See, you CAN wear the pith helmet and not be terribly offensive about it

[jhameia]

Professor Elemental performing his new single "Fighting Trousers" which is pretty hilarious. I'll admit the first time I saw his costume and persona I was put off by it, but listening to his "pith hop" (pith, as in pithy) (which is interesting because it plays with language) (apparently it's called "chap-hop" right now) it's amusing, and watching him perform at Steampunk World's Fair* is quite fun too. He doesn't wear the helmet all the time, and he doesn't have an explorer persona. So, like holzman and I were discussing, does Professor Elemental's performance mitigate the colonialism telegraphed by the costume?

* As a random aside, the girl at 1:52 in the linked video came with her white mom and Chinese dad and they were this very adorable steampunk'd Wild West family.

Anyway, he's a very lovely person in real life too. And his excruciatingly obvious Britishness rather put to shame all the people faking British accents at SPWF.

Comments

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks for the link. Elemental's self-parody is totally worthy of a more detailed critique; I see a conference paper. ;-)

Um, yeah. I am trying to entice my (British) husband to come along to SPWF this year. The opportunity to mock fake accents is part of the draw . . .

[holzman.livejournal.com]

According to hatofhornigold and jadegirl, the Professor's oft-worn shorts are in British fashion parlance children's clothing. On the one hand, that can be a purely visual way to deconstruct a pith helmet (or what have you), on the other hand it only works if one already has that as part of one's fashion lexicon.