Shirts Ghetto People Like

The ghetto world is known for wearing some wild *ss shirts. The hood may not have started the white tee thing, for example, but it sure took it to the extreme. And ghetto people are a surefire audience for the shirts you see at the swap meet or at the beach boardwalk with big *ss weed leaves on them or cuss words in massive block letters (e.g. Don’t Ask Me 4 Sh*t, a classic shirt this author could use when talking to women I wanna take out, but I digress)

Anyway, let’s document a little of what’s out there (in order from top to bottom). For instance, the hater enthusiasts are covered with authority.
A ghetto person just can't call their wardrobe complete without celebrating an irreverent song lyric that describes them to a T (pun intended). Of course one shirt bound to be on many ghetto backs celebrates the hood’s favorite skin art and Too Short’s favorite word all in one. Last but not least to be celebrated together are hood icons and bad design. Happy shopping.
<–This will especially be appreciated by the baller in your life this Christmas!

Michelle Obama

There’s just something about her like there’s something about New Balance 574s on your feet. You can’t place a finger on it, but it feels right.

Adele Givens tells it best. She’s just such a f*ckin’ lady!

She ain’t no video vixen and she ain’t tryna be no hot mama or anything else out of pocket. She’s just straight up woman. Fits Barack to a T. Those factors alone make her bad as hell. And she got badder as she got older! How many women can you say that about?

A woman like her could say “let’s get it on right here right now!” and a ghetto dude wouldn’t even accept because he’s just floored by her general steez…just wanna lay on her bosom and listen to her tell stories or something. And as he lays there, two milk 20-something freaks could come by ready for a three-screw, and he’d turn them down out of hand like “nah, I’m good” with a Kool-Aid smile on his face for a month.

Michelle Obama is the wife every man ghetto or otherwise wants next to him on every date and vacation, let alone bearing his children. And a lot of dudes don’t even know or won’t admit it! Queenly without tryna be some overbearing diva. Comfortable in her own skin just like the President. She knows where she fits in this world, doesn’t have a pretentious bone in her body. Whether wearing shorts in public or getting physically close to Queen Elizabeth, she pulls off being her.

Yo, kcuf the dumb….this author fox with Michelle Obama. Period.

You can’t make this stuff up #5

Out on the town a few weeks back, I spotted the following:

Yeah, it’s the ghetto Lady Deathstrike. A female Freddy Krueger. And she looked about 40 something running with her boyfriend that was probably 28 or 30. So she’s been studying at the Cougar Den. And her thickness indicates she was taught to kill her own food using those.

You guys can’t tell in the pic, but those things were quite thick and sturdy lookin’. Can’t imagine bangin’ her walls out and her carving one’s back up with those talons (not saying I wouldn’t poke–she had a nice meaty rack and, as you can see, a serviceable rump). What practical use could she have for those things? Maybe to sniff 2 lines worth of coke at once? And why do chicks with these swords on their fingers always have jobs that involve typing?

Author’s note: Yeah, it’s the first post in 30 days. Had been out enjoying summer for one (freaks, sneakers, drinks, you know the deal). Beyond that, what’s the point of casting pearls to swine, AKA these recent commentators who take this blog on face value and swear they know what this author is talking about better than I do. Reminds me of people who buy magazines for the pictures and not the written content. Those who see me drop it over on Kicks On Fire and Very Smart Brothas know the real deal. Anyway, all that is to say I’m alive and well.

#33: Hair shows

HAIR shows! F*cking hair shows.

The convention of feminine and campy flamboyance. Where the home-based stylists and their clients get their ideas. One of many reasons the stores run by Koreans sell the fake hair. And there’s a chance styles seen at one will turn up at a prom or two.

Alright, here’s the analogy to paint the picture for you:
Hair shows are to ghetto people what fashion shows are to the wine-and-cheese, Fancy Dan gay guys and child beauty pageants are to those loser Middle America redneck moms.

Some of the most ridiculous, impossible, Pantone-damning primary colored, Flavor of Love, job interview reject hair styles are what you’re gonna see at a hair show. Even hair magazines will steer clear of hair shows. But ghetto people get up for it like Texas gets up for high school football…and this author crams to understand either one.

So instead of a massive write up on it, it’s pictorial time….observe:

#32: Way-oversized shorts

Trust, this author’s sartorial tastes dictate and appreciate that shorts made for dudes stop at or below the knee. It’s one of those trends that was gotten right. Just feels right, it’s how a man should look. Leave the short *ss “hot pants” to broads.

Now with that out the way, let’s get to what SGPL exists to do: tell it like it is about the hood mentality. A mentality that takes things to extremes and often overdoes it badly.  (And summer’s coming up, so in the immortal words of Special Ed, it’s only gettin’ worse.)

Thus in the hood, so many ghetto people (yes, even straight, girly women) will come out of the house in shorts long enough to reach their ankles, with an area of fabric that could easily have been a regular pair of pants. And then they *sses have the nerve to sag in them. Meaning they can actually scuff their shorts with the heels of their shoes. As Geraldo said when covering Katrina, “what the hell.” Purpose-defeating ghetto priorities are quite powerful.

It was bad enough when Mexican cholos were going hard with this look by cutting off the cuffs of them big *ss Ben Davises, looking raggedy as hell in the process.

Really, why does a 5’6, 40-pounds-wet, scrawny ghetto dude need to wear 4XL basketball shorts when he already looks like a midget as it is? One can barely see the inseam half the time when he wears them, so it looks like he’s wearing a skirt. Furthermore, it’s been the case for going on 20 years that bigger size clothes are unavailable in your average store due to the bigger dudes being beaten to the punch by some twiggy little 32-waist douche housin’ up 40-s when he could pull the same look off with a mere 36, if not his own size.

The wackness of it all is that these looks go totally unchallenged by their peers. Everyone simply goes along with it. Ah well, somebody gotta keep the swap meets (and Jimmy Jazz) open.

I’m surprised ghetto folks don’t wear baggy *ss draws at this point.

#30: Sagging

It is told that in American prisons, the sagging of one’s pants was an indication that the male inmate was gay, and ready to get busy sexually. Up until the 80s, it was done on the streets chiefly by the most likely candidate to go there, gang bangers (surely one had to wonder about some of these dudes, considering the above urban legend). Then when baggy jeans became the trend in the early 90s, suddenly everyone was sagging, going lower inch by inch every 6 months, until finally some cornball decided that the sagging had to go underneath the *ss cheeks!

What possessed the first ghetto goof to go underneath the cheeks with it is beyond me. Is it to show off the skidmarked boxers they wear that no one else really cared to see? And when is the logical end of going penguin gonna hit the scene as some doofus just leaves the waist of his pants around his ankles and calls it a day?

The other mind bogglers about sagging are that:
a) so many of these cats wear these expensive jeans that were already too long for them to begin with (as so many ghetto types are shrimpy short dudes with Napoleon complexes) then sag in them and scuff the cuffs (which they don’t have the decency to splurge and have hemmed, since they’d rather have the weed money) so they’re just dirty and chewed up, and…
b) now that skinny jeans have hit the hood, people are sagging in those and defeating the purpose.

Worst of all, no one gets the idea that not only is it extra suspect lookin’ for all these wannabe tough guys to run around sagging, it just looks sloppy. Not to mention that the little thugs within the sagging community may have some police to run from or someone that owes them money to run after, but how can that successfully be done when they have to constantly pull their pants up to avoid tripping over themselves?

Ghetto minded people do so many paradoxical, corny, backwards things…and most all of it has a tendency to take off.

Does this author believe that folks should be fined and thrown in jail over it? No. That’s just wrong, and the legal system has bigger fish to fry than policing bad fashion. Leave that to the public at large. And bloggers like yours truly.

#28: Do-rags

Condoms for your head.

It used to be that the fellas would only use do-rags to hold down their pomaded and brushed head of hair while they were indoors, and took it off when going out to show off their waves. Do-rags were for a man what rollers are for women.

When the cornrow craze kicked in in the late 90’s, however, suddenly the ghetto faithful were rockin’ do-rags as accessories. Sweaty *ss, grease-smellin’ do-rag would be worn all. Day. Long while heads were just out ghetto adventurin’. Walkin’ the block, blazin’ on the corner, having sex (or jacking off in the alley if one were so unlucky)…all with a do-rag on his head that he never felt the need to take off. Do-rags were suddenly for a man (or thuggish-ruggish lesbian) what a bra was for a woman.

Even guys who were stone bald to the point you knew their hair was never coming back wore them, regardless of having a scalp with the shiny finish of a bowling ball.

To make matters worse, fools would layer two or even three different colored do-rags on their dome, with one of those douchey baseball caps (stickers and all, of course) tilted on as a cherry on top, and you better believe that whole clusterf*ck on his head is matching the fake Jordans on his feet. Add in all the aforementioned activity and those synthetic fabrics had to have someone’s head, rags, and cap smelling like sauerkraut with everything all discolored a dark gray like the insole of some hood girl’s ripper slippers (bought from the same shop to line the Koreans’ pockets even more).

And of course the logical end of this fashion statement is the ridiculousness pictured above, sold in 99 cent stores everywhere. You know once something hits the shelves of a 99 cent store, it’s officially done to death.

With the hipster/skater look all the current rage, the do-rags aren’t as prolific as they were when cats were bumpin’ too much Dipset. But you already know there’s nuff ghetto males keeping it alive everyday. Just like those hood urchins who still had jheri curls in the late 90s or leisure suits in the 80s.

TheEvilOyo’s take on the ghetto

The views expressed do not necessarily reflect that of Stuff Ghetto People Like…so don’t shoot the messenger!

#20: Bootlegs (and other illegitimate goods)

  You hear it by every liquor store, every check cashing place, every chicken-and-chinese stand.

“Got them CDs, got them DVDs.”

The bootleg man got you when no one else does.  Need that new Makaveli? It’s on deck.  A fresh replacement copy of Soul Plane?  It’s on deck.  If it’s directed by Tyler Perry, starring Cube, or featuring T.I. or Cassie on the soundtrack, it’s on deck with the bootleg man.

Or there’s that other guy with the Econoline doors propped open….

“I got that Ed Hardy, that True Religion, that Prada…”

Don’t forget that crackhead who is a better salesman of furniture than anyone who ever worked for Levitz or Wickes.  He also got those registration tags for your whip.

It’s a bazaar every single day in the hood.  Whatever you want, for a limited time only, it’s yours if you think the price is right.

The guys that have all this fraudulent crap wouldn’t put in the work if it wasn’t so lucrative.  Wouldn’t take the time to get that illicit editor’s copy, or sneak the video camera into the advanced screening, or buy in bulk from that warehouse…or ransack your neighbor’s property!  Because somebody in the hood will take a flier on it.  (And contribute to hood squalor in the process…but we know that don’t matter!)

Suckers and others line up to make sure they got the latest flick they ain’t tryna see in the theatre (more often than not a Black one) supporting piracy, and taking dollars away from the entertainers they obviously love enough to buy something featuring them in it, missing material and crappy sound and/or picture be damned.  And we all know it’s the pits not being dipped, so ghetto corner-cutters would rather cut to the corner to have what they need to floss like a boss at the club on Friday (and drink real drinks, go figure) instead of recycling Black dollars a better way by supporting the store down the block that really needs the customers.  

Keep this in mind when the “For Lease” sign goes up a week after the one that reads “Going Out Of Business.”  Or your favorite entertainer is no longer a bankable star.  Could have gone the extra mile and waited just a little bit longer for that legit product.  But ghetto people don’t often worry about legit.  No. They care about being up on the latest for as low a price as possible.  Remember this when you see a fairly crispy pair of late-model Jordans on someone’s feet in colors you don’t remember Nike making, or the Lex on D’s you know damn well Pooky can’t afford.  When they say they got the hookup, look for the fingers crossed behind their back!  Or look for the smoker they got that deal on the Rolex from (then you’ll know who to blame for the receiving stolen property charges).

#15: Prom

Prom is an event that high school students all over America spend enormous amounts of time, money, and energy for a few hours of fun. This dance is usually held at the end of the year to celebrate the transition into adulthood where young teenagers dance the night away. Traditionally young men wear a nice black-tie tux while the ladies grace the dance floor with lovely ball gowns. Prom is usually a night to remember especially the after parties where people lose their virginity or have their first taste of alcohol.

However, ghetto people have a unique spin on Prom especially when it comes to the fashion. No words can truly express the flamboyant prom fashions young ghetto people sport during prom. Prom being held at ghetto schools will have lots of color, intricate hairstyles, designer patterns, and the females will expose lots of skin. Prom is a time where ghetto people show out and try to outdo each other.

Without further adieu, I present to you Ghetto Prom 2008…