Crime and Fashion

Crime and Fashion
. . . . . Or. . . . .
It's All Links In Here.

If you're looking for a point to this entry, or some moral at the end of the story, you might want to look at some of the older posts here. This isn't an essay. It's just something that happened to me on the net.

So, the other day I was reading Barbelith, as I often do, and got pulled into this topic about a hat that's become all the rage in Brazil. The topic's author, a Brazilian, thinks it's a crime against humanity.

To which someone else replied, "Well, at least it's not as bad as a flowerpot hat."

So immediately I asked myself, "What? What's a flowerpot hat?"

Being at work and assigned to write about something entirely unrelated, of course I immediately zipped over to Google to look it up. My first thought, of course, was of those plastic flowerpot ziggurat things the band Devo used to wear. (Yes, for those who don't remember them, the 1980s were a very special decade.)

Clickety-click.

First, I wound up on the Devo.com's Gallery of Hippie Horrors, which seems pretty funny until you get to the Counter-Hippie Tactics which gets progressively less funny the more you read it.

Then, more by accident than anything else, I discovered that this wasn't actually Devo's official site -- http://www.mutato.com/ is. That was a bit of a relief.

So, on Mutato (which is, de-evolutionarily enough, in the process of a rather long rebuild), I first found a rant about SUVs (a pet peeve of mine) which invoked James Burke, host of the old documentary series Connections (a personal hero of mine). Unexpected pleasure.

Then, digging around the site further, I found a few links to www.songfacts.com, which is a rich data mine of pop culture trivia -- exactly the stuff for which the net is renowned and reviled. Devo's got a few songs listed on there, with most of their comments explaining their thoughts on putting their anti-conformist anthems in beer commercials.

But the last song on the Devo list is "Ohio." Yeah, the hippie anthem about the shootings at Kent State. Apparently, Devo covered the song on a 2002 album called When Pigs Fly, Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear. But that's not why they're listed in the Songfacts entry on that song.

As it turns out, on May 4, 1970, they were students at Kent State (as was Chrissie Hynde). Gerald Casale was even in SDS. He was at the protests. He and Mark Mothersbaugh watched the National Guard open fire on the unarmed students, listened to the nonsensical official explanations afterwards, and saw how ready the public were to simply accept that official story. And they say that's where the whole Devo anti-art, anti-progress, anti-fashion thing -- the whole de-evolutionary manifesto -- came from....

Said Casale, "It refocused me entirely. I don't think I would have done Devo without it. It was the deciding factor that made me live and breathe this idea and make it happen. In Chrissie Hynde's case, I'm sure it was a very powerful single event that was traumatic enough to form her sensibility and account for a lot of her anger." Mothersbaugh added, "It was the first time I'd heard a song about something I'd been a participant in. It affected us. It was part of our life."

... The worst thing about it is that 2 of the 4 students killed weren't part of the demonstration, weren't part of an antiwar group. They'd just come out of class from the journalism building at that time and come out on their way to their next class and were looking at the protest, just seeing what the hell's going on, and they got killed. The bullets just went everywhere, it was like a scatter-gun approach, like shooting geese. A lot of the bullets went over the heads of the protesters and kept going straight down the hill. One of the kids that's paralyzed for life was getting into his car to leave campus after his class, and they shot him in the back. He was at least 200 yards away and wanted nothing to do with what was going on. It was shocking. It pretty much knocked any hippie that I had left in me right out of me that day.

So.

I never did find a picture of the flowerpot hats on that site. But there were some on a memorabilia collector site, and on a fan's blog. So, after traipsing through actual crimes against humanity and how they relate to anti-fashion-as-fashion, I'm able to post a cutesy picture when I ask my inane question in the original conversation about the hat.

I wonder if James Burke would approve.

Posted by grant at February 09, 2004 04:09 PM