I did some google searches, but didn’t find anything.
From about 1978 to 1986 there were a lot of guys I knew who were affectionately known as “hoods.” It was sort of a post-hippie subculture. They were similar to “stoners,” but were somewhat more ambitious. Characteristics included:
White male between the ages of 15 and 25.
Long, straight hair.
Drove a very fast Trans Am. (A prerequisite!)
Uniform included jean pants (sometimes bellbottom), T-shirt, and a jean or leather jacket. (Think Johnny Ramone.)
Dealt drugs on the side.
Smoked lots of pot.
Had a menial job.
Loner.
What really set the hoods apart from the hippies & stoners was the Trans Am. You were not a hood unless you had a Trans Am.
I’m not exactly sure when they disappeared. Seems like around 1986.
The term “hood” for “hoodlum” was in use in my high school days (late 50’s) and was used to indicate the guy was into petty crime or was a gang member, even if the “gang” was not as well-formed or menacing as the LA gangs like Crips and Bloods and such.
Synonyms like “punk” and “badass” meant the same type of ne’er-do-well. I don’t think the term(s) ever really faded away altogether in this part of the country, but I don’t recall any “movement” such as described in the OP, and certainly not to the exclusion of other uses of the term(s).
Where I grew up (around the era Crafter_Man identifies) the “hoods” were kind of a combination of his description and would-be cowboys. The mostly listened to ZZ Top and Hank Williams, Jr., smoked a lot of pot, drank crappy beer that they stole out of distributor’s trucks, date-raped girls (and occasionally more…tolerated because “they’re good boys”), bullied other students, and generally thought of themsevles as real badasses until they crossed the local Samoan family, who were in fact real bad mothers who didn’t tolerate that kind of horseshit. I recall one particular case where one of these self-described hoods started trouble with the youngest Samoan brother. The next day he was pulled out of his car, savagely beaten, had the car rolled into a ditch and set on fire, and his girlfriend either courteously returned to her home or gang-raped, depending on whose story you believed. (Either way, she refused to testify regarding the beating and car theft.) I expect most of these people have either ended up working at the local powerplant or as meth users/distributors. A charming group of people with whom I have absolutely no interest in maintaining contact.
Good riddance to “hood” subculture. Now if we could only get rid of “gangstas” as well…
They morphed in the Black thugs, banjee boys and hip-hoppers of the mid-80s. And, instead of a Trans Am, they drive whatever vehicle their drug profits allowed them to afford.
The way we used the term when I was growing up (in Ohio in the late 1960’s in a working-class community), it could be used for either men or women. They were the group that didn’t get very good grades in high school. They cultivated a bad-boy or bad-girl image. Perhaps some of them engaged in criminal behavior, but mostly they ended up in working-class jobs. They certainly weren’t among the (relatively small) group from my high school who went to college and got good jobs.
In the main Beavis and Butthead article it is stated Todd drove a primer patched Plymouth Duster. I haven’t seen the show in years so I don’t remember either way.
We had people that fit the OPs general description in upstate NY in the 1970s. I guess every locale had a version.
Interesting that this term is conflated with the modern usage of “hood”. I read the title of this thread and thought, “Remember hoods? Huh? They’re everywhere!”
Nowadays of course, “hood” as a shortening of “neighborhood” usually refers to the ghetto, and a “hood” can be someone from the 'hood, or a short form for “hood-rat”, or even “hoodlum” still (with basically the same meaning now as then, but applied mostly to urban area-types).
I suspect that when this (more popular) usage took over any other connotation for hood was lost.
Back in the 1950s, I was a hood; the Dallas City police often told me so to my very face. They told me so loudly and repeatedly. They weren’t always consistent, they often told me I was other things, none of them flattering. The told my friends and companions the same things, often while we were in groups. If there are any Dallasites from the 50s here, I was usually to be found in the Lakewood area, unless we went out to the Jacksboro Strip for fun and entertainment.
> They morphed in the Black thugs, banjee boys and hip-hoppers of the mid-80s.
> And, instead of a Trans Am, they drive whatever vehicle their drug profits
> allowed them to afford.
Huh? In what sense are these groups equivalent to hoods? These groups are black or Latino, while hoods were white. Banjee boys are often homosexual or bisexual, while hoods (I suspect) were the sort who would beat up homosexuals. Aside from engaging in criminal behavior, there’s little in common among these groups.
Same thing here, same time period, Miami. There’s nothing quite so fine as taking a new girl to a dance and having the two juvie cops standing outside call you over on your way in. Then they tell New Girl: “You look like a nice kid. Better find somebody else to take you to dances, this guy is nothin’ but trouble.”
Inside your head you’re thinkin’: “YES! And thank you Officer Maloney, you just guaranteed that I’m gettin’ some tonight.” Through the door you can hear the DJ spinnin’ some Gene Vincent…
Whatever else it was, it certainly wasn’t a post-hippie subculture where I grew up. People were using the term before there were hippies. Hippies, at least in the 1960’s, came from middle-class (and often upper-middle-class) families. Hoods came from working-class families. Hoods greased their hair, while hippies didn’t put anything in their hair. If anything, hoods may have gotten off on beating up hippies.
It also wasn’t a subculture in the same sense as much of what we think of as youth subculture today. There was never any sense, as in certain movies like Mean Girls, that being a hood was consciously chosen subgroup that you clearly decided to join and then would always sit with at lunch. If you were white, came from a working-class family, knew that you weren’t going to college, and accepted the criminal behavior of your friends, then you were probably going to be classed as a hood, but there was little conscious choice in this.
First of all, the “morphing” from one group into another was a joke, and was made mainly because of the of the similarity in the criminal, outsider status of both, and secondarily, because one was white and the other black. Second, the banjee boys moniker actually started out being applied to what would have been considered straight, street boys. Homesexuals later took over the dress and the persona as a way of (a) remaining undercover, and (b) attracting those same tough, bad boys. While being gay and having lived in New York for the last 25 years doesn’t make me an expert, I think it gives me a closeup on both those cultures and the overlap between the two.
Regarding my first observation made in my original e-mail, I guess I forget this:
Growing up in Columbia, MD in the mid-80’s we called them ‘grits.’ And it was all about Zep, Kiss, AC/DC, Metallica, denim jackets, Trans Ams, cheap beer and mexican dirt weed.
I generally avoided them, but their girls were fun to party with…
Wendell Wagner, upon further research it does turn out the I erroneously chose the word “banjee” in my original post. That word seems be exclusively used to describe homosexuals who act and dress like street toughs and did not evolve from being used to describe straights who dressed and acted thusly. I made this incorrect assumption based on my earlier years, and my observations that those gays, then on the “downlow,” who imitated the behavior of heterosexual street thugs and I back-attributed the word to that group.
I do, however, stand by my assertion, joke though it originally was, that the word “hood” is now used to described a black, street and criminal element, not unlike the which described in the OP.
