Does there seem to be a correlation between fixed gear biking and the upper class?

even that thick-ass ass can’t save her from the wrath of tarckbears now

she should have kept the hardcase it came from the factory in to keep it from getting fucked up

oh wait

cool things are a product of privilege. the only cool things that happened without it was hip hop and graffiti and look how that turned out.

[quote=GRHebard]Remote,
did you join this forum just to say that?[/quote]
I DO NOT KNOW THE OP

i think this is a pretty weak statement. trends are perhaps more readily available to those who are privileged, but “cool things” don’t have to cost money, and often aren’t the expensive things–that they eventually become–when they’re first starting out, even if they do cost somewhat. secondly, increased avaiability to the privileged is not the same as being a product of it. a cycle can start, but i think saying that cool things are a product of privilege implies that its roots have to be there regardless of where it ends up. with regards to fixed gear on the street, i’ve heard a lot of old folks say they started because of less cost involved–fewer parts and fewer repairs, definitely adapting to a situation of less money, which i’ll admit is only one aspect of privilege, but i think the only you could argue has a direct relationship here. nowadays, though, i think the op’s question has some validity, the trend isn’t the cheapest one ever, and like any trend, it’s hugely materialistic and requires a lot of money to keep up with the joneses. i mean, the moshers.

speaking of moshers, tom mosher’s arrospok went for a metric shit ton on ebay recently. like 500-something.

op: fuck right off.

[quote=solbrothers][quote=GRHebard]Remote,
did you join this forum just to say that?[/quote]
I DO NOT KNOW THE OP[/quote]

lawl

i got an njs panasonic for 20 dollars

A lot of cool, trendy things were originally utilized by people with lower incomes. Fixed gear bikes as street rides were made popular by working messengers. Despite the current trend, many people who actually worked as messengers in the 70’s and 80’s were not middle class white kids who were doing it to piss off their families and gain street cred (no offense to the current messengers in here). And before the messengers picked it up, fixed gear bikes were brought to NYC by Jamaican Islanders and other immigrants who often rode them because they were the leas expensive type of bike to maintain and because there were a lot of them going unused since the popularity of track racing (and cycling in general) died in the 50’s. It hasn’t been until the last 2-3 years that it has become a ‘scene’ where the emphasis moved toward putting the most expensive parts on your bike and away from actually needing it to get around.

The same thing can be said for loft apartments, living in the inner city, and drinking cheap beer. These are all examples of things that were traditionally the domain of the lower income comunity. Then suburban white kids started buying in in attempt to distance themselves from their middle class upbringing (while maintaining their college educations and credit cards of course). Then you couldn’t find a descent apartment in a bad neighborhood for less than $800 a month. Of course, cheap beer is still cheap. But you can’t be a true PBR fan anymore unless you have a bike themed after it.

shut up about that.

everyone knows cool looses its cool once the privileged kids get their hands on it.

I’m broke. My parents were/are equally broke. I never went to art school. I usually ride a geared bike.

So by the law of opposites, the OP must be completely true.

Aren’t we all ready to pass off track bikes to the art school kids anyway?

Everyone knows lugged steel road bikes are the new thing… track bikes are so yesterday .

that’s almost totally true of me except for i ended up riding a fixed gear most of the time (though i’ve recently become enamored of singlespeed freewheel and have parts laying around to build a geared bike)…po’ kids ride fixed too.

edit: @ckd

[quote=TimArchy]“history that every strong rider who messed in the 90s knew about the second they got on bikeforums”

The same thing can be said for loft apartments, living in the inner city, and drinking cheap beer. These are all examples of things that were traditionally the domain of the lower income comunity. Then suburban white kids started buying in in attempt to distance themselves from their middle class upbringing (while maintaining their college educations and credit cards of course). Then you couldn’t find a descent apartment in a bad neighborhood for less than $800 a month. Of course, cheap beer is still cheap. But you can’t be a true PBR fan anymore unless you have a bike themed after it.[/quote]

i don’t see a single thing in either of these wall of texts that prove that cool things are not a product of privilege.

well then the proof is on you, let’s hear it.

The same thing can be said for loft apartments, living in the inner city, and drinking cheap beer. These are all examples of things that were traditionally the domain of the lower income comunity. Then suburban white kids started buying in in attempt to distance themselves from their middle class upbringing (while maintaining their college educations and credit cards of course). Then you couldn’t find a descent apartment in a bad neighborhood for less than $800 a month. Of course, cheap beer is still cheap. But you can’t be a true PBR fan anymore unless you have a bike themed after it.

wuh?

this is all completely stupid.

“when is something ‘cool’?”

unless you used to cool hunt in the 90s, this is irrelevant.

Was rap cool before the downtown white art crowd ‘discovered’ it? or was it a bunch of dusty-ass ghetto kids singing rhymes to each other? Was graffiti cool when only like 10 kids in the world knew what they were spraypainting to each other? Was heroin cool when it was dope fiends robbing houses and overdosing? Or did it get cool when fashion designers realized they could snort it, stay rail-thin, and design fashionably wasted looks? And then get uncool again when they realized they could still die? Does cool happen when it gets recognized by an influential (read:$$$) outsider as having a unique merit?

It seems like the only time something is actually cool is in the moment when the well-off white people recognize it as cool and right before realize they can rip off the idea with a more expensive version.

But also, it’s 2k9, there’s no ‘cool’ anymore, it all ‘hawt.’

I blame the white people.