why am I not surprised?

why am I not surprised?

mesh hats are like 1993 i'm sorry if jackass made them popular again 4 years ago

Here's what REALLY trucks me into a sheer irrational frenzy of loathing: guys who wear them off to the side. You, sir, are not a five-year-old street urchin, an extra in a Dead End Kids movie, or someone who takes the short bus. Have some diginity, please.

I always thought they were worn by punks, skaterboarders, hipsters etc. because a lot of guys really *had* to wear them at work. Or because they're really cheap and reasonably sturdy and that's all they could afford. But we can't say the same about Trucker's caps, right?

''I scanned the room and I could count 30 or 40 hipsters wearing trucker hats,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''You could have closed your eyes and thrown a stick and hit a dozen foam caps at any given point of the night.''

yeah, it wasn't flattering to the boys wearing hats. although i suppose that someone should tell the people in my hometown (small town michigan) that they're actually cool. or were cool. whatever.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/13832/1/image.gif

rowr.

also the dickies thing- they make nice looking basics, i mean the whoe tshirt jeans work shirt thing, and they rarely wear out-i have a few peices in my wardrobe.

except its not quasi at all

calgon take me away

i like these hats

How long does it take before they actually feel normal?

I don't know - it's not even about emulating anyone really - just that the dressed-down style of vinyl windbreaker, unfaded jeans or work-pants, plain t-shirt, nice clean stans etc always seemed like a sensible way to dress. almost like a school uniform, decision-free and unvain. it just seems funny to think that people say this is played out when it's whole strength before was under the radar unplayoutability. whatever.

(now everyone has gotten in while I was typing this and made all my points but whatever, so what, I'm losing my edge)

Do people find any other elements of hipster style class-condescending because they come from thrift stores or were once worn by people performing manual labor? I think I'll write a handbook of class-appropriate attire.

Someone please explain the qualitative difference between the following:

--gas station jacket w/stripes on sleeve and/or front + oval name/brand patch

--nylon snap-front collarlesss cotton-lined/unlined windbreaker w/ school/business/fraternal organization design printed on back

--mesh-back trucker cap

--corduroy jeans

--flea market/thrift store novelty t-shirt

--Hipper-than-thou band t-shirt

--Converse sneakers

--foldover-flap messenger bag

--terry-cloth wristband

The trucker hats are one item on a spectrum of uniform but, like Lee Harvey Oswald, they do not act alone. I think the reason people are upset about the trucker hats is that they can SEE them, and not the other items. It is a relatively crude level of style discourse.

The most redeeming thing about the trucker hats is that they lend themselves to nice graffiti customization. There should be more safe spaces for people to write graffiti.

The two people I have actually seen wearing the graffito'd ones were:

1. A street person harassing me at an outside table on Gansevoort Street. We were the suckers drinking at a bar with a circumflex in its name but who's got the trucker hat? According to the popular sentiment, I think this guy was TOO poor to be wearing a trucker hat so he should have sold the hat instead of begging us for money.

2. A moron yelling gay-bashing epithets from the passenger window of a car near Union Square. This was not cool at all. It sounded the death knell for my brief lust for a trucker hat.

converse were never the province of working class men...working class boys, maybe. ditto terry cloth wrist band, fold over flap messenger bag, cooler than thou band t-shirt.

*ducks*

are we talking mesh caps or hats that say freightliner or peterbilt etc.?

there are a lot of truckers in my family and i guess they are hipsters now! i can't wait to bask in their glamour.

(and those caps have been a staple forever!! some uppity schmoes at a gallery-opening start sporting them and suddenly they're outré? you people are frightened of weird shit)

who are you, momus? is this 1993/86/78?

That is all I have to say on this subject.

i want someone to photoshop a pith helmet on a picture of me.

http://www.asics.co.jp/onitsukatiger/apparel/images/OKT011-0325.jpg

yes/hmm/no

i seriously doubt these hats will be worn much beyond the summer (and possibly even shorter than that unless the next NERD album is rerleased PDQ) but they are just a fad - and thats what's so great about fads they are fun enjoyable things that you can enjoy and throw away.

i for one have two hats - i enjoy wearing them (even ever so slightly to the side sometimes) i'm sure i'll ;ook back on these days with a cringe like i do now when i think of some of the shit i've worn in the past but at least it beats the routine of the humdrum jumper, jeans and sensible shoes

viva la fad

oh and i just thought my dad drives a truck - a big one so am i exempt from being a fashioner now??

ride my wave

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

TRUCK

http://www.wearness.com/media/cloth_p1_det1_1_big.jpg

BEAT THAT JESS.

Ha, ha. Me. Except not really -- I think my dad gave me a cap with his company's name on it when I was ten, and I wore it for about two days. And this company was/is a huge magilla accounting firm. Indeed a lot of the foam caps I've seen in goodwill stores have had customized logos for all sorts of white-collar companies, used for what were obviously interminable events to instill company pride and whatnot.

I got this 8 months ago.

Now, all the star-fucker japanakids have John Deere hats they bought from Home Depot when they went to get bucket paint to do "Sick Rollers, Son."

They also rock green hats with clean white backs.

I no longer wear my John Deere hat.

Now I run my Chinese Restaraunt hat, which I got from my family, which owns said restaraunt.

Let's see the star-fucker japanakids get one of these...

Bitches.

k-FUCKING-ROWR!

Dickies and Carhartt are classic. You all need to remove the sticks from your asses. They're shoved up too high.

I've never bought clothing in NYC that cost more than $80 (and I think that was shoes or something).

That pic is beguiling, by the way -- such a mysterious look on that girl's face.

http://www.mp716vnmilitaria.com/Vn165.jpg

http://www.bethel.edu/~whidre/JPG_images/Pith_Helmet_-_Butting_Heads.jpg

Uh, what?

Oh.

Oh yeah anyway, trucker hats:
http://www.mtv.com/shared/media/news/images/n/Neptunes/sq-pharrell_williams_live-d.jpg

http://www.badassdads.com/art/hat.gif

Cause who gives a shit? They are fucken hats, fer chrissakes.

I don't wear any kind of hats (save tuques for the cold Cdn winter) because my head is too big.

but I'm wearing Carhartt pants right now, so maybe I'm doomed.

but this thread is about trucker hats, and they speak volumes.

PAGING DAVE PAJO! REPEAT: PAGING DAVE PAJO!

I have three trucker-style hats, one's for Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation tour, one's for Hudson Hawk and the last one was given to me by some guy I know a few weeks ago, it's says "Hard Cock Cafe" a takeoff on the Hard Rock. He printed up 100 of them for a biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. No, I don't get it, either. Of course he didn't sell any. It's pretty ridiculous, but at least it fits. I also have a sissified straw cowboy hat. And my Kevin Spacey Alternative Rock Beanie.

I really really hate those bucket/crusher style caps that are so popular with my gay brothers when they hit the dunes or model in the summer J. Crew catalogs. They look so unsexy, like something a really bad stylist would have worn in 1997.

Anyway, this is a goofy thread. I agree with Fritz, Sam and Daddino.

I don't know who these guys are or what they sound like, but I've hated them with a burning passion ever since seeing this photo in the Observer.

I own a number of work-shirts, but none that purport to be "real" work-shirts. I just like the cut/fit - I don't wear t-shirts often, and with jeans work shirts look just in between slob and "I spent way too long getting dressed." I've got one from "Front End Vintage" (I think that was the name of an Internet store I purchased it from) with the old Las Vegas sign on the back, I have a couple of the less-tacky ones with pinup/nose-art on them. I guess you can never really be tacky-free with a half-naked woman on your back, but c'est la vie.

When are bowling shirts due to make a comeback? If we bring back them and JNCO jeans, it'll be junior high all over again. But with waaaaay better weed.

I alternate between my Red Sox, Angels, Orioles and Celtics hats.

For work, I've got a Twins "batting practice" hat - some funny stretchy material that's supposed to be cooler and better about sweating.

I had one Indian Motorcycle hat that rocked my world, but it got too worn out and smelled strongly of liquor and tobacco (I've given up both), and I can't find another. Boo-hoo.

Milo, this is Slick 57. These guys also head up the Boys Named Sue. I love them and you are obviously a fule. ;)

BTW, bowling shirts have never gone out of style.

Don't fuck wit dis forum. We change shit. Moral of the day, folks.

Attention all marketing folks trendspotting in ILx: Kill yourselves now. That is all.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38378000/jpg/_38378779_brian150.jpg

I officially want a mesh-back cap again. But in a normal girl size.

Lanham has an epithet to describe this completely uncool crowd: midtown.

Bashing Midtown is so yesterday.

How the fuck is a television show nearly everyone in my age group watched "extremely underground?"

Also, the idea that anybody actually lives in Midtown aside from old spinsters who've lived there for 30+ years is beyond me.

This sentence is hilarious. I am going thrifting this weekend for teeny-tiny gimme hats to put on top of my rolls of quarters and then asking Big Cup if it will hire my dressed-down money.

What Lanham doesn't know is that Yorkville is the next Williamsburgh because I live there: shhh....keep it a sooper dooper sekret!

I dunno, all the broke-ass DJs I know wit' no cars who are always trying to beg rides to gigs off their friends so they don't gotta carry their shit over the subway system...?

If I was the reporter I woulda asked him if being a coddled momma's boy princess was cool!!

Except that Thundercats thing was priceless, so, like, he wins.

<3

Jamaican: They are Jamaican. (Left wing poor country value.)
Black: They are black. (Left wing racial value.)
Spliffed up: They smoke dope. (Left wing peace vibe.)
Musician: Creative. (Left wing expressive occupation value.)

American: They are American. (Right wing rich country value.)
White: They are white. (Right wing colonial bastard value.)
Trash: They are lower class. (Right wing populist value.)
Redneck: Not urban. (Right wing 'private property, soil, C&W, patriotism' type value.)
Drivers: Aggressive individualist job. (Right wing occupation value.)

So are trucker hats (no matter how 'ironic') a youth culture trend that could only happen under the Republicans? Why are the Williamsburgers not wearing big woolly rasta hats? Is it because they're not 'woolly liberals' right now?

WE DEMAND WOOLY CAPS

i'm goin up the country
sorry but i can't take you

there ain't nothin in the country
a guy like you can do"

- white american trash rednecks Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys

are overdetermined and ignorant stereotypes of country people a culture trend that could only happen among people who have never stepped outside of a curbside trash-pickup zone?

(i.e. why do I even bother responding to another completely idiotic Momus post?)

gravy fries to thread

Momus, read your Vice Magazine. Jamaica chic was last month's fashion spread.

http://www.viceland.com/issues/v10n3/htdocs/fashion1.php

Do keep up.

Since when were stereotypes ever worth paying attention to?

And anyway, if we wanted a reconciliation with "Bush's America" wouldn't we be dressing like this?

http://www.everettcollection.com/Entertainment/EntertainmentTV/Pages/page15.jpg

Momus for years I wore a red mylon-mesh hat. This one was so hard-core it didn't even have cloth or foam across the front, just nylon mesh all the way around, and it had a little patch sewn onto the front that read "CO OP", because it was from the Blount County farmer's co-op in East Tennessee, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains (about a 45-minute drive from my house). It was an allegiance to "white trash" for sure, but not to any politics I might project on them. To me it symbolized 1) people working together to create something useful 2) the down-and-dirty DIY ethic of the mountains and 3) a willful tweaking of the "urban" styles that the cool kids affected in my high school, and later, college. I didn't want to repurpose the meaning of the hat, I wanted the hat to repurpose the meaning of "cool"!

(at least not until recently)

(btw my Goodyear hat is more of a pit crew hat, y'know worn at racing events. And I like IRL/CART and I've been to the Indianapolis 500 a bunch of times so I guess that makes me an Indy 500 guy)

For god's sake, why do you want to go and bash truck drivers. I mean jet fuel doesn't bring itself to Heathrow or Tokyo airports. I think half the people wear trucker hats with genuine affection for the corny places they come from, even after they relocate to a big city. In high school I waited the counter in a truck stop and my uncle was an independent big rig driver. So I feel I can wear a mesh back hat if I feel like it, dammit. It's like saying, don't be fooled by the zip code that I got, I'm still Jenny, Jenny from the sticks. Yes, when the economy is rough American fashion does tend to get all "Born in the USA," but we are subsidy-check-cashin-- I mean hard-working-- Americans and this is how we dress. At least it has a grain of authenticity in it, unlike dressing like a Jamaican dancehall queen or rastafarian (speaking for myself of course).

My parents didn't send me to 6 years of evil medical school so some cyberhipster could tell me what I can and cannot wear. Wait, that came out wrong.

http://www.nba.com/media/act_corie_blount.jpg

'APRIL 17th 2003: I bought a ?trucker hat? yesterday. Now I have never really been a hat kind of guy, my precious locks need to be flaunted 24/7. And I never understood the appeal of the trucker concept. Most of the monikers are less than ironic, usually advertising some form of lubricant or a Midwest little league team (wait, SOME would call these hollow symbols ironic). But I bought a hat, a customized hat at that. I?ll throw up a photo of me and my customized hat when the time arrives.'

'Saturday, February 15, 2003

spent the day shopping got myself a totally awesome t-shirt with a pacman strawberry on the front with sparkles! very retro cool! also picked myself up a remax trucker hat , and oh baby does it make one hell of a lure for the ladies! i mean the females were practically all over me. armed with my fraggle rock baseball t, bomber jacket, and remax hat , i was unstoppable! i felt like such a big man when the waitress at my favorite pub sat down to check my hat out. much to the male customer's dismay! mouhahah.'

'Chris Coyle : Like so many original things this drunken asshole comes up with I swear to God that Coyle was the first one in snowboarding to don the trucker hat, aviator shades, and denim jackets. Basically, if you want to be one the forefront of snowboard fashion then check out what Coyle is sporting ?cause the guy is like two years ahead of Four Square. The name Chris Coyle can be found either on the pages on Transworld or on its Web site. The man himself can be found in your local bar.'

Well, him or his double.

'Knock it off with the trucker hats already

I'm not usually one to bitch about fashion trends. I can usually stomach the most absurd of fads for however long they last. Hell, many of them end up growing on me. But this mesh hat craze has gone too far. It's been a couple weeks already since the New York Frickin' Times ran an article announcing the trend dead. Shouldn't "hipsters" move on to the next big thing by the time the mainstream press even notices a trend, much less announces it dead? Still, I see them everywhere I go. *sigh*'

And from ilXor, June 11th, 2003:

Frankly I could care less what yankees and eurotrash think. 'Round these parts such hats have always been sported and are a-okay in my book.

Like I said upthread: stick, out of ass.

No, I don't think, I google.

Therefore I yam.

Only if we can write the bulk of it.

Are you a mesh hat junkie? What labels are poking out from under your bill?

um wow

"Ooh, this is cool. This is rad," marvels Jordon Davis, holding up a crimson leather jacket with a healthy pair of lapels. Lanham's internal hipster barometer detects little trace of irony.

Davis, 19, an aspiring model and artist, is an Angeleno on his inaugural visit to New York. "I get a Silver Lake vibe out here," he says, referring to L.A.'s Williamsburg analog. "

He's not an aspiring model and artist. He's a guitarist.

I'm always right that way, and it's always ugly in an inherently french De-Tocqueville-visits-the-colonials or Barthes-goes-to-the-car-show kind of way.

There's been some stubborn resistance on this thread to the idea that items become trendy or culty precisely because of the limitations of their meaning spectrum, in other words because they incarnate stereotypes. To object on a thread about indie guys with trucker hats that 'We don't care about stereotypes' or that 'Down south, black people wear them too,' or that 'Not all country people are right wing, you ass' is disingenuous and misses the point. The item in question gets its totemic power from the stereotype it incarnates; in other words, from the main thrust of the cluster of values it carries, rather than from peripheral exceptions and inclusions.

What's interesting is when one community (hipsters) wrests the item, with all its signs, away from another (truckers) and begins the work of re-assigning its meaning. This is really where we get the buzz of trend-recognition and have the pleasure of seeing a social value renegotiated before our very eyes, in real time. It's inherently pleasureable to see one stereotype changing into another, because it's always fascinating to see social values changing, and to find oneself on the side of those who understand and embrace the change rather than on the side of those who fail to notice or resist it.

My (unanswered) question on this thread has been about how much of the original 'trucker' values remain in the hat when it moves to Williamsburg. It's essentially the same question as: 'When the style of the racist football hooligan skinhead moved into the middle-class British mainstream in the mid-90s and it became acceptable for white males to have shaved heads and wear shoes with re-inforced toe-caps, how much of the right wing values of skinhead culture remained intact in the repurposed look to give it its desired 'hardness'? Conversely, how much was the skinhead look itself diluted and normalised? Were skinheads disappointed to find their power to frighten people diminshed, because they now resembled lots of placid and trendy guys on the High Street rather than xenophobe outsider warriors? And do skinheads have the resources to come up with a new look when something like this happens, to distinguish themselves from the hipsters and re-affirm their menace?'

Extrapolating, can truckers in any way now be mistaken for trendsters? Might you have to look twice to see if someone is real white trash or trusty simu-trash? Might it be the case that the distinguishing details are now moving, thanks to the rapid, confusing reassignment of dress codes, more and more into the body itself? In other words, you can tell a real skinhead because he has blotchy skin and bad teeth, and you can tell a real trucker because he has a beer bulge, whereas the trendsters who imitate them tend to be slim, buff and rather polished texturally.

However, even this isn't a given. Note the Matthew Barney prosthetics tendency -- trendsters not only now grow white trash mustaches and get tattoos, but are starting to get prosthetic beer bellies and acne. See also Cindy Sherman (soccer mom series) Terry Richardson (porno biker look), Casey Spooner, Jeremy Scott (art fag belly bulge look).

At various times I've been convinced that items of clothing can get me laid. In fact whole industries are based on selling us this illusion. Maybe it's not an illusion.

well, duh. its called image.

heard it

This, though, is a joke. From an
Interview with some real truckers:

Funky Redneck: Ya know truckers make good money. The part that sucks is that all the speed you have to take, to stay up while driving all dem trucks late. I would be getting alot of dem darn tickets, cuz I would be driving like 90 miles an hour up and down Highway 5.

PD: You just didn't give a fuck?

Funky Redneck: Yeah, I don't give a armadillo's behind about it... I started growing muh beard around the same time I began trucking, so like seven years.

PD: Damn, so that beard is down your pelvis? You pull a lot of truck stop diner waitresses with that beard?

Funky Redneck: Eh... you know some people say I look like a member of ZZ Top so... ya know... I'm kinda flattered.

PD: So when you were even haulin' interstate ass and there were girls driving in a convertible would you ever peek down and sneak a gander?

Funky Redneck: Yuh fah sho, ya don't realize how many crazy things you can see on the highway drivin'.

PD: Gimme one example.

Funky Redneck: Well ya know I've seen this one girl getting intimate on her boyfriend, she didnt know I was watching... I got caught, hahaha. She shouldn't have been doing it.

PD: Whooopppsssiiieee... You ever pick up hitchhickers?

Funky Redneck: Unless it's some fine lookin' filly then yeah, but there's a lot of crazy hitchers out yonder. You ever seen "The Hitcher"? If so you'll know what I'm talking about.

PD: Nah, I've killed a couple though... by the way I'm asking the questions, cracker!

1. To 'pass' so people don't yell shit at you from cars/vans/pickups for being 'punk' or 'queer'. Especially in big cities which are not NY or LA.

2. Numero Uno queer fashion designer aesthetic cock-hardener: X signifier represents a type of oppressor from my past, who now that I'm a safely famous/citified fashion person, gives me a stiffy just thinking about (HELLO JEREMY SCOTT). Apply same to female fashion designer RE: look of bullying trashy girls or cliquish snobby girls (explains revival of large hair, bead/feather roachclip/hair attachment, suede druggie boots).

3. Middle-class indie guys are design spods (Nick will not join this trend unless he finds an IBM cap in a Berlin flea market) who like cheap, durable clothes (hence the popularity of rural Goodwill/Sally Army shops and workwear/uniform shops selling tradesmen's clothes) and will do anything to avoid looking like a yuppie, even though they might be already. They're not terribly clued up on the whole queerness angle of their choice, though if sensitive and artistic there might be some oppressor-love going on. Or Bruce Springsteen/John Cougar Menstrualcramp-type reasons if they're slightly more mainstream, ie. do not own a passport.

Calling this a Republican-reactive trend is just plain wrong. This is one instance of a trend that started in smaller cities of America and then went on to world capitals, instead of the usual reverse. It isn't redneck pride, it's evolved to allow the rednecks of this world let you get on with things undisturbed.

that is exactly my point! a baseball cap is already recontextualized. a trucker cap is something that can be recontextualized in a different way. it can be taken away from the ordinary person and recontextualized by people in style labs across the world. also, the individuality that is expressed in the wearing of the trucker hat is a subtle and aesthetic play against the hive mind mentality of modern society, displayed by those who wear baseball caps. the trucker hat wearer is an individual who wants to bring the lone aesthetic of the tulsa trucker to gothenburg, skopje and st petersburg

it is only by wearing the hat of the individual/rural in the environment of the urban/communal that the true hipster/style lab dilettante can simultaneously display ironic connection with and iconic detachment from the society to which they are tethered, both the macro-society of america/europe, and the micro-society of williamsburg/shoreditch, a kitsch double inversion of overt norms, but also a play on the covert

Momus this sounds oddly as though you were concerning yourself with questions of authenticity, which would be a rather startling turn of events

Momus, could it be that you somehow invented this stereotype in your head? Because I think if 9 out of 10 people are unfamiliar with a stereotype, it's not a stereotype anymore.

Some Southerners are rednecks. Not all truckers are Southerners. Not all rednecks are Republicans! I mean, bloody hell, do you purposely make yourself resemble a wall in which people beat their heads into?

Though I love that whole thing about how you are always right and ugly in a Martin Lawrence in Black Knight type of thing! (That's what you said, right?)

I didn't realize anyone else had heard of the Mystery Girls. I like them. Nick reviewed their cd for something and got a free copy.

I have a CROWN shirt, like the gas station. But I got it at a yard sale a friend of mine had, and I don't know if it's a real one or if maybe she bought it at Hot Topic or something (cuz she's really into those pink leopard print things and what-have-you). But anyway... I digress.

I once wore this COKE shirt all the time because:
* It had that retro colored sleeves thing going on, but was the real thing, not a reprise, as I got it at a thrift store...
* I thought it was funny because it was all about a big corporation. At the same time though, I was obsessed with drinking coke.
* It reminded me of Bjork's COCK shirt.

Yes. Now what does this have to do with anything?

Guys in trucker caps are funny, but also that look can be attractive.

I think this is where I point out that the # of mesh-back baseball caps in retirement homes > the # of mesh-back baseball caps in the cabs of big rigs, and then Momus tries to equate "old people" as a generic population with truckers as a generic population so that his classist argument still seems tenable to him

But to call baseball communist because it's a team sport is only slightly less ridiculous than calling Mississippi communist because they have chain gangs.

Anyway, gimme hats perhaps point to the trend of the Southernization of American culture. Cities down there are winning Super Bowls and getting to the Stanley Cup finals, what is that?

This is an honest and important answer from a person wearing a Coke shirt.

No matter how much you wriggle ('Old people wear trucker hats!' 'Look, I googled a communist trucker hat!') you will eventually always end up, when you key the concept 'trucker' into your lexical analyser (I have one strapped to my wrist, it has a cool LCD display) in a semiological loop that goes 'white trash'-'redneck'-'ZZ Top'-'George W Bush' then gets temporarily diverted through 'Williamsburg'-'Colette' before jumping back into 'redneck' loop.

Now, why can't a person 'outed' (in the original terms of the responses to this thread) as wearing a trucker hat say something as simple as what the Coke girl said?

'I thought it was funny because it was all about right-populist values. At the same time though, I was consuming a lot of right-populist values.'

As D. Bowie said in 'Cracked Actor': 'There's a fly in my milk. And he's getting a lot of milk. That's how I felt when I came to America.'

Why should coke-snorting hipsters be any less immune to the zeitgeist than anyone else? Why should irony, rather than being a sign that they've got everything figured out, be a sign of their capacity to slide from one (relatively sincerely-held) set of values to another?

If this year's irony is next year's sincerity (as I ironically believe this year, and sincerely next), then perhaps those people will next year really have trucks.

No matter how much you wriggle ('Old people wear trucker hats!' 'Look, I googled a communist trucker hat!') you will eventually always end up, when you key the concept 'trucker' into your lexical analyser (I have one strapped to my wrist, it has a cool LCD display) in a semiological loop that goes 'white trash'-'redneck'-'ZZ Top'-'George W Bush' then gets temporarily diverted through 'Williamsburg'-'Colette' before jumping back into 'redneck' loop.

But, Momus: what does anything besides "George W. Bush" (which you inserted in there yourself cos I sure ain't never seen him in a trucker hat) have to do with Republicanism? You're lucky if white trash votes, and quite a lot of the white trash I know--including myself--are not Republicans.

Hard to vote Republican when your childhood was spent living off the system that Republicans are trying to demolish, ya know?

Ally, I've met you and you are by no stretch of the imagination 'white trash', so stop being so pretentious!

The horrible thing about the American political system is that people vote for the right with their guts and not their interests. The white poor ought not to vote Bush, just as capitalists ought not to (the economy does better under Democrats -- FACT!), but 'sentiment' and 'actual interests' are not the same, as K. Marx never tired of pointing out. I have devoted my life to trying to discredit 'conservative sentiment' -- a state of the soul nicely illustrated by ZZ Top. If people wearing trucker hats is part of the project of 'demolishing conservative sentiment' (by making fags wear the garb of bigots) then I'm for it. If it's part of an attempt to make conservative sentiment trendy, I'm dead against.

i didnt google a communist trucker hat. i googled a baseball hat. if you do not understand the intrinsic difference here, then we're going to struggle. upthread you seemed to show an understanding of the difference between communality and individuality, and how this was displayed between baseball and trucking hats. now, if you are conflating them, then i feel you have misunderstood the whole concept. on the other hand, there is nothing to be understood, to understand is to miss the point, so it depends which way you look at it i guess

you will eventually always end up, when you key the concept 'trucker' into your lexical analyser (I have one strapped to my wrist, it has a cool LCD display) in a semiological loop that goes 'white trash'-'redneck'-'ZZ Top'-'George W Bush' then gets temporarily diverted through 'Williamsburg'-'Colette' before jumping back into 'redneck' loop.

interesting. i hadnt thought of it this way, i've never equated truckers with rednecks, this seems to be a critical misrepresentation, i think this may hold a little water if we are talking post 79, and further right wing colonization of the representation of the working class in the media. but i cant help feel that the wearing of trucking hats is as much sincere as ironic, and is actually a) a 1970s thing (ie looking at working class culture in a pre laissez-faire/nuliberal/antifederalist way), and also b) as a reaction to electroclash/urbanity/europe. which makes it both a) an endorsement, and b) a refutation of american rural society

Now, why can't a person 'outed' (in the original terms of the responses to this thread) as wearing a trucker hat say something as simple as what the Coke girl said?

the simple is dead. it is disingeneous to say something simple, because the wearer is saying many things, contradictory things, the wearer is saying "i say simple things" but also "am i really saying simple things?", it is ironic and sincere at the same time, and as we both know, momus, there is no difference between the 2. they are the same thing. it is play, display, the refutation of the simple, because the sincere is ironic, and the ironic is more sincere than anything else

'I thought it was funny because it was all about right-populist values. At the same time though, I was consuming a lot of right-populist values.'

like, duh. right-populist values begin in london/new york/tokyo/dc and are sold to the rural and suburban, whereupon they are sold back to the inhabitants of the city. urbanites can then look down on those values, while endorsing them through their very lifestyles. embodiment by proxy, surely?

Why should coke-snorting hipsters be any less immune to the zeitgeist than anyone else?

!?!?!?!?

they are not immune at all. they are always a picture perfect representation of the zeitgeist of 18-24 months previous.

>>>If this year's irony is next year's sincerity (as I ironically believe this year, and sincerely next),

as i said previously, there is no difference between the 2.

then perhaps those people will next year really have trucks.

i certainly hope so! but only if they where tutus. otherwise they will fall into the authenticity trap which you seem to inhabit

1) Farmers
2) Mechanics
3) Athletes
4) Rednecks

Now all of these things intersect (in fact, I have been all four of those), and I fail to see how any of them carry any political clout. However, when a 'Burger dons one of these mesh caps, they're simply going for a white trash aesthetic, mainly cuz it seems "real" and "honest" and denotes "working class" and all of that other bullshit. It's no fucking different than white suburban kids (who these 'Burgers certainly are) wearing LA Kings hats a decade ago, or even baggy jeans. It's just rich white people trying to act poor cuz that makes them more "authentic" and bullshit like that. So if there is a deep-seeded meaning behind this, Momus, it's just that rich white people feel a serious disconnect from "the real world" as they imagine it. Haven't the styles of people from a lower class ALWAYS been cool for people of higher classes???

And yes, blacks/asians/hispanics/etc where these too, but we're talking indie kids.

AND ANYWAY, the whole look is fucking deader than newsboy caps cuz last night I got sent a package from Capitol Records that was A PROMO MESH CAP WITH THE WORD "VERBENA" (a southern rock band who sold out and went grunge) EMBLAZONED ACROSS IT!!! It made me laff really fucking hard.

*ducks*

I'd just like to add that it is shortly going to become very, very trendy to be fat. The fatter the better. You heard it here first. Next year's trucker hat is trucker fat.

Momus I fucking posted upthread that I wear my Goodyear hat because it's the same hat I saw pit crew guys at the Indy 500 wear. Are you fucking dense or what?

argh

One of my best friends in the world specifically calls me out to thread as white trash, but Momus who met me for a couple hours in a group of like 15 people knows better! This is why I likes ya, Nick.

That being said, don't mistake newfound money for a complete change in 20 years of class status. Goddamnit, it's not cool to be poor. Hell, sometimes that's how you can tell the difference between the hipsters and the truckahs--find out which one admits to having actual aspirations.

As a working class kid, and rest assured i am as working class as they come because my dad drives a lorry and we had it tough by god i am now confused as to whether i can wear it or not, whether it is actually a demening hat of slavery that shows me to be the redneck self fulfilling hick i really am....oh no wait its a fucking hat, its not a pair of jack boots its a stoopid trend no more no less and certainly not a fucking 300 post thread.

Anyway im off home to my shack to go a hog tying

I guess people will have to park in Letterman Square?? That's close to AOL Circle.

Have I ever told you guys that I've wanted to be a trucker someday? I'm totally serious.

In New Jersey. Keep your cars out of Manhattan.

Momus needs to read the New Yorker profile on Don Ainsworth that ran back in February. That should shift his view of truckers. ("should" being the key word)

And no Nick, ya ain't cool for living in Tidewater. Unless yr Pharrell.

however, y'all have spent the time arguing with him = he's won

???

From which class will come the values of the future America you wish to see? Which is the progressive class?

Whichever one's not the jet-setting find-a-new-country-to-live-in-every-six-months class.

Momus, there is no progressive class.

"Shall I place my fingers in my ears and hum loudly, or shall I just talk over the people who've successfully countered my argument?"

The graduating class of 2017 (which my son will prob'ly be a member of).

I love words with multiple meanings.

Momus, trucking isn't somekind of yee-haw deliverance backwater. If you live in the industrialized world, everything you buy anywhere ever has been on a truck at some point, driven by...a trucker! This is why fuel-prices aren't some cultural problem of "fat bastard suburbanite gated community suv addicts" or however you'd like to characterize them, but a real economic problem. Gas gets more expensive, everything gets more expensive. Purple shorts, peruvian fado reissues, drum machines, etc etc. all of it. Not that we're even talking abt this anymore. What are we talking about?

"No, those courses of action would be ridiculous. This situation calls for a straw man!"

Oh fuck off. Yes, your consumption of jet fuel sure is making the world a better place. And yes, every American is a flag-wavin', Dubya-lovin', God-fearin' idiot. Fuck you.

Now, if you think 'Trucker' is a red herring, fine, those hats might as easily be worn by American hunters or farmers, who if anything bring even more conservative associations (NRA, big combine harvesters rolling across big empty states with 'k's in their names and no ethnic minorities). The mythological association 'redneck hat' stands.

And then we get back to this question of what the 'smoothneckers' are actually doing with the imagery of 'roughneck' culture. I'm not convinced by Suzy's explanation that they're 'passing', blending in with their former oppressors, though there may be something in that. I think it's probably a mixture of wishing to blur one's too-bourgeois origins, wishing to appear macho, and wishing to defuse, reappropriate and recontextualise conservative heraldry.

HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? YOU'VE NEVER BEEN TO ANY! THEY'RE "FLYOVER STATES," REMEMBER?

fucking twat.

(there are too many Nicks on ILX Nick)

Oh, really, you silly big essentialist, what about the Weimar Republic?

Your first is just false! As so many people have pointed out, the only person who has all these "trucker=rightwing" associations is your good self! Often I disagree with you, and it's fair & fun to parse our disagreements, but here you're just wrong. Do you know any actual truckers? I do. So do lots of other people. What a number of them are expressing is that your "trucker=iconographic shorthand for this/that set of conservative tropes" equation is true only for you. Repeat only for you.

[Biggest number of posts between beginning to write & finishing post ever, for me. Your "flyover" bit is pricelessly ignorant, however. I LIVE IN IOWA WITH MY WIFE, WHO'S FROM THAILAND. WE WATCHED US SOME PASOLINI THE OTHER DAY...WHICH WE RENTED FROM THE VIDEO STORE HERE IN IOWA! SHOCKAH! Don't talk about things about which you know absolutely nothing whatsoever.]

- xxxoxoxoo yr friend in Jesus, Tracer Hand

I.e. The Weimar Republic was the incubation period of the Nazi Party. Nice try.

i * ro * ny: 1c. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning. 2b. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

Straw-John, imitating himself: "Go soak your head, my sister-in-law's also from Thailand and she lives in Nebraska."

Both: [cue orchestra] "You'll ne-ver walk a-loooooone!" etc

The mythological association 'redneck hat' stands

you are wrong unless you mean "for Momus, the mythological association 'redneck hat' stands." Your assertion that this icon is generally understood as you understand it has been demonstrated to be false on this thread.

God, I just can't get over this. It's so hopelessly ignorant. Of course, if I say "how many farmers do you actually know? because I know several, and they don't fit your mold," M.'s response is/would be (and I invite him to dispute this!) "No no - I don't mean actual farmers - I mean what city-dwellers think of when they think of farmers. Except that when the city-dwellers pipe up to say "No, that's certainly not what I think of when I think of truckers/famers/mechanics/construction workers/whatever-working-class-nonstarter-image-you'll-invoke-next," you either change the subject or pretend you didn't hear/understand.

Just because you hold truckers, farmers, and many others in contempt doesn't mean everybody else does.

(I don't mean that to sound all-pissed-off, but really, this thread isn't so rancorous that it needs to be permanently derailed by huge images that don't pertain.)

OK DONE

O\/\/|\|70R3|)!!!!!

Jon, you've been asked a million times to stop this shit so grow the fuck up you annoying cocksucker!

that "am i emo" picture (which is very relevant to the original topic) possesses an entertainment value of which much of the bull-honkey butt-musings on this thread fail to live up to.

gygax!:j-dub::felipe alou:barry bonds

(sorry, Jon, I took out some of the repeating photos. I don't like doing it but it makes it very time consuming for people to scroll through and this is a good discussion.)

I think it's relevant too, but I also find it strange how much that particular take on "emo" resembles "indie" from the late 80s and early 90s. If anything, it's almost identical but more stylized (and perhaps more defined as a result).

But please... How many groups before "emo" have been identified at least partly by ratty Converse All-Stars? I seem to recall folks on skateboards in the 80s...

The popular indie/emo fashion that i read about in People magazine.

Aaron, that's Harmony Korine's new one, 'Nun's The Word', right?

That said, my post didn't have much of a point and wasn't trying to lob coconuts at you. Maybe just gleak a bit of the milk on you, is all ;)

My other post though, the anecdotal one about the difference between cloth- and foam-front caps, is the essence of this thread and will be ignored by all Received Social Meaning Transgressors at their peril.

Do you know any actual truckers? I do. So do lots of other people. What a number of them are expressing is that your "trucker=iconographic shorthand for this/that set of conservative tropes" equation is true only for you. Repeat only for you.

I think we're at odds here because we're in different continents that have different ways of thinking. I'm in Europe and I'm in the a priori tradition in which everything is ideological and you start with a position and lay it out. You're in the US and you're looking at things empirically, trying to gather data about the state of things and work towards a complex picture of reality. A lot of my thinking and argument, here and elsewhere, is devoted to trying to show that everything is ideological, and that there can be no neutral ground on which to stand. Anglo-Americans really don't like this line at all.

Now, what actual truckers may be or do is of almost no relevance to the significance of the meme 'trucker hat', what matters is the ideology the meme is seen to contain. And it happens that the US is currently being run by a very ideological clique whose values are incarnated, visually, with blue collar memes, even when their policies do nothing whatsoever for blue collar workers. (Bush at Camp David in cowboy hat, Bush at Ground Zero praising the firemen rather than the financial services workers who died in greater number...)

I can't know what associations everyone has about any item of clothing. I could possibly do what Komar and Melamid did when they used polling organisations to determine 'America's favourite painting', commission a whole bunch of attitudinal data and come up with a distillation of popular association, by asking questions like 'Which is more macho, pineapple or knife?' So, sure, 'I don't really know how Americans conceive of these sorts of people'. But I do know the subliminal, TV commercial-sized meaning of 'trucker', and I do know that for hipsters in Williamsburg to be working with that image, they'd have to have wrung it through a lot of changes in meaning. So my question is, from what to what? I think we've only scratched the surface of the answer, and we've got rather sidetracked into name-calling and a clutter of unneccessary 'realist detail'. Because myth and realism are not the same thing, and we're talking myth here.

this is one of the most stunning momusian perversions of logic yet

Have we determined where rally caps fit into this?

Mr Blount, allow me to repeat my urgent and key position, please:

The horrible thing about the American political system is that people vote for the right with their guts and not their interests. The white poor ought not to vote Bush, just as capitalists ought not to (the economy does better under Democrats -- FACT!), but 'sentiment' and 'actual interests' are not the same, as K. Marx never tired of pointing out. I have devoted my life to trying to discredit 'conservative sentiment' -- a state of the soul nicely illustrated by ZZ Top. If people wearing trucker hats is part of the project of 'demolishing conservative sentiment' (by making fags wear the garb of bigots) then I'm for it. If it's part of an attempt to make conservative sentiment trendy, I'm dead against.

I did address "the meme 'trucker hat'" and made a point of doing so. This thread is decent evidence that this meme is considerably more complex than you think! You speak of "the ideology the meme is seen to contain." My argument on this thread is that you are describing your own baggage with respect to Trucker Hat as, you'll forgive me, the Actual Ideological State Apparatus Trucker Hat. [I suspect that Althusser might balk at this use of his term Ideological State Apparatus, but ideas have a way of wriggling free from their mothers & I'm fairly certain anyhow that at the end of the day I.S.A.=particularly virulent meme.] I don't say that memes are in the end wholly subjective; when I say "McDonald's," we may all have different emotional responses, but the meme in all its grandeur is the same for all of us except pehaps the insane. When I say "trucker hat" - this is my point - people don't respond as you imagine they do. Search in vain for people who do! What you ascribe to the meme Trucker Hat seems actually a product of your own prejudices.

WHEREFORE, much of your argument collapses. Again proceeding from Althusser: "...there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning, by the category of the subject and its functioning." On this very thread we have the ideology itself - no need for dancing around the issue! The meme "Trucker Hat" doesn't carry the associations you describe, or, if it does, it carries within itself so many contradictory impulses that the ones in which you're more interested become unrecognizable.

2) The generalization that the people in the WTC were of one particular class or occupation is both wrong and offensive.

3) I have seen Dubya in a suit way more often then a cowboy hat.

Where did I bash Cantor Fitzgerald?

In short, [Dubya's] iconography and his ideology are (deliberately) not lined up, because his iconography is him with a bull hailer standing next to a fire chief, but his ideology is Enron and rich guys in suits whose brokers are Cantor Fitzgerald.

By associating Cantor Fitzgerald with Bush, whom you clearly hate, you are bashing them.

Many people here don't like Bush either but your posts almost make me want to like him (which is a repugnant idea to me) if only to defy you. Way to go.

Okay, J0hn, the ideological subjects. We have one of them, me, thinking the hats look a bit too right wing, but I'm probably over-sensitive on these matters. We have Takashi noticing his hat is a babe magnet, we have kephm who used to wear them on the farm, then didn't, but might go out tonight wearing one with mascara, we have Yanc3y saying it's 'white people trying to act poor cuz that makes them more "authentic" and bullshit like that'.

There is no right or wrong answer, surely. We all gaze at the hat and see...

EXACTLY

or to put a finer point on it

We all gaze at the hand and don't see "rightwing"/"conservative"/etc: but you do! and that's all right, but you ought to put your cards on the table and say "this is my own response" instead of trying to attribute it to the zeitgeist. Ergo, you are Kolley Kibber and I claim by three pounds fifty

why hello there feller!

can you read?

Doesn't!

didn't mean to sound (overtly) nasty there, as it currently reads as...

uh cheers matey!

I multitask, as I'm sure you do. While arguing about all-important hats I did an interview with a Portugese magazine, went to hear some (lovely) new pieces at my collaborator Anne Plantine's house, went secondhand clothes shopping (no hats), split up with one Japanese girl and got sent naked self-portraits by another... It's been a long day, maybe it's time for bed.

Racist! Artist!

Actually I doubt that any meme that was so simple and stripped-down would last very long, or have much power, as a meme at all. But here Momus is simply thinking in the same sort of binary oppositions that characterize his approach to music (and make his music so pallid and irrelevant except as the backing tracks to intellectual minstrel routines...and hey I like the odd minstrel routine now and then as I've noted on other threads).

Down with all the would-be smart comments essentially restating "Haha you're having a long conversation about hats haha." If you think it's so stupid, move on over to the postmodern thread and leave us alone.

("i shopping" is ©2004 Apple Computer)

...

The name-calling is regrettable but I think we're still talking about hats, basically, at a theoretical remove (haha the remove is only theoretical!!). I'm comfortable with that.

I have three: MAC Racing (not a mesh cap, but close enuf for this thread, given to me by my stepfather when I worked in his garage), John Deere (given to me when I was 13 by the farmer I worked for) and Verbena (courtesy Capitol Records)...

I feel like it was a John Deere hat - or maybe a Husqvarna - but I honestly don't remember! It was green and white, anyhow.

94-98 = Ski Caps
98-2000 = Cowboy hats
2000-Present = Mesh caps
Present-??? = White caps

climbing the hills of soybeans to check for hot spots in a 120-degree morton building=learning that reimagining one's work identity only goes so far and no further

OMG!! Momus=Custos=Calum! I hit the trifecta!

I hate you. Does that count?

But I forget that the incendiary nonsequitir is Momus's metier. Carry on. What subject shall we tackle next?

it's like an acknowledgment of total impotence, retreating entirely to the aesthetic realm and speding your energies decrying certain signifiers which you associate with certain political positions. it's probably precisely because we share many of your political views but DON'T claim impotence and rootlessness as our birthright that we DON'T get so worked up over these signifiers and in fact have a more nuanced appreciation for the richness and complexity of american (and other) culture.

[insert momus comment about being glad to be in j-l's company here.]

You know, either Godard and me are crazy or we are right. Everything is political, especially hats.

OH MAN. I HAVE JUST REALISED. AND THIS IS, LIKE, YOU KNOW, REALLY IMPORTANT, SO IMPORTANT THAT IM GOING TO USE UPPER CASE, AND YOU ALL KNOW HOW I HATE THAT RIGHT?

YOU, YES, YOU, AMERICANS....SEND ME HATS!

Yeah, you and everyone else here (incl. me)

I don't really hate Momus, I just get annoyed at the sight of an artist who eschews introspection.

So you're saying my head is nowhere near enough my own ass, right?

I love you, Andrew!

''I think we're at odds here because we're in different continents that have different ways of thinking. I'm in Europe and I'm in the a priori tradition in which everything is ideological and you start with a position and lay it out. You're in the US and you're looking at things empirically, trying to gather data about the state of things and work towards a complex picture of reality. A lot of my thinking and argument, here and elsewhere, is devoted to trying to show that everything is ideological, and that there can be no neutral ground on which to stand. Anglo-Americans really don't like this line at all.''

marx to thread!

but what of aesthetic?

I believe that here you and Mssr. Godard part ways.

but anyway, you have to interpret what's there. you can't just project ideology onto things (I'm sure will come back and say you can but nevermind).

I am yeoman and I need to be loved
Just like anybody else does

(Dons yeoman hat, discards all other hates, leaves thread to do a bit of plowing.)

I've always called them gimme hats. Maybe it's a regional thing -- I'm from Illinois.

In any event, can we have a vote on how many people have one of these hats, and if so, how many do you have, and what's on them?

I don't have any mesh back kind here with me right now in NY but I have a few gathering mold in my parents' basement -- a giveaway Cubs one and a cheapass White Sox one.

The real gimme hats for me are customized promotional items from movie studios and record companies. I have an "8 Mile" one and an ASCAP one. These are technically all-cloth baseball hats but they serve the same function to my social classification, whatever it is (I eagerly wait assignment, a la Ally) as mesh back caps do to truckers or whatever. I wear them when it rains sometimes because they were free and I don't want to ruin my Todd Hundley autographed Cubs or Al Levine autographed Angles cap. I wore the 8 Mile one in seriousness once to a rock show and party afterwards and then said to a friend "The 8 Mile hat is dorky, right?" to which my friend said "You're just now figuring that out? So what, you're [FELICITY REDWELL], you can wear an 8 Mile hat if you want."

You see people all over LA wearing hats and T-shirts and customized baseball jackets with the leather sleeves of dated movies and overhyped bands. When I see that, I just think, oh that was free, they didn't do their laundry today or wow, that person hasn't worked since she was on the crew of Amperican Pie II. It's kind of endearing, I think. I wouldn't be all upset if I saw a guy back home driving a forklift wearing a, I dunno, Fischerspooner hat, I would just think, oh how nice, his niece must work for Capitol.

Anyway, I still think the reason this thread is still going is that because people can SEE hats and not other things.

I think scott seward's point about terminology is well-taken. Half the fun of the indie wardrobe is the story you can tell when someone comments on your thingy. The other day my friend had to restrain me from going up to the guy at the Barney's Co-op who was wearing a Knollwood Golf Club windbreaker and asking him is he from Lake Bluff, I used to waitress at Knollwood, are you M____, my first kiss?, etc. But he was having an attitude-off with the salesperson and it was very tense so I didn't want to run the risk of exposing him as a fraud just then.

Maybe it's a trucker hat if you buy it and a gimme hat if you got it for free.

(And a "gotcha" hat if it's from Von Dutch.)

ugh.

i really don't know what to say.

Anyway, more importantly:
John you should talk to Sarah "77 sXe tigers" McLusky about that!
When I signed up for my email address a very very long time ago, I couldn't think of any that weren't already taken so I ended up adding the x's. I didn't know that meant straight edge. Sorry my email address is so dumb. Ok, enough about that.

I've only ever had one baseball cap that I can remember - the Mets. It was my dad's. I wore it when I was little.

I only have snow hats now, but I only wear them when it's actually cold outside.

You can wear whatever you want. It doesn't mean you are ascribing any values to it or that other people should either.

Yanc3y, yes do that if you like, parsing social differences in ever more minute ways is what made this such a great thread. The concept "Trucker hats" was torn apart and revealed to be a misleading blanket term for a huge range of styles and social codes and behaviors. Momus provided the condescending strawman, as usual; this was good since it gave people a pressing reason to put a lot of effort into articulating those differences. Where the thread went wrong - where all "Momus threads" seem to go wrong - is that so many people seem to judge the thread's success by whether or not they succeeded in convincing Momus of their point of view. This is a strange amount of deference to give to someone you supposedly think is ignorant and a poor reader. A lot of the points made above by you, Tracer, John, Scott, etc. are excellent and I hope we have more threads like this.

Another aspect of the foam hat aesthetic, at least here in Indie Valhalla, is that it goes well with the poofy michelin man-style vests with stripey patterns on them, which are all over the place in thrift stores. Together, hat and vest are an attempt to signal one's fellowship with the "warm people" and to sneeringly exclude wind and rain.

http://members.aol.com/dubplatestyle/mase.jpg

That's exactly what went wrong with this thread. And I blame myself, or rather, the 'let's refute Momus whatever he says' syndrome exemplified by Stencil's:

Many people here don't like Bush either but your posts almost make me want to like him (which is a repugnant idea to me) if only to defy you

This thread started because of a very specific trend for a very specific hat, a trend that started early in 2003 and was reported in the New York Times by May. These hats have been worn in a very specific way by members of Fischerspooner and the kind of people who go to Colette parties when they happen in New York. The thread might have done some good work if we could have gone more into what Tracer Hand laid out here:

I didn't want to repurpose the meaning of the hat, I wanted the hat to repurpose the meaning of "cool"!

Instead the thread went into convoluted denials that such hats exist or are being recontextualised, or are even particularly a trend of 2003. It dissolved into a lot of pointless 'dedefinition' and 'restereotyping': 'Truckers aren't just this, they're also this'. That would be a great argument in a court of law or a sociology text. It's not a great argument when discussing the 'cult' or 'mythical' properties of a fashion item (precisely the things which give it power). To say 'It's just a good ole hat worn by good ole boys' is to be in denial of everything relevant or interesting about the subject.

I thought the most interesting thing on the thread was learning the name of the guy (Chris Coyle) alleged to have started the specific recontextualisation of the specific hat we're talking about. A snowboarder. A better thread would have gone at that point into the impact of skating and boarding on youth culture style. A huge topic, and an interesting one.

And that man is wearing a baseball cap! You are just showing how out of touch you are, Blount!

I got more enjoyement from Scott's two line post than yr (as has been shown here) nonsensical ramblings. but we've been here before.

Your need to maintain certain people in rigid unflattering stereotypes is also incredibly obnoxious. I think this thread overwhelmingly demonstrated that other people don't think this is an interesting basis for conversation, and as has been pointed out to you repeatedly already they don't even acknowledge that your pet stereotypes have any persuasive reality, as myth or sociology.

This thread did largely avoid the issue of "cool", but since cool is regional and relative, and since you seem intent on sticking to one very narrow definition that others consider ridiculous or passe (Fischerspooner, colette parties), this is hardly surprising. I've nothing against Fischerspooner, but I'm still waiting for you to convince me why Casey F. wearing one of these hats now is more revolutionary than an Oly hipster wearing one while sitting on the sidewalk outside of K Records 10 years ago.

Chester, I think I've spent most of this thread saying how very unrevolutionary I find Casey Spooner wearing this hat.

OK then, has Casey F. suddenly lost his totemic power? This is your ball, you should be the one to start it rolling.

Chester, the nutshell barometric reading on Fischerspooner is that they went out of fashion on October 31st, 2000.

And why did skate kulchur decide to copy working class kulchur?

Johnny Knoxville to thread!! (hee hee)

(i've just been dying to say that all thread cuz everytime i see yr name i get the band in my head)

anyway

I think we need to distinguish what can be done in a thread on ILX from what can be done on a hat. The hat hasn't got that much space, and people aren't going to be staring at it, stroking their chins, as long as they've been staring at this thread, stroking their dicks chins.

Challenge: please tell if my representation of your POV above is accurate, and if not, please restate your POV WITHOUT recourse to punning or witticisms.

Actually what I'm asking Momus is for to take a moment and put clarity over cleverness.

I'm sure no one needs my take on this, but I read the whole damn thread so you're gonna get it. Momus: the reason your idea of what trucker hats signify is slightly off-base is because you've made the mistake of believing right-wing rhetoric. Mesh caps are just the sort of "heartland" Americana -- associated with laborers, truckers, farmers, mechanics -- that American Republicans have been trying to claim as their exclusive territory for a few decades now. You, being Momus, should be the last person to believe them: the "heartland" and the people in it conceptualize themselves and wear their hats in a lot of different ways. Just to give you an idea, even my father -- a liberal immigrant academic -- used to wear this type of hat: he'd wear it to soccer games, and he'd wear it to mow the lawn, because it's pretty much the kind of hat you wear for that sort of thing when you live in the Midwest.

You and J0hn are right though, that the hipsters wearing them are wearing them because of more specific types of associations. Instead of just tying those associations to the one-dimensional caricature of Bush you like kicking around, I wish you'd tried to sort out what those associations might be. Let's try it.

(1) Like all fashion, it's something of a reaction to fashions that came before it -- specifically, a certain mode of hipster who's styled, highbrow, urban, and most importantly completely disdainful of anything having to do with rural or working-class America, to the point of seeming like he'd get the vapors over the mere sight of a tractor. This mode of hipsterism has been around long enough that it's started to seem stifling and silly, a weird bubble-world of people who'd be confused and helpless if they set foot outside of Manhattan. The hats are a tweak of that, obviously: they say "Truck stops? Mechanics? Farmers? Your cliche disdain for them is boring and my apparent relationship with them is interesting." (We'll get to the authenticity of that relationship in a second.) This, by the way, works especially interestingly if you're a big poncy art/fashion star like Casey Spooner or something: it's a juxtaposition, and while it might not be the sort with a ton of depth it at least mixes things up a little. It also explains why the trucker hat can hold a special lure for the children of the bourgeoisie, many of whom have been taught to fear such things as lures toward downward mobility.

(2) How was all of that originally supposed to make the people wearing the hats look (or even feel)? Daring, maybe, or at least devil-may-care; unconcerned with floofy high-end fashion. Down to earth, maybe, or even salt-of-the-earth; rootsy and American, not fancy and Europhilic. Manly, maybe, at least in contrast to the supposedly effete city hipsters around them, and intrepid -- like the sort of guy who'd be as comfortable in an Alabama truck stop as a hip Brooklyn bar, the sort of guy who can work with his hands. Probably even a little deep and soulful, like Tom Joad. (We'll get to whether any of that still works in a second.)

(3) What else came along with that? It's a question worth asking, because the hats were bound to appeal at first to the people most comfortable with the values they were perceived to stand for. "Conservative" isn't one of those values nearly as much as Momus thinks it is -- much less so than, say, an intellectual impoliteness or anti-intellectualism: it's not surprising that the hats link up mentally to Vice, which prides itself on exactly this sort of projected impolite, common-sense, offending-"urbane"-sensibilities pose. The hats can go with drinking domestic beer and cursing a lot; with disdain for airy "highbrow" notions; with liking things that are "balls-out" instead of "subtle" or "meditative." Are these notions built on possible stereotypes of the sort of person who might "actually" wear a trucker hat? They sometimes are, and in the end they may become a farce. But the point is that those perceived values probably have some sort of allure to a lot of the people in the hats, a point I think Momus and J0hn were right to get at.

Tracer offers a good example of how this all might have worked early on -- the trucker hat's constitutes some part of the milieu he genuinely came from, so instead of packing it away as shameful to urbane Manhattan eyes he kept it in action. People weren't likely to think he was one of those imaginary hick bogeymen some city-dwellers fear, although some probably did greet it with a little distaste; and if he wore it naturally, people weren't likely to think he was being ironic, although some probably jumped to that conclusion, too. But what did the bulk of them think? Either (a) that he was wearing a hat just like the hats of the non-urban milieus they were familiar with, or maybe more often (b) that the hat on his head displayed more cultural experience than they had, a comfort with a world and aesthetic they didn't know much about how to deal with.

Of course, that's the source of the criticisms people have levelled here: just wearing the hat doesn't magically create that comfort or fondness. At a certain point in the hats' popularity, it becomes a way for people to identify with urban hipsterism, not with its supposed opposite -- at its worst, it'll start to look like city fashionistas playing some appalling working-American dress-up, an insulting variant on blackface. It's this way with any fashion trend, of course: the moneyed trend-rider who runs out to buy these things may get the look, but he can't have the feel, can't actually pull off any of the cultural associations the object was meant to lend him in the first place.

No, I'm not sure about that at all. Tracer Hand said that when he wore his, he wanted to repurpose the meaning of cool rather than the meaning of the hat. Now to me that suggests that:

a) For Tracer, hipster values are problematical whereas trucker values are not.

or

b) For Tracer, hipster values are changeable (by Tracer) whereas trucker values are not.

There may be some attempt to 'get in touch with trucker values' going on, I don't know. One thing I've noticed about irony is that it's a kind of 'safe zone' between attitudes. Irony allows you to strike several contradictory poses at the same time. Therefore it's a good attitude for people who are insecure or transitional, or who just want to be cut a bit of slack. Irony is the closest thing we have to ideological neutrality, perhaps. It's the amber light between stop and go. But I don't think we can adopt irony forever. Finally, we have to take a position, become committed, state our beliefs. Irony just buys us a little time for ambivalence.

whose meme signifies right wing conservatism and thus i reject the use of these hats because they are in conformance with the imperialist project of george w. bush and co.

I personally do read some right wing conservative values into the hats, yes. J0hn has pointed out that this is strictly a personal association and perhaps a minority one. But I do consider it the right of minorities to tell the world how they perceive things without being told they're mad or just plain wrong. In terms of the perception of myth, there is no wrong or right.

My perception of a right wing meaning in the hats is ultimately the reason I would never wear one. But the right wing meaning may be nothing more specific than that I think of America, presently, as a right wing country, and the hat is a specifically American hat.

(Now I'm going to read Nabisco's longie.)

This, by the way, works especially interestingly if you're a big poncy art/fashion star like Casey Spooner or something

Let's also stress the camp element, the Village People element, the sexual element when you're as gay as CS. Trucker hat as rough trade bait?

The reaction Nabisco describes, with the emotions spelled out in his (2) para, do line up for me with the 'reactionary' values of the Republicans. Europhobic rather than Europhile, anti-intellectual... I can even happily tie Vice into this 'reactionary' swing. Most of the people I know who work on Vice came from Index. Many are gay. Index would never use 'gay' as an insult. But Vice would. Vice gets away with it because it's 'ironic'. Irony allows it to thrive in times which certainly are more homophobic than the 90s.

The allure of 'balls out values' for trucker hat wearers lines up with the allure of homophobic values for gay writers and editors. At first, it's transgressive and exciting. And it makes you feel less ghettoised. But the thrill of flirting with / internalising the enemy (Suzy's point upthread too) surely passes. Then there has to be a reaction to reaction.

The one thing I think Nabisco missed out is the in joke element. When these hats first started appearing on heads like Mr Spooner's earlier this year, only a few people knew. Knew what? Knew that this did not betoken Mr Spooner becoming a slob, but betokened the in crowd's adoption of a new sign of their difference from the slightly less in crowd.

I admit when I saw Mr Spooner in a trucker hat at a Dior party in Paris in February I, firstly, didn't recognise him and, secondly, thought 'God, he's really gone to the dogs, what a slob, it must be the drugs.' Then my third thought was 'A trucker hat that says Roma, well, I can see that he's playing with jarring memes there...' And the fact that it matched his red track suit... well, it was clear he hadn't given up colour co-ordination. No, this was obviously the new way the in-crowd was signalling its inness.

I'm sure Mr Spooner has already abandoned the look and moved on to something else, because that's his job, and the hat thing has gone down to second and third division trendsters and will soon mingle with people who wear such hats 'innocently' and therefore stop signifying anything very much at all (except, for me, America.)

(You can see my snap of Mr Spooner in his hat, looking very like Tweedledum to Neil Tennant's Tweedledee, here.

Nice try, Momus. "Minority" does not equal "beleaguered, underrepresented minority whose point of view must be heard! and/or is being suppressed!" et al. A minority of people believe the proposition that the sun revolves around the earth, also: must we suffer their opinion simply because they are so few in number?

You claim to have read Nabisco's post, but it is almost impossible to believe that you did: you are clinging to your "heartland=reactionary!" etc. poppycock which hasn't just been disputed, but disproven, again & again & again. 'A trucker hat that says Roma, well, I can see that he's playing with jarring memes there...' The memes in question are shared only by yourself and your offensively classist friends. The rest of society does not think that the working class is ignorant, ugly, or uncultured.

When these hats first started appearing on heads like Mr Spooner's earlier this year, only a few people knew. Knew what? Knew that this did not betoken Mr Spooner becoming a slob, but betokened the in crowd's adoption of a new sign of their difference from the slightly less in crowd

refers only to the people at this particular party or at least the small number of people who occupy this particular sleb/fashion world since any random person you pulled off the streets of Olympia, Austin, Athens, Chapel Hill, not to mention many, many other places in America - once again, this has been pointed out many times upthread - would immediately have gotten what the other party goers you allude to didn't get. Based on your story, Casey Spooner's (not Fischerspooner as I thought upthread) hat is loaded with all sorts of transgressive meanings in that particular, very limited environment and I appreciate you pointing that out.

She's Angela Bowie to Momus's Mick Jagger?

(Er, did I type that?)

John if you're only just getting in the You Must Be This Outraged To Have Sex With Momus line... bring a book.

Maybe you're permitted to shout down a minority of people who are wrong about something factual, but it's just rude to shout down people who differ in their personal interpretation of a mythical item. An American can tell a European what a hat means to him (and I've learned some things on this thread, as I always do on these threads, though I could do without the Salem tone), but he can't tell a European what the hat should mean to a European.

Chester, I don't at all see Casey's world as 'devoid of all outside history and context', the 'jarring meanings' I talked about just in the referends 'Roma' and 'trucker' are totally about contextual clash, and the clash of populist hat with silk shirt and scarf sets a high-low thing going... God, I'm starting to sound like Arena Homme now...

FWIW, I would have argument sex with you before I would JC (interpret initials as you wish).

(haha best x-post evah)

(a) It's not only wrong but actually sort of mean to pretend that someone can't be attracted to non-cosmopolitan American without having conservative tendencies. A lot of Americans grow up around places where people wear mesh hats, and a lot of those places have more good points than you're willing to admit. Community, sunshine, geniality, lack of pretense, earnestness, drive-ins, history, meat and potatoes, athleticism, towns with one stop light and one Tastee-Freeze: Republicans didn't just seize on this imagery at random, they seized on it because it has some truth and goodness that people respond to. What you're doing is maybe excusable, since you're not American: you're giving in to those Republican ad campaigns and being disgusted with all those images because of the politics they're linked to. A lot of Americans, having more invested in those images, wisely refuse to let conservatives co-opt them: we recognize that they're not the conservative fairyland they're supposed to be, that they have rich progressive histories and that they can embody as many of our ideals as George W. Bush's. I said the hat might make you feel like Tom Joad for a (progressive) reason -- substitute Woodie Guthrie if you didn't pick up on it. (And note that the Guthrie-loving boys of Wilco have been wearing trucker hats a lot longer than Spooner has.)

(b) You yourself, Momus, have taken, on this very board, a lot of the "anti-PC" stances that are all the rage these days: you've supported Vice's use of language, you've argued in favor of "impolite" discourse, and you've generally backed any idea that seems contrary to bourgeoise social standards. More importantly, you've argued every time that this makes you more, not less, liberal. The city kids with their trucker hats are doing exactly the same thing. "Urbane" people have long been frightened of, disdainful of, or at least conflicted about what they perceive as the culture of the rural working class -- about country music, about trailer parks, about Southern religion and hunting and chewing tobacco. Wearing a trucker hat in their urbane midst is the sort of tweak to that you're usually all in favor of: it brings all that stuff up and reminds them how much they've removed themselves from it.

The same goes for people wearing old metal t-shirts and half of the other stuff Vice goes for. Which is why I think you're taking a completely opposite side on this issue than you usually do. The trucker hat, especially when appended to "balls-out" cultural fetishism, is exactly the sort of thing you always call liberal -- a vague transgression against staid cosmopolitan standards of what is or is not considered intelligent or worthy of attention. You always claim to be in favor of this, but I think what you've revealed here is that you're only in favor of it when it goes your way -- i.e., in an arty, academic, Euro-friendly direction.

I, on the other hand, am sticking where I always stick: to use the same word as usual, I don't think this is a really "productive" transgression, though that's not enough to get me upset about it other than as a potentially-annoying fad. It's not that I don't see your point: on the biggest level, yeah, the sort of culture people associate with these hats is one that's conservative about a lot of issues, and their appeal to some people probably has something to do with that. But it's your fault, not mine -- people like you have deified any tweaking of convention and propriety so much that it's now considered cool to thumb one's nose at the Enlightenment-style rationalism of the urban liberal's status quo. If trucker hats are conservative, stop complaining: you got exactly what you asked for.

Now: that's why the trucker hats looked good to people at first. I think we all agree that they're rapidly ceasing to say those things and becoming a standard fashion-trend form of dress-up.

(Ironically, with Nabisco's reclaiming of the Progressive aspects of middle America, that "Sandanistas" comment is far more appropriate the second time around. Yay irony!)

Seriously, thank you Nabisco.

I think a Fischerspooner blackface show would be excellent. It would be a visual equivalent of the sound of Bowie's 'Young Americans' album. (But the music should be brass band style oompah, just to confuse matters.) They could really divide the hipsters from the hivemind with that gesture. Their career might then go the way of another New York performance art group, PruittEarly:

'In 1992, Pruitt and Early decided to take on African American culture and its popular representations in their show, 'Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue.' The prestigious Leo Castelli gallery was plastered with gold foil and splattered with paint. Commercial posters of prominent African Americans (including Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) were shrink-wrapped in plastic, like posters and tapes in stores. There were protests outside the gallery. The New York Times termed the show "degrading," and The New York Observer described it as a "cynical appropriation" of black heroes for the purpose of a "flashy, trashy, Warhol-type installation display," but today Pruitt says the artists' point was missed. "We were pointing out the commodification of black heroes, how they are often exploited by predominantly white owned companies," he explains.

The artists' plunge was speedy. After the exhibition, support for their work vanished. Their personal relationship soon disintegrated. Pruitt says he felt ready to give up... He became a salesman at a fashion store for two years.'

From Indieplanet, Rob Pruitt, Pariah No More

(It took Pruitt ten years to come back, and now he's known for cute paintings of glittery panda bears.)

A new low.

No, no, no, a new 'Young Americans'.