i’ve had the exact same haircut for thirteen years.

see, egghead

since allen iverson influenced me to upgrade from a close fade to a ceaser some time in the winter of 1995, i’ve stayed loyal (heh) to the cut. sure, i occasionally change the length and thickness of my beard and mustache, but my hair has basically remained the same.

at the base level, professing to having the exact same cut for over a decade seems somewhat odd until you remember that for a professional black male, there really aren’t that many variations. this is a stark contrast to the 80′s, a decade which saw the virtual wild wild west of acceptable adult black male hair. nowadays, our choices have basically been narrowed down to ceaser, short fro, locks, or bald. sure, if my head wasnt shaped exactly like an easter egg i could conceivably grow cornrows or rock mini’s with watermelon jolly ranchers at the tips, but i know that doing such could, no, wait, would stifle my professional and social growth as well as insure many nights of dry penis.

although we’ve commonly and willfully accepted that a change in hairstyle can drastically alter a persons job prospects, we seem to be a bit hesitant to admit how much it affects our dating selves as well. in a perfect world, i wouldn’t be lactose intolerant, jim jones would be dead be managing a bodega in new rochelle, and your hair wouldnt really matter that much to anyone else. bald or perm, braids or process, in a perfect world you’d still get the same type of attention from the opposite sex regardless of what’s happening on your scalp. its the person inside that matters, right? your hair should have sh*t to do with that.

yet, as i hear “come home with me” obnoxiously blasting from some car outside my bedroom window, i’m reminded that jim jones is still alive, cookies and cream shakes give me impressive gas, and hair matters.

hair matters in the sense that a particular hairstyle can give strangers immediate synopsizes of your personality. adjectives such as “afro-centric“, “high-maintenance“, “free spirited”, “hood rat-ish“, and “gotdamn foolish” could be immediately assigned to you, and this same immediate synopsis affects what type of person might be drawn to you. as i jokingly mentioned before, i know that if i had cornrows instead of the simple ceaser, i wouldnt have been able to bag some of the women ive bagged before, their decisions solely based off of my implied maturity level and income potential. regardless of whether or not this is right or wrong, you can’t deny that its true

hair matters because with many black women, merely suggesting to them that changing their hair might possibly result in increased attention from the opposite sex could induce eyerolls, dialated eyeballs, eye-poking, and eventually eye-gouging.

hair matters because, well, none of us would have ever heard of kelis if it didnt, and, well, we all know how much the idea of kelis has influenced the direction of each of our lives

hair matters because, well, i’m not even gonna attempt to discuss the long and nuanced history regarding african-american women and their hair, so i’m just use this clip as my cheat sheet:

so, coarsely maned fine people of vsb.com, how does hair matter to you?

—the champ