party in the back

Bringing up Billy Ray Cyrus in a mullet retrospective might feel predictable, but we’d be remiss not to mention his indelible contribution to the history of hair. The country singer wasn’t the first famous person to rock the two-layer look when he released his breakout single “Achy Breaky Heart” in 1992, but he sure as hell made an impact. Billy Ray’s mullet was a magnificent, by-the-book example of the style: super-short on top and so long in the back he regularly wore it in a ponytail. His debut also marked the pinnacle of the mullet’s mainstream popularity; by the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was the go-to cut for straight, white guys who wanted you to know they liked to party hard (see also: George Clooney, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Barnes). But the rules of fashion, dah-ling, are as inescapable as gravity: what goes up must inevitably come down. The popular ’do quickly picked up a slew of rather condescending nicknames, like the Kentucky Waterfall and the Tennessee Top Hat, as well as an association with bogans. The end came in 1994, when rap group Beastie Boys mocked the cut on their track “Mullet Head”, which namechecked poor Billy Ray. (A ‘mullet head’, if you’re wondering, is a 19th-century insult akin to ‘doofus’.) In a magazine feature, the group called the style “the worst haircut of all”. Savage.