Date of Award

1999

Document Type

Research Paper

First Advisor

sal johnston

Second Advisor

dAve pAddy

Abstract

In this project I aim to give a heuristic account of the punk and underground music scene’s relationship to the phenomenon known as the mullet. I do not intend to construct profile of Mullet identity,” nor is this an attempt to understand the Psychology of the mullet,” nor is this an attempt to understand the Psychology of the mullet. The mullet hairstyle exists in many forms. It can be found women, on cowboys, and generally throughout all sectors of society. But I don’t actually look at the mullet itself at all. I look at how mullet humor is constructed in punk circles, so I do not look at the mullet as Subject. Rather, the mullet, as object, is reified to connote certain meanings in punk discourse. My initial interest regarding the mullet was to see whether or not the connotations punk attributed to the mullet were class-related. I assumed that, because the mullet is a haircut most often found on white working class men, punk’s humorous assault against the mullet were organized around class divisions between mullets and punks. However, punk’s relationship to the mullet is not based solely on classism. I argue that punks code the mullet as a class-stereotype for the sake of making humorous in-jokes about heavy metal and hard rock audiences; this in turn maintains important and necessary subcultural boundaries between different musical affiliations-punk and hard rock.

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