We Analyzed Keith Morris’s Dreadlock

Κείμενο VICE Staff

30 Απριλίου, 2011, 8:00μμ

By Vice Staff

They say eyes are the windows to the soul, in which case your hair is what? The roof? Like a roof, your hair is important but something that most of us hardly ever think about beyond its outward appearance. If you don’t take care of it, it will rapidly be tangled with gunk and tennis balls and dead birds. Take Keith Morris, former Black Flag vocalist and frontman for the Circle Jerks and the recently formed OFF! He’s been growing his dreadlocks in a variety of configurations for almost 23 years, and they now look like something that was snaked out of a gutter after a particularly bad rainstorm.

This is why, after pondering the cornucopia of disgusting junk that might be found in Keith’s keratin helmet, we asked him and his fellow OFF! bandmates (who would serve as a control group, of course) to send us at least three grams of their locks. The plan was to mail the samples to a lab in Texas that specializes in “Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis.” This not-exactly medically approved hair test determines which vitamins and minerals an individual is lacking and how many hazardous metals are constantly being pushed through his or her scalp. We thought it’d be a good alternative to a normal music feature, because writing about bands is usually about as interesting as taking a shit in your shoe and walking around the block.

The next time we heard from them, they told us that not everyone was into it. Initially, we figured it was Keith who was uncomfortable with the idea because he felt singled out due to the situation on his head. But for the record, we must state that Dimitri Coats, Steven Shane McDonald, and Mario Rubalcaba—three supposed punks who between them were in Burning Brides, Redd Kross, and Rocket From the Crypt—were, for whatever reason, scared of having their precious manes inspected by weirdo pseudoscientists in Texas. Keith, however, was totally game and immediately FedExed us a little furry cigar.

For science’s sake, and because the rest of the band declined to participate, we tested three other samples alongside Keith’s: a black guy’s dread, some ginger strands from one of our photographer buddies, and a bunch of clippings we stole off the floor of a barbershop. After about a week, the lab sent us back pages of charts and graphs that we did our best to process and summarize into language that someone would actually want to read.