Hair Rant – Fiction

Hair Rant

by Joshua Brown

First there’s the Middle Eastern fellow’s hair on the cover of the new Henry Threadgill CD, Makin’ A Move. He’s standing in a really foreign-looking scene, and he’s got a hot pink (as in fluorescent) turban covering his hair or lack thereof. He could have an afro, or he could be bald; you’ll never know. He does, however, have very brown skin, questioning eyes, and lot of gray, white, and black stubble.

Then there’s a local act called Fallen Hero. The cover of the album, Unsickbar, is just like the cover of Venom’s Possessed, with the black and white negative photograph and two pentagrams. Only here, the three band members are pictured (instead of a young boy and girl), and the pentagrams are turned the other way around. They’re very clean-cut young men with almost military haircuts. I’m sure they spend a lot of time in Faneuil Hall.

Now there’s the guys in Super Deluxe from Austin, Texas. They’ve got their shit together hairstyle-wise, almost as much as Urge Overkill. All members have that certain Soul Asylum appeal, only their hair is not as long, maybe ‘cos they’ve come onto the scene late enough to understand that grunge is passé. To give a non-referential reference, these guys have post-adolescent in-control-of-my-boyishness boyishness that would make a faghag shudder with delight and a straight boy like myself envious. The lead guy has shoulder-length, dark brown hair with the perfect amount of grease. He probably measures the grease content on his head daily and adjusts it accordingly for maximum sex appeal.

Then there’s the cartoon cover of the Cub side of the Cub/Potatomen split EP on Lookout!. It’s pretty much the ideal cartoon girl. Her hair is in the Pippi Longstocking-esque pigtails, and her eyes and mouth are both colored chocolate-brown. Her dress is darker-than-sky-blue, with purple eyeballs for decoration. There are eyeballs on the flowers and on the house’s exterior as well, but I digress.

Lastly, there’s the girl on the insert to the boring Veronica Cartwrights CD, that I agreed to write five sentences about just to keep the photograph on the inside flap. There’s an older, probably high school freshman-age babysitter-type-of-girl mounting a young boy next to the watchful family vacuum cleaner. It could be his sister, too, but that would have no place in my fantasy, damn it! I’m an only child. The vibes of this particular scene are on a loss-of-virginity kinda level. The girl’s hair is cut super-thick above the shoulder and starts out straight, then begins curling about halfway down. It’s the style folks of the ’90s avoid like the plague, and one only someone with a ’70s aesthetic and a shirt that looks like wallpaper could fully understand.