Let’s send the mullet back to the ’80s

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/04/2021 (2026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a crusading newspaper columnist with naturally curly hair, I have decided to use today’s column to take a courageous stand.

With absolutely no regard for personal safety, I am going to draw a line in the sand and demand that our provincial and federal governments immediately take steps to ban the horrific hairstyle commonly known as “the mullet.”

I was inspired to take this stand because I have just read a series of international news reports stating that a pair of right-thinking schools in Australia have bravely banned the mullet, which had its heyday in the 1980s.

This not a knee-jerk reaction, because I have two logical journalistic reasons for demanding this hairdo be outlawed, namely: 1) It looks stupid; and 2) I hate it!

By way of background, I will remind everyone that the mullet, also commonly known as the “Hockey Player Haircut,” is a hairstyle in which the hair is much shorter at the front, but ridiculously long at the back.

Which explains why it is also sometimes described with the phrase “business in front, party in the back.” As the website urbandictionary.com points out, it is the sort of hideous hairdo you would get if you crossed a “ladder-climbing bank employee” with a “bad hair-band musician.”

If you need further explanation, just Google any photo of former NHL superstar Jaromir Jagr — “the man, the myth, the mullet” — or Billy Ray Cyrus, country music’s poster child for the mullet in the early 1990s. He released an album in 2006 with the single I Want My Mullet Back.

The stylish point I am trying to make today is that I am launching my anti-mullet campaign after reading about two elite schools in Australia that banned mullets after deeming this car wreck of a hairstyle “not acceptable.”

According to online reports, Trinity College, an elite private boys school in Perth, Australia, outlined its ban on the retro haircut in a recent newsletter, noting that students who do not comply will be picked up by their parents and ordered to get a (bad word) decent haircut.

“It is without reservation that the college sets clear requirements that ensure health and safety, as well as setting a high standard for personal presentation,” the newsletter states.

“The current trend of growing the hair at the back of the head and/or closely cropping the sides of the head to accentuate the ‘mullet’ style are untidy, non-conventional and not acceptable … Students are not permitted to have mullets, rat tails, top knots, Mohawks, extra-long fringes, or any other non-conventional style cuts.”

It turns out Trinity College is not the first Aussie school to ban the “business at the front, party at the back” style. In February, Waverley College in Sydney prohibited the mullet, also labelling the iconic haircut as “not acceptable” for students.

While elated by the gutsy stand taken by these educators, I was shocked to learn West Australian Premier Mark McGowan weighed into the Great Mullet Debate with a view that will deeply offend fashionable readers. “I’m very pro-mullet, it’s a unique Australian invention – one which we’ve been selling to the world, but I’ll let the school make their own decisions,” he told reporters last week. “I’m pro-mullet, I’m not so pro-rat’s tails — rat’s tails are a bit beyond the pale.”

I want to avoid making cruel personal remarks, but, on your behalf, I examined several online photos of Premier McGowan’s hairstyle and I would describe it as a cross between a chartered accountant and a substitute math teacher, if you catch my subtle drift.

For the record, I personally have never sported a mullet, for which my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, is forever grateful. On several occasions, however, I received haircuts that looked as if they had been styled by a flock of angry seagulls fighting over a pile of garbage.

I am talking about haircuts that would make former U.S. president Donald Trump — whose locks have been described as an “inanimate object that straddles his scalp like a dead, furry lobster” — look like a sane, reasonable human being.

The worst haircut I ever endured came in high school when I studiously avoided barbers until my unruly hair made it impossible to see on the basketball court, at which point I grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked the hair away from my face the way explorers use machetes to slash dense foliage in Grade-B jungle movies.

But that is not today’s horrific hair point. No, today’s point is we need to do something about the mullet because it is making an unwanted comeback. “The much-derided mullet: made infamous by Little Richard and David Bowie, is back but with a modern twist,” according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

“The modern mullet is only going to get bigger in 2021,” Tony Copeland, the co-founder of the British Master Barbers Alliance, told reporters. “We will see more men up and down the country walking around with this style.”

This is not a time to mull over the mullet, Canada, this is a time to seize our scissors and take drastic action.

Which is why I am calling on everyone within the sound of my voice to immediately write an angry letter to the nearest politician demanding a ban on the mullet. Think of it this way — when the mullet is outlawed, only outlaws will wear mullets.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca