God Damn It

If you'll recall, among the topics I enumerated in my list was an in-depth from-the-trenches report on Moscow's Mullets, the hairstyle of the new elite. Well, I see that The Exile has not only scooped me, and has probably done a better job than I would have, but it was published on the same freakin' day that I made that post. Oh well. For those who can't be bothered to click through, here are the money quotes:

To understand the Russian mullet, you have to go back to the early 1980s, to the beginning of Russia's "rock renaissance." Specifically, to Viktor Tsoi, the legendary dead front man of Kino, who sported a classic 80s I-used-to-be-stadium-rock-but-now-I'm-New-Wave mullet of the sort you'd see on a Steve Perry of Journey or a Billy Squier. The mullet somehow vibed with Tsoi's Asiatic features (he was half-Korean) and immediately spawned a trend among his millions of fans.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the mullet collapsed like so much inefficient state industry, giving way to the worst of the West's imports: the eurofag techno hairstyles of the 90s. Like, who can forget the Caesar?