Raw, loud, and dangerous,1 the choice of thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies for a hundred years, the motorcycle’s powerful juju has made it a colossal icon of popular culture, symbolizing values associated with freedom, rebellion, and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a nihilistic Fuck the World (FTW) attitude.
Early in the 1960s, the motorcycle and rebellion came together in an unusual way with the emergence of the outlaw biker lifestyle. What’s fascinating is how in the last twenty years the trappings of outlaw biker culture have been co-opted, cleaned-up, and commercialized for mass consumption, making the outlaw biker the dominant fashion model for the motorcycle industry.
The sanitized image of the outlaw biker is now the stuff of romantic fantasy, conjuring up images of Vikings, pirates, and desperados. These now-trendy rebels celebrated for their iconoclasm are “as American as apple pie,” a documentary points out, “direct descendants of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and other freedom-loving spirits of the untamed frontier.”2
Before the outlaw biker style became cool, however, outlaw bikers were feared and loathed by the public. Getting plenty of sensationalized attention from the media, they were most often associated with unseemly acts of drunkenness, irresponsibility, and gratuitous violence, and their chopped scoots had less to do with cool than mayhem. True, these rebels smashed icons, but what the public noticed was that they smashed skulls, too. Besides the notions of freedom, brotherhood, and machismo, then, there was a more powerful underlying theme to the out-biker lifestyle—nihilism.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pointed out that all we really know about life is that it’s uncertain, unjust, and cruel. Our highest principles, our knowledge, and our claims to the absolute are nothing more than hopeful interpretations, all of which, the philosopher noted, are false. Nothing is true. This insight is the beginning of nihilism—“the danger of dangers,” as Nietzsche called it.3 A nihilist understands that all knowledge is perspectival, that no position is better than another, that there is no measure for good and evil, and that nothing has inherent value, including life itself. A true nihilist, then, repudiates all values, believes in nothing, has no loyalties and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. It’s an epiphany that releases tremendous annihilating forces.
Nietzsche was convinced that the powerful corrosive effects of nihilism would undermine and eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest catastrophe in history (p. 3). As he predicted, Western culture in the twentieth century—“The Age of Anxiety”—was permeated with nihilism. The most influential philosophical movement of the century, Existentialism, for example, focused on solving the problems posed by the loss of cosmic meaning.
For the French existentialist Albert Camus (1913–1960), nihilism was the most vexing problem of the century. It reveals that life is not a pilgrimage, a program, or a goal; instead, it’s a very unpleasant event. We’re marooned in an indifferent universe where our frantic efforts to discover meaning come to nothing. Appropriately, Camus chose Sisyphus as a metaphor for the absurdity of the human condition. The mythical figure was condemned to push a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom again and again forever. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks,” Camus wrote, “and this fate is no less absurd.”4
What’s to be done, then? Camus identified two options for coming to terms with meaninglessness—suicide or rebellion. Those who don’t have the stomach to face the futility of existence escape the problem with a kind of intellectual suicide, embracing “some stupid little fanaticism,” as Nietzsche put it, and allowing others to choose meaning for them. The better option, Camus proposed, is to rebel against the meaninglessness of life: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (p. 91). Sneering at the indifference of the universe—by giving it the finger—only this will permit a modicum of dignity. The existential rebel understands this: life is not a goal; it’s an attitude. The benefit: Living in a state of rebellion against an absurd existence destroys guilt and allows the rebel to experience total freedom.
The danger, though, is that total freedom can be used in very nasty ways. As a solution to the problem of absurdity, one can justifiably lash out at the world and everyone in it because with nihilism, any goal or value is equally worthy or unworthy—universal happiness or universal annihilation. Take your pick. As the impact of nihilism spread and with it the destruction of values, Camus anticipated phenomena like the Fuck the World style. In his philosophical essay The Rebel (1951), for instance, he describes how metaphysical collapse often ends in total negation and the victory of nihilism. In such instances, rebellion is characterized by profound hatred, pathological destruction, incalculable violence, and death.
American responses to nihilism are unique in that they tend to be self-indulgent and narcissistic. And whether or not the masses are able to name the phenomenon, it’s clear that nihilism troubles the public psyche. The Beats, Pop Art, Hippies, Goths, television culture, spectator sports, Punk Rock, Death Metal, and New Ageism can all be understood as responses to nihilism. And the pervasiveness of Postmodernism, which embraces the notion that all truths and all beliefs are of equal value, is yet another symptom of nihilism’s caustic effect. The most fascinating example of nihilism in American popular culture, however, is associated with the motorcycle.
The motorcycle’s association with nihilism probably began in 1947 when four thousand drunken savages, “straight pipers,” wreaked havoc in Hollister, California—or so it was reported. Motorcycling would never be the same.
Hollywood cashed in on motorcycle-themed nihilism with its version of events in Hollister in László Benedek’s The Wild One (1954), the granddaddy of all biker films. Marlon Brando’s Johnny, a brooding, surly, self-destructive punk in black leather, would prove iconic. While his Black Rebel gang terrorizes “Wrightsville,” we learn that Johnny’s What-are-you-rebelling-against?-Whad’-ya-got? amorphous nihilism is appealing to women, as sweet Kathie Bleeker discovers. It’s a point that would not be lost when fascination with the outlaw biker lifestyle burgeoned.
American critics of The Wild One feared that the motorcycle-themed glamorization of nihilistic rebellion would prove influential, and they were absolutely right. The success of the film not only introduced the motorcycle rebel to the mainstream, but it also shaped the outlaw biker style and made it cool. And life imitated art. The Outlaw Motorcycle Club’s “Charlie,” the red-eyed skull over crossed pistons, is derived from Black Rebel costumes.5 In fact, The Wild One, probably more than any other single event, was the catalyst for creating and codifying what would become one of the weirdest nihilist phenomena in American history—the outlaw biker.
Outlaw bikers are not noted for their philosophical ruminations; their nihilism is, rather, a spontaneous symptom of modern culture. Recall how the nihilist perspective reveals that traditional values are worthless, and that ultimately nothing has any meaning. As Camus notes, one can deal with this meaninglessness by holding it in contempt. The outlaw biker lifestyle was conspicuously and outrageously contemptuous of the values the majority of American society embraced, seeing them as pathetic, phony, and suffocating.
As the outlaw motorcycle style evolved, club members were more likely to be marginalized working-class males than WWII veterans. This transition marks the beginnings of the hardcore, badass faction of American biker culture, the “one-percenters.” The one-percenter motorcycle gangs gained notoriety in the 1960s, primarily as a result of the California Hells Angels’ widely reported violent antics at Monterey and, later, Altamont. During this time, Hells Angel Sonny Barger became the chief spokesman of biker nihilism. A 1965 Newsweek interviewer noted that the unkempt Barger actually stank.6 Nurturing a foul odor like this, Sigmund Freud said, can be understood as a direct assault on civilization.7 And a cultivated stench was just one of many ploys of outlaw bikers for communicating their contempt for modern values.
Beyond stench and an inherently confrontational attitude, the outlaw biker style evolved an elaborate iconography to advertise nihilistic rebellion. Motorcycle gang insignia, for example, was designed to be shocking. Witness the Outlaws’ “Charlie” and the Hells Angels’ winged skulls. Black has archetypal associations with evil, and the black leather vest that sports the club insignia also carries artifacts associated with the individual member’s attitude and experience. One might see Nazi death’s heads, swastikas, DILLIGAF (Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck), DFFL (Dope Forever, Forever Loaded), FYYFF (Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck)—and the classic FTW (Fuck the World), a bit of slang uniquely associated with outlaw biker style.
“Dangerous Motorcycle Gangs,” a widely circulated two-hour police course, notes that a white cross on a biker’s colors is earned by robbing a grave, a red cross by “committing homosexual fellatio with witnesses present.” 8 Green wings denote the wearer performed cunnilingus on a venereally diseased woman, and purple wings signify—get this!—oral sex with a dead woman! (p. 32). As a rejection of values and an expression of nihilism, what could be more aberrant and grossly offensive? And even if these interpretations are inaccurate or fabricated by bikers themselves as a joke, they still reveal the outrage that the outlaw biker expression of nihilism intended to inspire. When we discover that everything is false, Nietzsche warned, we learn that anything is permitted.
All in all, the authors of “Dangerous Motorcycle Gangs” conclude, outlaw biker philosophy can be summarized by a single phrase: “fuck the world.” “FTW,” the report notes, “is their motto and is the arrogant attitude by which this subculture attains its goals and objectives. . . . They don’t want to be like the normal citizen or dress like them. This is why they have created their own dress code which is filthy, repulsive, and often offensive” (p. 14).
And the rub of it, the authors seem to lament here, is that this despicable FTW style of nihilism makes the outlaw biker extraordinarily attractive to “good looking” women: “Strangely enough, an unlimited number of good-looking females, it seems, are attracted to the macho image . . . to a life which seems as exciting as a roller coaster ride, fast motorcycles, macho men, drugs, alcohol, parties, guns, topless bars, and anyway-you-want-it sex” (p. 23).
Of the various biker films spawned by the success of The Wild One—films with promising titles like Devils’ Angels, Cycle Savages, Death Riders, Hell Riders, and Moto Psycho—none communicated the wanton destruction nihilism could evoke better than Tom Laughlin’s The Born Losers (1967). In just thirteen years, Hollywood took audiences from Johnny’s rather tame, ruminative nihilism to nihilism as a titanic force of destruction. “Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish,” said Nietzsche, “but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys” (p. 22). The Born to Lose Motorcycle Club does just that.
The club’s membership consists of bleary-eyed psychopaths like “Cueball,” “Gangrene,” and “Crabs,” who stumble from one kidnapping, gang rape, and bar brawl to another, all the while smashing what they can. There are no boundaries to their depravity or brutality, and there is utterly no rational motivation for their monstrous behavior.
Not surprisingly, the nihilistic rampage in The Born Losers comes to mind when reading the social analysis of Dimitri Pisarev, the nineteenth-century Russian who became a primary spokesman for a new political philosophy, nihilism: “Here is the ultimatum of our camp; what can be smashed should be smashed; what will stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate hit out right and left—there will and can be no harm from it.”9
No matter how frightening or loathsome the outlaw biking style of nihilism appeared to be, it also had a mysterious resonance; and no matter how Hollywood might negatively dramatize the image of the outlaw biker as a chopper-riding psychotic in black leather and chains, it remained a heady, intoxicating fantasy. In Hells Angels, Hunter S. Thompson writes that outlaw bikers “command a fascination, however reluctant, that borders on psychic masturbation.”10 He’s right. Middle America, always fascinated with bohemian ways, couldn’t seem to get enough seamy reports of sex, depravity, filth, violence, and far-out choppers. Accordingly, the fantasy image of the badass nihilist biker slowly acquired almost mythic proportions as a symbol of rebellion, metaphysical escape, and existential freedom. Finally, it was ripe for Madison Avenue.
Willie G. Davidson, grandson of one of Harley-Davidson’s founders, played a major role in making nihilism trendy when he borrowed styling cues from the chopped and stripped-down bikes preferred by one-percenters. Until his bold move, Harley-Davidson made it clear that it loathed the image of nihilism the outlaw bikers cultivated. And whether or not Willie G.’s decision was motivated by the simple realization that if you can’t fight ’em, join ’em, it was a stroke of marketing genius. The 1977 FXS Low Rider, introduced to the public in Daytona, tells the story: outlaw cool would be king at H-D. The Low Rider put Harley-Davidson back on the road and helped to mainstream FTW style.
With Harley-Davidson’s turnaround, more and more motorcycle manufacturers followed suit, marketing dozens of motorcycles that attempted to model a tasteful flair of outlaw styling. In a relatively short twenty years, what was once reviled became normalized, and TV commercials and programs, video games, fashion, filmmakers, celebrities, athletes, and politicians have embraced the badass biker image. And in the last twenty years, coincidently, interest in motorcycling has grown dramatically with double-digit sales increases for nearly every manufacturer. The wild success of the Teutuls’ American Chopper and other television programs like it is just one example of the mainstream appeal of the badass outlaw style.
Motorcycle advertising now routinely encourages consumers to abandon social conformity and celebrate the suppressed barbarian, assuring them that this motorcycle or that accessory can communicate the FTW attitude, albeit tastefully. An ad for mufflers, for instance, incorporates the image of a leather-clad, tattoo-covered biker emerging from under a three-piece suit and the line, “Inside every good guy there’s a real badass.” Ads encourage consumers to “Raise some hell,” “Take the Low Road,” pose the question “Who cares where you’re going?” and remind them that “You’ve got the attitude” or “So much evil, so little time.” “Ride like Hell, Feel Like Heaven” a motorcycle ad selling boots says.
Victory Motorcycle describes its new chopper-inspired “8 Ball” as “Beautiful as Sin. Raw, basic, and dark. Just what a black sheep should be.” An advertisement for Ford’s Harley-Davidson trucks (which tells you something about the power of the outlaw image) offers surprising insight into the psychology of FTW cool: “It says, ‘Look at Me’ and ‘What are you looking at?’ simultaneously.” Even the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is now selling its 2005 calendar with outlaw biker pin-ups, big bruisers with menacing scowls, and, of course, tricked-out choppers. And Wal-Mart, known for refusing to market products it considers controversial, sells “chopper” bicycles and T-shirts with the iron cross motif, the latest symbol of outlaw chopperdom.
A Geico insurance ad is another clear indication about what happened when FTW attitude went commercial. It shows a huge biker, apparently a hard-core one-percenter complete with a shaved head, long gray goatee, black sleeveless tee, and an intimidating expression. Tattooed on his massive biceps is the cutsie Geico gecko. Of course, motorcycle insurance is antithetical to everything the FTW attitude represents—nihilists don’t need no fuckin’ insurance.
What’s particularly revealing about the marketing of nihilistic sentiments is that all of the advertisements mentioned above appeared in mainstream motorcycling magazines, mags like American Iron, Cycle World, Cruiser, Motorcyclist, and Ride. One won’t find nihilism shtick in magazines such as Street Chopper, The Horse, and Outlaw that ostensibly represent hard-core bikers.
The enormous success of motorcycle-themed nihilism is nowhere more apparent than at biker extravaganzas held in Sturgis, Laconia, and Daytona. These massive, ten-day affairs are attended by hundreds of thousands of motorcycle riders who, at some level, can become “outlaws,” in gigantic FTW-style fantasies featuring drinking, loud motorcycles, and the requisite symbols of outlawry, hedonism, and nihilism.
Consider that Daytona’s Bike Week attracts 500,000 to 600,000 motorcycle fans, predominantly male and, in the last decade, primarily middle-aged and middle-class. And while locals rail against the perceived depravity of the affair, prohibitions regarding public drunkenness, decency, and safety are relaxed to support the FTW fantasy. Why? Nihilism chic pays. According to Volusia County reports, Bike Week is worth about $340 million.
Evidence of the popularity of FTW style is everywhere at Bike Week. When the most famous outlaw, Sonny Barger, came to sign his autobiographical Hell’s Angel, for example, hundreds waited in line for a copy. In addition to the Teutuls’ Orange County Choppers, at least twenty chopper manufacturers set up shop during the week to promote their badass (and hardass . . .) rides. On Main Street, the heart of the affair, there is a new DILLIGAF store specializing in DILLIGAF accessories, where, with screaming irony, no smoking is allowed. Oh, and check out its online store, where you’ll get a ten-percent discount. . . .
The few Bike Week participants who are actually one-percenters—the fashion aristocracy here—wear their colors. Most leather, however, merely mimics the outlaw biker style by sporting advertisements for one or another brand of motorcycle, patches and pins purchased at bars and boutiques featuring the outlaw style or handed out at toy runs and other charitable events organized for motorcyclists. It’s no wonder that hardcore bikers lament the faddish popularity of their style:
And what about what used to be the standard apparel? The plain black T-shirts, the engineer boots, jeans with the little battery acid holes. Remember them? Mostly all gone now. Each item replaced by its designer counterpart to impart a carefree sense of tasteful rebellion. In essence, nothing more than a costume that only gets put on to ride the bike. The vest was a place to hang your experiences. These days that $170 vest is nothing more than free ad space for Harley-Davidson.11
Images of the human skull are extraordinarily popular accessories, too. Skulls are the acknowledged touchstones of the entire biker world. As memento mori (“remember that you must die”), human skulls have historically symbolized our own mortality, and they’re associated with poison, pirates, evil, and death. But since the advent of outlaw bikers, skulls are most often associated with the outlaw style, communicating danger, an attitude of reckless abandon, and FTW.
With the successful marketing of nihilism, however, the shock value of skulls has been rendered impotent by their ubiquity—they’re everywhere, grinning, flaming, crying, smoking, scowling, screaming, rotting, jesting, exploding, and flying. Skull paint themes and graphics on custom bikes are everywhere, and even Harley-Davidson offers a factory custom paint job featuring flaming skulls. The number of skull-related products for accessorizing costumes and motorcycles is nothing short of amazing. Like so many other offensive trappings of outlaw nihilism, then, skulls have become conventional and stylish.
Since nihilism became fashionable, not surprisingly, hardcore bikers are alternately puzzled, amused, or annoyed by what’s happened to biker gigs like Bike Week:
Harleys have become a toy for every yuppie rub [rich urban biker] jerk off out there. They get to play “Biker” without havin’ a clue what it’s really all about. A half million people at Bike Week and maybe fifty thousand bikers at best. Like the t-shirt says, “You used to hate us, now you wanna be us.” I just hope there’s some of us around when they’re gone.12
The great irony is that while tens of thousands at Bike Week shell out big money to ape the one-percenter style, it’s a crowd that wants nothing to do with true nihilists. The fact is, that even within the context of Bike Week, most fantasy outlaw bikers would be afraid or embarrassed to be seen with true desperados. And when the party’s over, FTW sentiments have to be returned to the closet, covered up, or garaged.
Actual one-percenters should be admired, I suppose, for having the courage of their convictions. The price American society exacts from any iconoclast is extremely high, and higher still for the nihilist. The fact is, outlaw bikers are shunned by nearly everyone, banned from many businesses, and frequently harassed by police. And that’s the irony: The rebellion and existential freedom associated with the outlaw lifestyle is actually demanding and heavily codified. Nihilism, too, contains its own curious irony: Holding the conviction that truth doesn’t exist is difficult to justify because the statement “truth doesn’t exist” is a truth. Paradoxically, pure nihilism is a position that destroys all positions—even itself.
So why has the FTW style struck a cord with otherwise mainstream motorcycle fans? From a psychological perspective, Freud would argue that, like a true nature’s child, we were born to be wild. Unfortunately, for most of us, our superego won’t let us walk on the wild side. So outlaw bikers, like criminals and mobsters, intrigue us, at least at a distance, because they can freely express their existential outrage and act on their aggressive and predatory impulses without guilt.13
From an existential perspective, rebellion can add zest to the life of the conventional herd animal saddled with responsibility, rules, political correctness, and groupthink sentiments. Rejecting this burden is liberating, the existentialists suggest, providing an escape from a pointless life led in quiet desperation. But even more gratifying, argue the nihilists, would be to smash everything. And if the growing popularity of the FTW style is any indication, even the fantasy of nihilism is a heady thing, suggesting that the burden of modern life is indeed becoming so painful, so distasteful as to be unbearable.
Nietzsche thought that civilization’s struggle with nihilism was a necessary “pathological transitional phase” that would last two centuries (p. 14). We’re about halfway now, so we can expect to see plenty more phenomena like the FTW biker lifestyle and the mainstream’s fascination with it. Whether or not civilization will survive the battle with nihilism, the philosopher wasn’t sure.
But let’s face it, if one accepts the metaphysical realities nihilism reveals, we’re all born to lose because life’s a bitch and then we die. So let existentialism guide; there’s no fate that can’t be surmounted by scorn. And outlaw bikers have proven that the motorcycle can be a powerful talisman for releasing and expressing one’s dissatisfaction with life. Free yourself from the meaningless demands of the herd, then. Be a badass outlaw biker. Fuck the world! On Saturday afternoons, anyway, after the yard is mown.
__________
1 And, according to Sigmund Freud, supremely phallic. In The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), Freud wrote, “It is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatus occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male ones)” (p. 391). Straddling loud, complicated machinery like a motorcycle, then, has unmistakable phallic authority—no other machine comes close. This could be one source of the motorcycle’s symbolic power and almost mystical adoration.
2 The Wild Ride of the Outlaw Biker: Real and Imagined. Video. Peter Jones Productions, 1999.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 45.
4 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 90.
5 “Outlaws World,” American Outlaws Association, www.outlawsmcworld.com, accessed 2004.
6 “The Wild Ones,” Newsweek (29th March, 1965), p. 25.
7 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 46.
8 “Dangerous Motorcycle Gangs,” An Inside Look at Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Boulder: Paladin, 1992).
9 Dimitri Pisarev, quoted in Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Road to Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 120.
10 Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1966), p. 262.
11 “Arby,” “See no Evo,” Full Throttle (August #46, 1999), p. 86.
12 “Frog,” “The Readers Write,” Dixie Biker (April 2001), p. 38.
13 Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism, reprinted in Joseph Sandler, et al., eds., Freud’s “On Narcissism”: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 19.