Martorial elegance # 43

MC Serch attempting The Crane in the video for that Kurious Benetton joint he was on with DOOM a couple of years back; his only worthwhile contribution to the song.

Back in the late nineties the gentlemen's fashion magazine Draper's Records proposed that the reason men's denim sales in the U.K had slumped to an all-time low was because of "the Jeremy Clarkson effect". It's an immensely plausible hypothesis, but it doesn't explain why the effect didn't spread to the 2 countries where denim is king when Top Gear is the highest rated show on the BBC's flagship channels in America and Japan, or why the equally atrocious Richard Hammond & James May visage of bootcut jeans with a brown leather jacket then became the default casual look of 97% of men over the age of 35 throughout the last decade.

Here at The Martorialist we spend at least 3 minutes per waking hour formulating theories about the effect celebrities in appalling jeans have on the tastes of the general public, and today we've come to a conclusion on the origins of sagged pants and it has nothing to do with 2 Live Crew album covers, street looks derived from the lack of belts in prison, or skaters buying their pants two or three sizes up to act as protection against injuries; the act of wearing one's slacks drooped below one's waistline, we proffer, was actually borne out of the universal horror teenagers experienced in 1989 when they flocked to see The Karate Kid 3 and laid their eyes on the then slightly portly Ralph Macchio making his jeans look all Jeremy Clarksoned out and thought "Christ on a pogo-stick, let's try to look as far from that as is sartorially possible" :



And there, in a pair of ill-fitting denim, is a lesson for you on how cruel, fickle, and ironic the worlds of both fashion and cinema are, given that Ralph had outswagged the rest of the male cast in The Outsiders as Johnny Cade by pulling off what's arguably the greatest Canadian Tuxedo in celluloid history back in 1983, yet still found himself as a proto-Kenny Powers figure for denim dystopia a mere 6 years later. Damn, Daniel son. To his credit, Karate Kid 3 saw Ralph still posessing aspirations of James Dean with his red Harrington jacket ala Jim Stark, but fate was conspiring against him on multiple levels by this point and the movie's wardrobe department could only come up with a cheap replica rather than a real Baracuta G9. Save for My Cousin Vinny, Ralph's movie career never recovered from such indignity and it shadowed the downfall of Sensei John Kreese and the Cobra Kai until regular tv parts acted as a sort've televisual Terry Silver.

BONUS BEATS :

Let's cast our minds back to the days when Serch was a tad more athletic :

3rd Bass - Wordz Of Wisdom (1989)



Yo, you know who's to blame for Serch's achingly solemn delivery on that aforementioned Kurious & DOOM joint? You dudes who've been calling him thee most exalted potentate of whiggatry on the internet for the last 15 years or so, that's who. Even if you've never been partial to Serch's brand of pre-Rappaport whiteness, you have to admit that the enthusiastic Serch of yore is far preferable to the earnest Serch on that song, and I'm sure you'd also concur that in 2011 it's about time someone leaked that original version of Serch's Back To The Grill Again with Akinyele on it which was mentioned in the Ego Trip book back in 1999.