Decoder Ring | Mystery of the Mullet (Encore)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Slow Burn Presents: Decoder Ring | Mystery of the Mullet (Encore)

Date: December 4, 2024
Host: Willa Paskin
Episode Theme:
This episode of Decoder Ring dives deep into the cultural, linguistic, and historical “mystery of the mullet”—the infamous haircut that’s business in the front, party in the back. Beyond style, host Willa Paskin explores how the mullet became a symbol, how it earned its name, how cultural memory and language shape our view of the past, and just who, exactly, coined the term.

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Main Episode Theme & Purpose

Purpose:
To unravel the enduring mystery surrounding the mullet hairstyle—how it evolved from stylish to reviled, what the word “mullet” really means, where it comes from, and how our perceptions of the past get distorted alongside it.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mullet: Identity, Power, and Rebellion

• Lauren Wright, a modern-day mullet wearer (02:12):
  Describes her haircut as “short and tight on the sides, some solid length in the back… curly and luscious.”
• The mullet has signified rebellion, queerness, outsider status—and at various times, mainstream respectability and masculinity.
• “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.” (Lauren Wright, 05:07)

2. The Rise and Fall of the Mullet’s Cool Factor

• Once ubiquitous among rock stars (David Bowie, Prince), athletes (NHL hockey players, especially Ron Duguay and Jaromír Jágr), and celebrities (Billy Ray Cyrus, Lionel Richie).
• By the late 1990s, became derided as “trashy,” “low class,” and a comedic symbol of being out-of-fashion—anchored in pop culture via movies like Joe Dirt (04:36).

3. The Lexical Mystery: When Did We Start Calling It “The Mullet”?

• Listener Oscar Sigvardsson’s quest (07:40):
  Triggered by the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) 2013 public appeal: they couldn’t find the term "mullet" for the hairstyle before 1994.
• This shocked many: the haircut seemed so 1980s, but the word didn’t exist in print then. Decade confusion was rampant.
• “Like, mullets are the most 80s thing you can imagine… but nobody used that word in the entire decade? Like, it can’t be.” (Oscar Sigvardsson, 08:22)

4. Searching for the Earliest “Mullet”

• Oscar and many others scoured archives; all found older uses referenced the fish, not the hairstyle.
• Discovery of Australian slang “hockeyfila” (hockey hair) and a 1993 Swedish song about the phenomenon.
• Oscar’s "Today I Learned" Reddit post (18:54) fueled a crowdsource hunt for older references.

5. The Great “Street Machine” Magazine Hoax

• A Reddit user (“topsmate”) claimed to find “mullet” in a 1991 issue of Street Machine—but this evidence later revealed as a forgery (see resolution below).
• OED and libraries scoured for the magazine, finding only later or altered copies—adding only confusion and more myth to the word’s origins (25:11–26:41).

6. OED & Slang: The Truth Emerges

• Catherine Connor Martin (OED) explains how the OED must verify print evidence to catalog a word’s first appearance (24:55).
• The first verifiable use is the Beastie Boys’ 1994 track “Mullet Head” and their 1995 Grand Royal magazine feature (27:11–28:52).
• “It’s entirely plausible that this word originated in Australian slang... but our only solid documentary evidence is from the Beastie Boys.” (Catherine Connor Martin, 26:41)

7. The Beastie Boys' Role—And Who REALLY Named It?

• The 1994 song “Mullet Head” and the 1995 Grand Royal magazine issue helped popularize and codify “mullet”—shifting public perception toward disdain and cementing the term in pop culture.
• Writers involved (notably Warren Fahey) say Mike D of the Beastie Boys coined the term intentionally as part of a plan to kill the hairstyle:
  • “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... It was all quite intentional and completely planned by super genius Mike D.” (Warren Fahey, 40:14)
• There are conflicting reports among Beastie Boys’ collaborators and friends about which member first uttered it, but consensus is: the term came directly from the band, not from earlier subculture slang.

8. Language, Memory, and Confirmation Bias

• The false 1991 citation reveals the power of cultural myths and the desire for history to match intuition. Many want “mullet” to date to the ’80s because it feels right.
  • “It feels so much like the term ought to have existed before 1994… when evidence of it popped up, it was taken seriously... more seriously than it deserved.” (Willa Paskin, 38:20)
• Ultimately, the mullet is a “low stakes iteration of something that’s often not fun or low stakes: people’s warped but strongly held perceptions of the imagined past, and the lengths they’ll go to hold onto them.” (Willa Paskin, 39:16)

9. The Big Hoax Revealed

• Timestamps 34:19–37:47:
  “Topsmate,” the Reddit user, admits in a never-publicized Imgur gallery (titled "An Apology to the Oxford English Dictionary") he faked the evidence, Photoshopping the magazine for “points” in an online trolling club.
• Reflection on the harm of such fabrications in a post-truth world, and the seductive nature of online conspiracies and “fake proofs” (36:40).

10. Why Is the Mullet “Ugly”?

• The act of naming—especially the Beastie Boys naming and shaming—may have made the cut permanently uncool:
  • “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? And if the name changed when we see it, couldn’t it also have changed how we see it?” (Willa Paskin, 44:08)
• The cultural memory fixated on the negative stereotype coined by the Beasties, rather than the previous, less stigmatized iterations.

11. Reclaiming the Mullet

• Despite the journeys and shaming, for wearers today (especially in queer and outsider or “uncool” circles), the mullet remains a potent symbol of pride and self-definition.
  • “For the people that really get it and appreciate it, it’s a powerful thing to have.” (Lauren Wright, 45:54)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “It’s a haircut that’s long and short, male and female both, and neither at the same time.”
  —Willa Paskin, (10:06–10:28)
• “We called it the Dugay, named after Ron Dugay because he had such a good flow... Guys permed it. I mean, they got perms of only their flow.”
  —John Warner, (13:07–13:43)
• “Australian English has a history of kind of punching above its weight when it comes to colloquial English... The word ‘selfie’ originated in Australian English... It’s entirely plausible that ‘mullet’ originated in Australian slang.”
  —Catherine Connor Martin, (26:41)
• “He came up with the word mullet and said, this is what we’re going to do... It was all quite intentional and completely planned by super genius Mike D.”
  —Warren Fahey, (40:14)
• “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...”
  —Willa Paskin, (39:16)
• “Is it really an apology if you don’t deliver it?”
  —Willa Paskin, (37:47)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [02:12] — Introduction to Lauren Wright and the mullet’s power as a self-expression.
• [07:40] — Listener Oscar Sigvardsson’s linguistic sleuthing and the OED puzzle.
• [13:07–13:43] — 1980s hockey hair: “the Dugay” and “the flow.”
• [18:54] — Oscar’s “Today I Learned” post kicks off Internet crowdsourcing.
• [24:55] — OED’s rigorous process for verifying language’s first uses.
• [27:11] — Beastie Boys’ 1994 “Mullet Head” as the earliest confirmed use.
• [34:19–37:47] — The big reveal: the “Street Machine” evidence was faked.
• [44:08] — How naming and lampooning the mullet shaped cultural memory.

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Conclusion:

Decoder Ring’s “Mystery of the Mullet” is a sly, thorough, and entertaining investigation of not just a haircut, but how our collective memory and language work hand-in-hand to shape reality. What begins as a quirky question—“Who named the mullet?”—unspools into a reflection on the nature of history, mythmaking, and why sometimes the things we’re certain are true just...aren’t.

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For further cultural mysteries, email [e-mail].

End of summary.

Transcript

[Will]

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[Willa Paskin]

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. 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. 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. 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.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

This podcast contains explicit language.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Lauren Wright]

I am the proud owner and wearer of a mullet.

[Willa Paskin]

So firstly, can you describe what your.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

Mullet looks like to you?

[Willa Paskin]

Like, what nature of mullet is it?

[Lauren Wright]

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. It's definitely curly and luscious and I don't know, I'm pretty proud of it.

[Willa Paskin]

Lauren first encountered mullets when she was a kid back in the 90s so.

[Lauren Wright]

I grew up in Texas, and 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 and she was always chewing gum, gold hoops, just like strong gay woman, which I didn't really know at the time. 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 we would. She'd teach us different line dances. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. From such heights, the mullet could only fall. And it felt far. By the end of the 1990s, it had become dramatically uncool, loathed, even, considered to be uniquely unattractive, trashy and low class. 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 jock played by Dennis Miller.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Time.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Hey, Xander.

[John Warner]

Xander, you got to see this guy.

[Willa Paskin]

God almighty mana from inbred heaven.

[Warren Fahey]

Hey, freak boy.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

1976 called It Wants its hairstyle back.

[Willa Paskin]

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 the way it thumbs its nose at mainstream respectability.

[Lauren Wright]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Were you calling them mullets?

[Lauren Wright]

Do you remember No, I don't think that I was. I feel like I was too young to kind of remember, like, the big 80s mullet style.

[Benjamin Frisch]

What if I told you that the word mullet didn't exist until 1994? I.

[Lauren Wright]

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

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring, 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. 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. 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? 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.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

My name is Oscar Sigvardsson. I'm a software developer and I live in Stockholm.

[Willa Paskin]

Oscar is really interested in language and.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Linguistics, so I subscribe to all these, like, weird linguistics and lexicography blogs and things like that. And one of the blogs I was. I am subscribed to is the Oxford English Dictionary's Public Appeals blog, where the Oxford English Dictionary, like, puts out appeals to the public for, like, oh, we're researching this word and we've hit the wall.

[Benjamin Frisch]

And.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

And so in 2013, they put out this blog post about the word mullet.

[Willa Paskin]

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, which I.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Was very surprised to read because 1994, like, that's so late. Like, mullets are the eight, like, the most 80s thing you can imagine. Like, there's nothing more emblematic of the 80s than a mullet. But you're telling. Like, but nobody used that word in the entire decade. Like, nobody. Like, it can't be.

[Willa Paskin]

Like, it's so weird, 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. 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. It was first popularized in the early 1970s by David Bowie. 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. It was Christmas week, and the hair stylist 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.

[Susie Ronson]

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. You know, nobody. You'd look really different.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Susie Ronson]

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?

[Willa Paskin]

The answer was some scissors. Schwarzkopf Red Red Hot Hair Dye and Guard, an anti dandruff treatment that made Bowie's hair hair stand up in the front. 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. It was the perfect haircut for the extraterrestrial Ziggy, who was not exactly male or female because the mullet was genderless, too. It's easy to lose sight of this now, but 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. 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. 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. 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 Dugay.

[Will]

Ron Dugay awarded a penalty shot. And here he comes.

[Willa Paskin]

Dugay, a handsome Canadian who was married to a model, played in the NHL from 1970, 1979 to 1989, and is widely credited with having one of the earliest mullets in the league. 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. Of the four, Dugay 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. I mean, even the doll says to 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.

[John Warner]

We didn't call it mullets. We called it hockey hair.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[John Warner]

We called it the Dugay, named after Ron Dugay because he had such a good flow.

[Benjamin Frisch]

You called it flow.

[John Warner]

It was called the flow. Like, how's your flow? If somebody came in and was looking like 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. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 Jaeger. I came here 1990. I had the longest hair in NHL. But don't forget, people, in 1990, there was a style that's Jaeger, the legendary Czech who would play in the NHL for 28 seasons. Talking to ESPN in 2016, 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. It's like the mullet a prince in a Disney movie would have if they had mullets. Well conditioned, luxurious, somehow sparkly. And Jaeger'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. I came to us first City was Motley Crue and Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. So they all had a long hair. So I want to be a rock star like them. 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. So many of the canonical mullets, Jaegers, Billy Ray Cyruses, Jean Claude Van Dammes 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. 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 next one. 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. 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. This brings us back to Oskar Sigvardson. 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. Confronted with a claim that seemed so chronologically off, Oscar did what a curious language obsessed person might do. He tried to find out for himself. Okay, so from here on out, we're going to dig into the lexical weeds, but I promise the payoff is worth it. 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 Oscar set out to find one.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

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? 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.

[Willa Paskin]

The mullet, a family of fish, is eaten all over the world.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

And it was like, 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. Paul Newman is called mullet Head in Cool Hand Luke. He doesn't have a mullet. Like, he's called. He's being called an idiot. There's a clip from Cheers where Sam calls Diana mullet head.

[Willa Paskin]

You just ended that sentence with two prepositions.

[Will]

Don't you have customers to deal with?

[Willa Paskin]

That ended with a preposition too.

[Will]

Don't you have customers to deal with?

[Willa Paskin]

Mullet head?

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

So, like, that's it, right? You can't actually find it. At that point it became like, oh, this is a fun fact. Our use of parties less efficient to use in Sweden, though.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

The Swedish word for is hockeyfila, which means hockey hair.

[Willa Paskin]

Hockey fila was. Is a whole thing in Sweden. There's even a well known 1993 Swedish rock song about it.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

There was a very big hit from the Swedish group the Lykla Kompisana, which translates as the happy Friends. Like, it was huge. It was something that everyone knew because it's like a real ear worm and it's like funny and it has. The chorus is just a guy singing.

[Willa Paskin]

Anyway, even though it wasn't always a smash with other Swedes, Oscar often shared this mullet factoid. And then in 2015, for no particular reason, he decided to share it on Reddit. Oscar posted his information about mullet to the todayilearned subreddit. A kind of gathering place for fun tidbits.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

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.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Just because, like everyone, like, whoa. And then trying to solve this problem with you. Like, exactly.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Yes, that was my favorite part.

[Willa Paskin]

Right?

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Because the comments, most many comments were like, this is total horseshit. Like I, I was in the 80s. You use mullet all the time.

[Willa Paskin]

This is exactly what some of the comments on his post sound like. Bullshit. I grew up in Queens, New York City and used the term mullet since 1994. One reads, Another goes, I call bullshit. When Achy Breaky Heart came out in 1992, I and everyone I knew in North Dakota was referring to his haircut as a mullet.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

There was lots of those. But anyway, lots of people started like doing the research and it was so much fun.

[Willa Paskin]

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, where it was framed as like, get a load of this nonsense. And one of the people reading that post, he found something.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

A user named topsmate like 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. And yeah, and he posted this image of a magazine that he found in his garage.

[Willa Paskin]

The image that topsmate posted is of two pages from an Australian high hot rod magazine called Street Machine. They're from a piece about a teenager named Craig Parker who built his own muscle car. 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. And then there's an arrow added by topsmate 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. It seemed to be a piece calling a mullet a mullet in 1991.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

I remember reading that and like my jaw dropped like, that was the coolest thing I've ever seen.

[Willa Paskin]

Oscar immediately replied to topsmate's comment and said, this is amazing. You should submit this to the Oedipus. This is great work.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Part of me was like, dismissed that my cool today, I learned, had been disproven by this Australia guy. But like, part, but the bigger part was so happy that I could like make like I had had like a small part in making the contribution to the history of this term.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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. And also this was such a big deal to Oscar because he was just way down the rabbit hole.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

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. And then this guy comes and like, no, yeah, I just went out to my garage and found the Holy Grail. Essentially what I think of as any pre1994 references to mullets.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

The oed, the Oxford English Dictionary. It covers the whole thousand year history of English.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

In 2001, the dictionary added the word mullet, or specifically mullet noun 9.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

It's mullet noun 9 because there are eight earlier words called mullet in English, each of which has a different etymological origin.

[Willa Paskin]

But the people at the OED weren't totally satisfied with the etymological portion of the mullet noun 9 entry, because like everybody else, 1994 sounded late to them.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

There seemed to be a disconnect between the lexical history of the of mullet and the cultural and social history of the 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. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

Then in 2015, the plot thickened because someone posted a Til Thing I Learned thread on Reddit.

[Willa Paskin]

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

[Catherine Connor Martin]

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, and we typically will. We want to verify them in print in a library, which is the gold standard.

[Willa Paskin]

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. Catherine read me the email the librarian sent to her.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. They could only find a January, February 1992 double issue, which, instead of making the whole thing shadier, actually introduced some doubt.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

Research librarians are the greatest people. And so one of them took it upon themselves to contact the editors of Street Machine magazine themselves. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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. It was not definitive documentary proof. But for all that Catherine 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.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

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. 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. That wouldn't be surprising at all.

[Willa Paskin]

So yeah, the first documented usage of mullet noun 9 from 1994 it doesn't come from some random Usenet page. It comes from the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys, the rap rock outfit consisting of Adam Adrok Horowitz, Mike Mike D. Diamond and Adam MCA Yauc, who died in 2012, released the song Mullet Head in June 1994. The lyrics, which reference the 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. 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. The song also includes the lines, you want to 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. The second documented reference to the mullet included in the OED 2 also comes from the Beastie Boys. 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.

[Will]

The trio has now come out with its own magazine, and it turns out to be one of the funniest reads around. Grand Royal is, as its proprietors acknowledge, a celebration of inside humor, basketball trivia, slang, blatant opinions and half baked notions.

[Willa Paskin]

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, and perhaps the worst haircut of all is a cut we call the mullet. 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. There's also A Q and 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. 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.

[Warren Fahey]

Everyone from porn stars to Superman were sporting it suddenly and masterstroke was to tag it with a word that would, you know forever, hopefully abolish it from the human race.

[Willa Paskin]

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 at the time.

[Warren Fahey]

It was utterly completely new and nobody had heard of it and everybody thought it was nuts to do it. What are you naming a hairstyle after?

[Lauren Wright]

A fish.

[Warren Fahey]

What?

[Willa Paskin]

For the piece, he went up to Los Angeles to get a leather bound tome that he says had been permanently borrowed from the LA county library system about the history of hairstyles going back to the Sumerians.

[Warren Fahey]

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. 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.

[Willa Paskin]

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 of Mike D and the director Spike Jones, Day in mullet wigs. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. As far as we could tell, the only stone the OED had left unturned was topsmate himself, the Reddit user who had originally posted the Street Machine pages. So we decided to reach out to him. 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. First, he tried to find other places online. Topsmate hung out. But his only lead were the images that TopSmate had posted on Reddit. 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. 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. Of course, 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. 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.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Okay, so.

[Willa Paskin]

Hi.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

Hi.

[Willa Paskin]

So, yeah, so I called Catherine back to tell her about it.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Can I just, like, read it to you?

[Derek John]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Okay, so it's from April 22, 2018, and it's called An Apology to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[John Warner]

What?

[Benjamin Frisch]

And it says, a few years ago, I saw a post on Reddit about the origin of the word mullet. 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. I changed the COVID 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. It says why would I do this? I was a founding member of an online community called Anoy 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. 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? 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. 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. I respect the OED and I should not have published the edits that I did.

[Derek John]

Well, I have very mixed emotions to hearing this. I mean first of all there's like validation that this always felt sort of hinky and the likelihood of it being real seemed vanishingly small. And I have to respect the game here because those things that he mentions, 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. But then also it's kind of sad when a mystery ends.

[Willa Paskin]

Catherine also pointed out another thing that the whole thing is pretty dark. There's an additional paragraph in the apology in which topsmate says he's become disillusioned with a NOI club because it's quote full of people whose only purpose in life is trolling, vaccination supporters and US political discussions. 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. Between 2015 when he posted the photoshopped image, and 2018 when he apologized, Topsmate, 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. 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.

[Derek John]

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 from our perspective, that's still not answered. But we're always open for new for new data.

[Benjamin Frisch]

At this point I'm just like, you are open to new data, but like, I just feel like you guys got it.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

We, we never say never in in.

[Derek John]

This business there are always, there are always new things that come up. But yes, I don't think this is active anymore.

[Willa Paskin]

I want to gently suggest there was something going on to keep it active for so long, something besides lexicraphical plausibility. Call it a bit of mullet confirmation bias, because it feels so much like the term ought to have existed before 1994. The OED put out this and then when evidence of it existing before 1994 popped up, it was taken seriously. Really seriously. 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. We all kept digging because we couldn't quite believe that what we thought we knew was true wasn't true. 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. 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 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 lengths they will go to hold onto them. 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? Did the Beastie Boys pluck it out of thin air, or did they get it from somewhere else? Honestly, seems like they plucked it.

[Warren Fahey]

It was definitely coined by Mike D. Of the Beastie Boys.

[Willa Paskin]

Warren Fahey, the writer who contributed to the Grand Royal mullet package, again, who.

[Warren Fahey]

Had noticed that this hairstyle 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. So it was all quite intentional and completely planned by super genius Mike D.

[Willa Paskin]

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. But Warren is adamant Mike D coined the term and the Grand Royal piece itself suggests everyone working on it at the time thought so too. 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. 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. Still, Mike was the Beastie most involved with the magazine. Maybe the staff just hadn't talked mullets with the other members. 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 from Mike D. Steve said he first heard the term from Adam Yauck, likely in the early planning stages for this piece of 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.

[Benjamin Frisch]

This is just fully like too much detail. But one of the things that is also interesting is that song Mullet Head.

[Willa Paskin]

Like it was a deep B side like it.

[Benjamin Frisch]

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 this song came out in mid-1994, but it would have only been for Beastie Boy heads or people who'd bought that single.

[Derek John]

That's such an important part of slang too. So the appeal of slang when it comes out is that it's. It's an indicator of in group identification. So like the exclusivity is what makes it tantalizing.

[Benjamin Frisch]

The other thing that is sort of interesting about just date wise is that Grand Royal. So the issue that has this article about the Mullet, which is so much more detailed than the song is a year late. So it came out in 1995, but it's like famously a year late.

[Derek John]

Oh, like the publication process was way longer than it was supposed to be.

[Benjamin Frisch]

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. But then.

[Derek John]

Oh my God, you're tying this up to make it so, like seeming like very straightforward.

[Oscar Sigvardsson]

Well done.

[Derek John]

You solved the mullet mystery.

[Benjamin Frisch]

Well, you had already solved it. That's the joke. It was already solved.

[Derek John]

Yes. It wasn't a mystery at all.

[Benjamin Frisch]

We just thought it was. It was a made up mystery.

[Catherine Connor Martin]

It wasn't a mystery ever.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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.

[Lauren Wright]

You know, the mullet has been deemed like traditionally very unattractive and ugly.

[Willa Paskin]

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. 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. 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? 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? And if the name changed that we see it and when we see it, couldn't it also have changed how we see it? Maybe one of the ways this term retrofitted the past is to make us primarily associate this hairstyle with the objects of the Beastie's 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 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. 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.

[Lauren Wright]

For the people that really get it and appreciate it. It's a powerful thing to have.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoder ring slate.com this episode was written by me. It was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan Chung, Max Friedman and Katie Shepard. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior Technical director. 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. 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 Decoder Ring show page, or you can visit slate.comdecoder/ 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. 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 again. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.comdecoder plus to sign up. We'll see you in two weeks.

[Benjamin Frisch]

It.