The Dickhead, Then and Now: It's Been Five Years Since ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’

Suppose we should get this out the way early doors: yes, everyone at VICE is a dickhead, most especially me. "But," you are saying, with your little hands, with your keyboards, "What are… fucksake, mate! What are we meant to call you in the comments section now?" Get this: everyone in the comments section is a dickhead, too. It's 2015 and the world today is just a perfect dickhead ecosystem. Is it the water? It is not the water. Is there some sort of special dickhead gel being absorbed up through our thumbs and into our brains, delivered to us via our touchscreen devices? I'm not saying "no". But look to your left and look to your right and then look down at your own torso and there is a 66 percent chance you just looked at at least one dickhead. Dickheads abound.

Anyway, with the caveats drawn up and checked by our legal department, onto the meat of things: it's been five years and one day since quirky, hipster-baiting YouTube hit "Being A Dickhead's Cool" was first uploaded to YouTube. Why didn't this article get written yesterday? Because we only noticed today. And so the truth of all things: dickheads, fundamentally, are lazy and inattentive.

But they are also changing. Because the dickhead of "Being A Dickhead's Cool" – the dickhead of 2010 – has warped into something familiar but not the same. They don't really do that thing with the empty glasses frames any more, so that's wrong, however: fixie bikes are still a thing. It's just hard to know, isn't it? What is dickhead and what's just normal? What is a leftover from the Neanderthal dickhead of 2010, and what is the state of the evolved dickhead today?

What better way to celebrate a cultural epoch marker like "Being A Dickhead's Cool" like going through it, line by line, and saying how it's wrong when held up to the cold, hard light of today? Nothing is better. So let's do exactly that.

Actually quite hard to do the leap from Cambridgeshire to London these days, with a technical unemployment fall under the Tory government being masked by the fact that most people on that first slippery rung of low level, low pay employment are locked in the prison of zero-hours contracts. Also, most of the affordable rentals are in south London now, which is a fucking trek. So, like, not to put words into mouths of The Grand Spectacular, who made this vid, but "Got on the train from Cambridgeshire / eight-hour shift at a big Sports Direct and then home again / or maybe I can crash on a sofa in Brockley / idk it's 50-50 at the moment I need my mate to text me back" would now be more apt.

But listen: I'm no musician. Maybe that doesn't "fit".

Moustaches gave way to beards during The Great Pulled Pork War of 2013; purple leggings are for flamboyant cycle couriers, the ones who have calf tattoos about how much they hate cabbies and say things like, "MATE, YOU NEARLY HAD MY SINGLE LONG, WENDING DREADLOCK OFF THERE! IT'S GOT A BELL ON THE END, YOU MUG! YOU COULD HAVE HAD ME UNDER THAT STATIONARY BUS!" Sailor tats are no longer hip, so sorry if you have one of those permanently on your body now because of this song. I think the main tattoo vibe right now is either "very lo-fi picture of a skull" or "geometric shit", although obviously refer back in five years to see how wrong that turns out to be.

Yeah, this is more or less good. Dickheads still play synths, despite the creeping army of ukulele players surging in their wake. I mean, ultimately: dickheads will always find a way to make the most irritating noise possible, whatever the year, whatever the situation. That's how Stomp happened.

I don't really know when "wearing glasses that didn't have lenses in them" gave way to "going through a special double-door arrangement into a cat café that smells mildly of shit" and "unironic vaping", but it did, and now here we are. In a way, the effect of peeking back through history just five years beyond is a little juddering, like looking at Boy George in the 80s, or Gazza in the 90s: they were very of their time, very iconic, but also absurd looking, and would just look stupid if they were happening right now, in front of us. Imagine if someone came up to you in thick-rimmed non-prescription glasses, now. You'd assault them. What were we thinking? What were we all thinking? What were we thinking?

This was quite a fun, knowing line in 2010 – we did hate the poor, didn't we? We did like to turf them out of their council houses and push them out of London, and then complain when their houses were concrete-y and bleak – but now, in 2015, it's realer, more huge. Now conglomerates buy up council housing like Pacman eating up pills, and either propose to tack something on top of them that inexplicably makes each property worth £1.5million or just raze the fuckers to the ground, building towering skyscrapers up in their dust. So, to recap: the real dickheads aren't hipsters… the real dickheads… are… overseas property investors? Something like that. Make u think, either way.

Instagram. We have this and it's called Instagram now.

London Fields is still a good BBQ-and-tins spot and I won't hear anything against that.

The only people who have blogs now are divorced uncles and fashion girls. Weird crowd.

Sorry, I'm just – it's just I'm still thinking about it. I mean, are we not allowed to enjoy BBQ-and-tins any more? If man cannot enjoy BBQ-and-tins then man cannot truly enjoy life. Is it "ironic" to enjoy well-grilled meat and a cold can? Is it not de rigueur to take photos of yourself having fun in a field? No, it isn't. It's perfectly OK to like good things. I'm feeling very distantly victimised by this jokey song's attitude towards BBQs.

Still true and also a v. accurate description of a recent warehouse party I went to although actually, come to think of it, my name wasn't on the list and I had to really begrudgingly pay £8 to get in. So that's one thing that has changed between 2010 and 2015. People behind beer-sodden desks in condemned buildings are now really fucking tight with the guestlist.

We're post-Starbucks now, dickheads today favouring coffee shops staffed by Australians, the Australians incredibly good but also slow at pulling coffee, the Australians doing strange milk patterns and handing your coffee to you without a lid, the Australians nodding Australianly to a stack of lids behind you, as if: like, I'm paying about £2.60 for a fucking coffee here, mate. The least you could do it put a lid on it. It's a very basic bit of labour you are outsourcing to me for reasons unknown. If I wanted to put sugar in it I'd take the lid off. Don't give me that shit.

Yeah, this accurately describes a couple of weddings I went to this summer.

And so to conclude: does "Being a Dickhead's Cool" stand up today? "Being a Dickhead's Cool" will stand up as long as dickheads exist, which will be forever, the shocked silence caused by a nuclear bomb slamming into the UK shattered years later by the quiet clicking of cockroaches and some wanker who hid in a fridge falling to the dirt, covered in the chalky dust of a nuclear fallout, and coughing, "I'm… leaving… PR… to… open… a… sourdough… pop-up… "

But I suppose the real takeaway from this is the sharp, sudden knowledge that – though we might look back and cringe at 2010-era dickheads, dickheads with their low vests and sailor tattoos, their moustaches and their spectacles – are we not still they? Will we not look back on this from 2020 and laugh, honking on our hover cigarettes, riding our hovercycles, getting face tattoos that hover slightly above the skin, and go: Oh, what dickheads we were back in 2015, when we vaped, and thought Twitter was good. Essentially: dickheads endure, dickheads evolve, dickheads will never die. Dickheads undulate beneath the yellow-white sun. And we are all dickheads, every last one of us, and the only thing stopping us from being anything other than that at any given moment is the context of the era we live in.

Anyway: good song, thanks for all the laughs.

@joelgolby

(h/t @girlonetrack)

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