super natural phenomena; COMBING THROUGH WHAT CONSTITUTES “NATURAL” HAIR AS DREADLOCKS WANE

Pittsburgh City Paper April 16, 2003 | Anonymous In today’s here-today-gone-today world of hip-hop fashion, it’s hard for the media to keep up with all the pop-up trends. Take the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which in November 2001 published an article on black folks’ natural hair styles — specifically dreadlocks — and featured a photo of Nate Mitchell, owner of The Natural Choice hair salon in Oakland, his mane of locks spread left to right margin. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell became a lock-less monster.

“I felt they served their purpose,” says Mitchell. “Towards the end I was keeping them for the wrong reasons. I was keeping them because others had them or because chicks dug them.” While locks have lost their novelty among blacks, many have found a way to un-lock the definition of what it means to have natural hair, experimenting with Skittle-colored dyes, centipede-path designs, horsehair and even coffee stirrers to concoct a new wave of natural hair fashions. These styles say what locks did in the ’90s: give me free.

Don’t get it twisted: Just because they’re using materials that aren’t indigenous to the scalp doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to still call it natural. According to Tamika Williams, a stylist at Natural Choice, “natural” simply means free of any chemical processing to change the hair’s natural texture: no perming, relaxing, gelling or anything that would disrupt the normal course of black hair growth. And where locks were once the premiere way to make that earthy statement, the style has been amended to include braids that coil like a snake charmed out of his basket, cornrows that replicate Barry Sanders running routes, plaits that reduce thugs to Li’l Bow Wows, and micro-braids that resemble blackened strands of angel hair pasta. site natural hair blogs

Those who chose to maintain the locked hairstyle have even expanded their lot by braiding, dying and twisting hair in ways the original Rastas, who began the method to purposefully offend British authorities, never imagined. Kia Frazier, Williams’ “soul sista” and virtual twin stylist at Natural Choice, has a multi-tiered lock style where her hair’s complexion transitions from a candy-apple red to a botanical fuchsia to a deep shade of merlot.

Locks experienced a tremendous surge of popularity in the early ’90s as black-is-beautiful preening rappers such as YZ, Speech of Arrested Development, Lord Jamar of Brand Nubian and Ish of Digable Planets branched out from the previously popular boxed and S-curled fashions. Blacks here in Pittsburgh captured the same spirit, and familiar local personalities such as Luqmann (better known as B-Tree), Bridgespotters’ captain Kamau Ware, poet extraordinaire Davu, as well as Mitchell of Natural Choice, took up the cause. Today, only Davu has locks, though even he went through the painstaking, near-surgical removal procedure — and then grew them right back. naturalhairblogsnow.net natural hair blogs

“Biblically, I was into Solomon and Samson,” says Ray Merriweather, a senior at Pitt and Natural Choice regular who just recently excavated his head’s branches. “Their reasons for growing their hair were more physical, but my reasons were more mental — ’cause I ain’t but so big. There’s a lot of energy in [locks] but you come to a point where you realize you don’t need them to be where you need to be.” Mitchell’s shop is the first regionally to specialize solely in natural hairstyles. And with the distinction of being the first shop of this ilk, it’s fitting that it sets the trends of what is and ain’t natural. Why are they able to make this distinction? Says Frazier, “It’s a generational thing — the generation defines what it means and what they believe is real.” Or, judging by her tone, basically because she said so.

The style that has replaced locks as the black hairdo du minute is cornrowed hair. And even that style continues to mutate from the conventional styling — arched rows beelined over one’s skull — to where the rows take dizzying cursive paths defying linear theories, never really connecting point A to point B, but instead swerving from quadrant III to quadrant I with polynomial properties.

Hip-hop etymology blatantly robs Webster’s for its words and occupies them with his own meaning; hence — in the corniest of examples — “fat” becomes “phat” — no longer denoting obesity, instead meaning attractive. Today, natural doesn’t change in spelling but its definition has been extended, while at the same time it can no longer be limited to just the look of Bob Marley disciples. It makes just as much sense as that “natural” Aquafina spring water that’s been bottled through pipes in Pepsi-Cola factories.

But of course, by the time you read this, the Jheri Curl will have re-emerged as the new hair fashion for blacks.

Photograph (Natural Choice co-owner Nate Mitchell) Anonymous