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The deep fried meme is a staple that exists on one of the Internet's many racially fraught intersections. A Black Twitter creation, the meme genre combines jokes rooted in black culture with aggressively distorted source images. They're the sort of jokes that don't quite land when there's a white user behind them—but many were emboldened enough by the web's gift of anonymity to do just that. The resulting noxious cloud hasn't completely overshadowed deep fried memedom, though. Up on my newsfeed one winter night came a picture of a suited-up Bugs Bunny, his forehead caressing a golden pistol in grim determination. The famed hare was in a bad way: "Lord Forgive Me...Time to Go Back to Tha Old Me."
The meme stood out for two reasons. The most obvious one was that it was relatable: Who among us hasn't brooded about being back on that bullshit? Secondly, that Bugs picture predates the 2015 birth of the deep fried meme and is at least a decade old. I remembered it from long-lost Myspace profiles and from the Facebook pages of fellow high schoolers subtweeting some vague indignity in the way teenagers do, before subtweeting was even a concept. And of course, anyone who's lived in the city during the 3XL-shirt era knows that edgier cartoons—the ones with the graffiti-like exaggerations, and street-adjacent sensibility—aren't just Internet fodder.
On the surface, meshing Looney Tunes with urban culture seems silly. There's no character journey or irreversible consequence in Bugs Bunny's universe, thus, there's no need for Bugs to be back on any sort of bullshit. Look below the surface, and you'll also come across Looney Tunes' well-documented racist history—in All This and Rabbit Stew, Bugs faces off against Sambo-esque hunter Tex Coon, who can't resist a game of craps. Squint a bit and it becomes apparent Looney Tunes and black expression are bonded by the latter's knack for reassembling American culture in its language.
The idea of doing so is built into streetwear's DNA. Streetwear imagery like the Tasmanian Devil in a gold chain, Wile E. Coyote in a mink, and Marvin Martian in a bandana can be traced back to the legendary Queens-based design crew, the Mighty Shirt Kings. Composed of Edwin "Phade" Sacasa, Rafael "Kasheme" Avery, and Clyde "Nike" Harewood, the group took the colorful aesthetics of '80s New York City graffiti and applied them to t-shirts. The Shirt Kings set up shop in Jamaica, Queens' Colosseum Mall, where they quickly became known for combining known cartoon figures (including a few from Disney and comic strips), caricatures, and fly boy flourishes like gold teeth. For Phade, the venture was a combination fanhood and obligation. "You got to remember: '84, '85, '86, that was when the crack era came out and was devastating communities and destroying families," Phade tells me. "We had almost a moral job to bring joy to people's lives—and you found joy when you were a child."
Shirt Kings' clothes became popular thanks to college kids wearing their designs outside New York and visits from then-hot Queens natives LL Cool J and Run-DMC's Jam Master Jay ("The minute Jay came down it was like, 'Oh, who is this guy having a superstar who's all over MTV come down to the Jamaica Coliseum with, like, 100 guys—all of them wearing Adidas—and they're all buying shirts.'"). While his mentor, fashion icon Dapper Dan, was infamously served a cease-and-desist from Gucci because of his "knock-ups," Phade was able to avoid any legal entanglements with Warner Bros. and other corporations. Instead, they overlooked Shirt Kings all together, with Phade noting that, before hip-hop objectively became the commercial behemoth it is today, "there was a vast space between urban and corporate."
Warner Bros. would eventually come around, though. Michael Jordan and the Tune Squad's 78-77 win over the Monstars in 1996 remains a major Generation Y touchstone, and the novel concept of co-starring a human superstar with animated ones proved to be a barrier-breaking one. "Every kid at that time went to see that movie because you were now able to see this larger-than-life persona interact with the cartoons you grew up watching every Saturday morning," Elena Romero, author of Free Stylin': How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry, says. "It was quite an interesting combination that then sparked the licensing opportunities." Warners Bros. would go on to to enter over 1,000 licensing agreements. By the turn of the millennium, two of the most notable ones in fashion were Iceberg and Southpole's Lot 29.
Lot 29 was arguably the best of the two. The brand's liberal use of bright colors and loud designs was an easy sell for a teenage demographic that still wasn't emotionally removed from Looney Tunes' joys. Designs like Bugs Bunny's B-Boy stance were edgy yet innocuous enough not to invite violence (unlike the No Bitchassness shirts; toughs from certain parts of aughties Brooklyn tend to physically inquire if that's true).
Although popular in retrospect, at the time Lot 29 was something of an underdog: The parent company was owned by Korean brothers David and Kenny Khym. Southpole was already an established brand, but they were outsiders in the urban space compared to black-owned competitors FUBU and Mecca. To help with their brand's appeal, they brought in Phillip Pabon, who had already proven himself as FUBU's VP of marketing and advertising. As Southpole/Lot 29's general manager of marketing and advertising, he got to work negotiating deals with celebrities and hip-hop/R&B stars of the moment, notably Juelz Santana and Keyshia Cole. "How crazy is it for a truly conservative Korean company to jump into black culture? All the companies that are embedded in the culture do it, and they're considered culture vultures. Because they're just monetizing our energy," Pabon says. "They understood they didn't speak that language, and they understood they needed to find someone who could speak both languages."
Neither FUBU, SouthPole, or Enyce (or Phat Farm, Sean John, Rocawear…) would maintain their relevance going into the next decade. Lot 29 was no different—seeing a stranger in a Sylvester the Cat hoodies in 2018 can be concerning. Still, Looney Tunes remain a sartorial inspiration. Jeremy Scott's fall/winter 2015 Moschino line famously showcased the characters jeweled-up on sweaters as a homage to the "cheesiest moments in marketing history." More recently, Bugs Bunny also made another appearance in Bobby Ashley's fall 2018 collection.
The urbanizing of Looney Tunes isn't a new concept, and neither are the cultural dilemmas surrounding it. In the '90s, Black Bart—The Simpsons' Bart, but black—was a popular T-shirt design amongst black consumers, but there was still that anxiety about who was outfitting Bart with Air Jordans. In the academic paper, "Black Bart' Simpson: Appropriation and Revitalization in Commodity Culture," graphic artist noted that J.T. Liehr noted that, "Of all the shirts aimed at blacks, I rare saw black people in the involved in making them." Even Springfield wasn't detached from the idea of debasing a culture by replicating and synthesizing what it holds dear.
Bart's character-defining rebelliousness, in a sense, relates to black youth against a society that still doesn't really know how to accept them—Black Bart in a high-top fade symbolically closes that culture gap. The combinations are often surreal, but that's the brilliance of it: The production company behind Tex Coon certainly devalued African-Americans—and yet. At best, Daffy Duck in dreads was fine for its time, but even as ephemera, it's a cogent example of black culture's unrivaled ability to innovate. As for the memes, or those occasions should you find yourself back on your bullshit, it still works.