, something besides lexicographical plausibility. Call it a bit of mullet confirmation bias.

00:42:37 Speaker_13
Because it feels so much like the term ought to have existed before 1994, the OED put out this appeal. And then when evidence of it existing before 1994 popped up, it was taken seriously. Really seriously.

00:42:51 Speaker_13
And then ultimately, perhaps more seriously than it deserved. Like multiple librarians more seriously than it deserved. And so many people in this tale behaved this way. Reddit readers, librarians, street machine editors and readers. Definitely me.

00:43:07 Speaker_13
We all kept digging because we couldn't quite believe that what we thought we knew was true. wasn't true.

00:43:13 Speaker_13
One thing I noticed is that many of the people most devoted to the idea that the term mullet existed in the 1980s, Catherine, Oscar, Reddit commenters, me again, weren't even fully sentient in the 1980s.

00:43:27 Speaker_13
It wasn't personal experience or individual memory that was driving our certainty. It was just a cliched sense of the era, which was all we had to go on.

00:43:37 Speaker_13
In this regard, the mullet is a fun, low stakes iteration of something that is often not fun or low stakes at all. People's warped but strongly held perceptions of the imagined past and the length they will go to hold onto them.

00:43:55 Speaker_13
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Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. So we've almost fully excavated the mullet, but there's a little more to this mystery. If the term mullet wasn't coined in Australian car culture, who actually coined it?

00:45:50 Speaker_13
Did the Beastie Boys pluck it out of thin air or did they get it from somewhere else? Honestly, seems like they plucked it.

00:45:58 Speaker_09
It was definitely coined by Mike D of the Beastie Boys.

00:46:02 Speaker_13
Warren Fahey, the writer who contributed to the Grand Royal mullet package again.

00:46:06 Speaker_09
Who had noticed that this hairstyle was was impinging on civilization to a monstrous degree at that point in time. And he came up with the word mullet and said, this is what we're going to do. We're going to devote an issue to making that word stick.

00:46:26 Speaker_09
So it was all quite intentional and completely planned by super genius Mike D.

00:46:33 Speaker_13
Now, obviously, I would have liked to ask Mike D about this. Still would, if anyone has an in. Please consider this my public appeal. But he declined to speak with us.

00:46:44 Speaker_13
But Warren is adamant Mike D coined the term, and the grand royal peace itself suggests everyone working on it at the time thought so too.

00:46:52 Speaker_13
The article says, we're not sure where the term mullet came from, but as usual, Mike D was the first to use it around here.

00:46:59 Speaker_13
If that implies he might have gotten it from somewhere else, the possibilities listed for where he might have gotten it, maybe he was thinking of a muskrat, for example, don't suggest he was borrowing slang from a buddy.

00:47:12 Speaker_13
Still, Mike was the Beastie most involved with the magazine. Maybe the staff just hadn't talked mullets with the other members.

00:47:20 Speaker_13
When I ran the theory that Mike D had coined the term by the Beastie Boys publicist, a man named Steve Martin, who has known them forever, and did the real life interview with a mullet head for the Grand Royal mullet package, he'd never heard that it came specifically for Mike D. Steve said he first heard the term from Adam Yauch, likely in the early planning stages for this piece.

00:47:41 Speaker_13
He asked him if it had anything to do with a fish, and Adam said, no. Whatever Beastie came up with it, the timeline supports the theory that one of them birthed it outright. I explained this all to Catherine.

00:47:53 Speaker_13
This is just fully, like, too much detail, but one of the things that is also interesting is that song, Mullet Head. Like, it was a deep B-side.

00:48:06 Speaker_13
Like, it was originally released in 1994 in June as, like, an additional track on the single for the third single off Ill Communication, which is to say it's not an album track, but it actually also makes more sense of the Grand Royal piece because it's, like, the song came out in mid-1994, but it would have, like, only been for Beastie Boy heads or people who'd bought that single.

00:48:30 Speaker_02
That's such an important part of slang too. So like the appeal of slang when it comes out is that it's an indicator of in-group identification. So, like, the exclusivity is what makes it tantalizing.

00:48:45 Speaker_13
The other thing that is sort of interesting about, just date-wise, is that Grand Royals, the issue that has this article about the mullet, which is so much more detailed than the song, is a year late.

00:48:56 Speaker_13
So, it came out in 1995, but it's, like, famously a year late.

00:49:02 Speaker_02
Oh, like the publication process was way longer than it was supposed to be.

00:49:05 Speaker_13
Yes. And so that actually means it probably had been originally conceived in time to come out with the album, which came out in mid-1994. Oh, my God.

00:49:15 Speaker_02
You're tying this up to make it so, like, seeming, like, very straightforward. Well done. You solved the mullet mystery. Well, you had already solved it. That's the joke. It was already solved.

00:49:29 Speaker_14
Yes, it wasn't a mystery at all. We just thought it was.

00:49:32 Speaker_02
It was a made-up mystery. It wasn't a mystery ever.

00:49:37 Speaker_13
Please bear with me while I suggest there is a real mystery left that's answer also has to do with the Beastie Boys. And it's, why do we think the mullet is so hideous? Because we do.

00:49:49 Speaker_13
I want to go back to something that Lauren Wright, the woman with the mullet who I spoke with at the top of the show, said.

00:49:54 Speaker_14
You know, the mullet has been deemed, like, traditionally very unattractive and ugly.

00:49:59 Speaker_13
But for decades, as we have seen, the mullet was not thought to be unattractive and ugly at all. What happened? I think part of the answer is the term itself.

00:50:13 Speaker_13
When the Beasties were clowning on it, the mullet was reaching the end of its natural life cycle. So everywhere, so mass, that hip urbanites like the Beasties were sneering at it. But that's not unique. This fate awaits most trends.

00:50:27 Speaker_13
Most styles seem unstylish as they're falling out of style. But that's not when most of them get their names. We don't call bell-bottoms pizza pants. But this is exactly what happened to the mullet. Is it crazy to think that matters?

00:50:44 Speaker_13
If the Beastie Boys hadn't named the mullet, doesn't it seem entirely possible that we wouldn't remember it so clearly? Some random hairdo with no agreed-upon name.

00:50:54 Speaker_13
And if the name changed that we see it, and when we see it, couldn't it also have changed how we see it?

00:51:03 Speaker_13
Maybe one of the ways this term retrofitted the past is to make us primarily associate this hairstyle with the objects of the Beasties' ire, cheesy white guys still rocking it in 1994, and not think of it as what it had been for years, a surprisingly pan-gender, pan-racial, global haircut that had a really good run, but whose time was just up.

00:51:27 Speaker_13
The mullet, the term, blotted out the mullet, the hairstyle, which, despite everything, meant and continues to mean many different things to different groups of people.

00:51:38 Speaker_13
What I'm saying is, maybe the solution to this last mystery, why is the mullet so ugly, is that it isn't really at all.

00:51:46 Speaker_14
For the people that really get it and appreciate it, it's a powerful thing to have.

00:52:03 Speaker_13
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at slate dot com. This episode was written by me. It was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch.

00:52:17 Speaker_13
Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan Chung, Max Friedman and Katie Shepard. Derek John is executive producer. Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

00:52:28 Speaker_13
Thanks to Barney Hoskins, Jerry Slater, Daniel L. Schachter, Alicia Montgomery, June Thomas, Forrest Wickman, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

00:52:38 Speaker_13
If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, I want to strongly encourage you to become one. You can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoderink show page.

00:52:51 Speaker_13
or you can visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, including answers to mailbag questions. So please sign up now.

00:53:04 Speaker_13
Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads, and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website.

00:53:12 Speaker_13
Again, you can subscribe on Apple podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up. We'll see you in two weeks.