Harley
Riders' Cultural Appropriation
by
Peckhammer
Submitted
by Nitinol
Harley Riders' Cultural Appropriation
The fashions,
fixations and culture of the working folk who helped make Harley-Davidson one of the most
recognized corporate logos in the world have been culturally appropriated by the rich
urban bikers that are fueling the retro-apocalypse(1).
Real bikers are a dying breed, despite the fact that Harleys are as common as flees on a
dog. Harley Davidson's modus operandi of prohibitive pricing, draconian control of
merchandise and the ubiquitous waiting list for new bikes have rendered America's most
notorious cruiser as the trend-surfer's fashion accessory rather than the epicenter of a
lifestyle.
If your history lessons are manufactured in Hollywood, then motorcycle culture has its
traditional roots in outlaw culture. The biker's self-image is that of a lone rider,
windblown, cut free from the society whose rules are boxing him in. But the term
"outlaw" in motorcycling is a paradox. The expression was not originally
associated with anything sinister. It simply meant was that you raced motorcycles but were
not sanctioned by the AMA. Life Magazine insufflated "outlaw" with its famous
picture of a burly, drunken biker on his hog surrounded by dozens of empty beer bottles
strewn in the streets of Hollywood then spoon-fed this image to the public.
Today's motorcycle culture appears to be nothing more than some black tee-shirt wearing
wanker fantasizing about being a hard guy. It's obvious that a guy who jams a fiber-optic
video camera up asses for 70 hours a week definitely has a fantasy about living a
different life. So he dresses up in studs-and-leather uniforms that were once hallmarks of
the culture's white trash origins and cruises the boulevard on a chrome-covered,
two-wheeled Winnabago.
The result is a whole new enclave of motorcycle riders: doctors, lawyers, actors,
engineers, salesmen, bankers, and computer programmers saddling up a pricey new wave of
bikes and effectively driving them out of the range of the "working man."
These RUBs are culturally appropriating in the same way that those pincushion-faced teens
are collecting body piercings like baseball cards. These behaviors are routed in tribal
custom and ritual. Are bikers' lives so homogenized that they have drawn on other culture
sets to subsidize their own existential voids?
(1) A retro-apocalypse is where we are so nostalgic for nostalgia that the biker culture,
as we know it, collapses. -Nitinol