The Bass Drop That Became a Haircut

The undercut is everywhere again. Not the tasteful barbershop fade—I mean the full side-shave, one half of the skull taken down to the bone, a haircut that announces itself before you’ve said a word. I keep seeing it on the train, at parties I end up at, behind the register at the corner shop at midnight. It’s back, committed and unapologetic.

We’ve been here before. There was a stretch in the mid-2000s when Tokio Hotel somehow became a global phenomenon and Bill Kaulitz’s impossible asymmetrical hair colonized the heads of teenagers across the continent. The band was from Magdeburg. They sounded like someone had tried to explain theater-kid energy to a German producer who had never actually met one. That look—one-sided, dramatic, a deliberate wrongness—got into the bloodstream and stayed for three years.

Now it’s Skrillex. The mechanism is identical. Here’s a figure you can’t actually reach—he’s always on a stage or inside a hard drive or on the cover of something—so you absorb whatever you can. His music sounds like a machine suffering a breakdown it doesn’t know how to process. All bass-drop wobble and "WNYAAOWWW WUH WUH GWAAOW," and somehow this translates directly into a haircut. You can’t get him into your bedroom, so you steal his look instead. Standard cultural operating procedure.

I’ll give the undercut this much: it’s committed. You sat down, looked someone in the eye, and said take it off. You stopped negotiating with the mirror about who you want to be. Whether it ages well is a different question—one that’s been answered badly by previous generations and will be answered badly again—but at least you meant it when you made the call.

The bass keeps dropping. The clippers keep running.