I’ve been reading a lot of history about the American Revolution, and one consistent feature in all the high-minded declarations is a reverence for earlier generations and a strong hope for future ones. Most of the discontent was reserved for the present leaders, which is to say that they were mostly mad at themselves and their peers.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of our postmodernism that we now seem to view our preceding generation as to blame for all of societies ills and look to succeeding generations with, if not contempt, at least pity. The Gen-Xers I know have taken square aim at the Boomers, and Millennials like myself can’t seem to stop ourselves from pointing out that Gen X kids all had their brains rocked by lead from antiquated gasoline.
At the same time, I have more than once mumbled that “Gen Z is soft” to another Millennial, and wondered aloud if the Pandemic had forever broken their collective will to contribute to society. It’s all nonsense, of course. My cerebellum is probably full of microplastics and my organs have been poisoned by the artificial ingredients put in my cereal during the peak of food science.
Monterey Car Week has become a weird cauldron of all generations, as enthusiasts of every age crowd into the same small peninsula to gawk at cars. After last year’s brief mayhem, there was a growing sense that this was going to be the year Car Week exploded, and everyone already decided who’d they’d blame: the Broccoli Heads.
What Is A Broccoli Head?
I barely use TikTok and am generally unaware of what is fashionable for younger people. I’m generally unaware of what’s fashionable for people my age, if I’m being totally honest. This is not a bad thing. I shouldn’t know why so many young men have the same haircut. It’s none of my business.
You can see it in the photo above, and there’s a good description from a salon here:
The broccoli head haircut, also known as the “bird’s nest” or simply “the perm,” is characterized by voluminous, tightly curled hair on top of the head, often with shorter sides. The name comes from its resemblance to the top of a broccoli floret. This style has gained immense popularity among young men and boys, particularly through social media platforms like TikTok.
As far as looks go, this seems fine. My generation’s equivalent was either frosted tips or a sort of ramen noodle pompadour so who am I to judge, really?
The broccoli head haircut may not be the preference of every young man, but it’s seemingly the choice of any kid with a camera within 200 miles of Car Week. They were everywhere last year and they’ve only multiplied in the last 12 months. If your business involves making the machines that give people perms, I’m assuming you’re a trillionaire by now.
Also, I asked around, and calling someone a Broccoli Head doesn’t seem offensive or pejorative, though if you say it with a sort of Robert Pattinson-in-The-Odyssey hard b then it maybe could be. Just assume I’m saying it with a soft b.
Fear Of A Permed Planet
This is the year it was all going to explode. Those were the rumors. That was the vibe. An old man in a Packard was going to crash into a kid with a Sony A6400 trying to grab a photo of a Koenigsegg and someone was going to beat someone else to a pulp.
I think the sense of what was about to happen is best captured by Instagram commenter Angeles Death Highway:
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There was a decent amount of intergenerational drama on display in this very fake AI video, which was then followed by this video about influencers. Resident Kate Novoa, who runs the blog Big Sur Kate, shared this post on Facebook, which was widely shared:
I think going into the week there was also a general fatigue on the part of locals that was entirely reasonable given there was a large wildfire in the days leading up to the event. The popularity of Car Week seems to have brought about as many people as the area supports, and it can be a strain on resources, even if it brings in money to the local economy, so I’m sympathetic to the residents.
The singling out of the kids taking photos of hypercars and supercars, though, does feel a little ageist. On A blog post from Big Sur Kate about the week, there was this predictable reaction:
I’m a boomer for sure. One of my first jobs was in a machine job rebuilding the heads and seating valves on small block Chevy engines. I can recite the cc’s, bore and stroke on just about every engine that came out of Detroit from 1958-1970. I love – LOVE – muscle cars. But I deeply despise what this event draws to our communities. These are not car buffs. Most are charlatans with ego’s attached to a $40,000 paint job.
90% of the car owners I spoke with wouldn’t know a carburetor from an incubator.
There is no one right way to enjoy cars, and if kids with cameras want to take photos of cars I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I met a bunch of these kids and they seemed enthusiastic about cars in a way that’s absolutely necessary if car culture is going to exist.
Leave The Broccoli Heads Alone
I am old enough to remember the wave of panic (or glee) attached to Millennials and our supposed lack of appreciation of cars. Here’s a typical column from USA Today in 2013 about how “Millennials reject car culture” that included this gem:
With online shopping, they have less need for cars to take them to malls. Smartphones take them to virtual hangouts with friends. Driving to the movies? Not in the age of Netflix. And when they’ve got to get somewhere, they avoid the hassle, cost — and pollution — of owning cars by relying increasingly on bicycles, public transportation and such hourly car rental services as Zipcar. Or they walk.
Maybe the worst was Elizabeth Rosenthal’s essay in the New York Times Sunday Review that implied it was the end of car culture (three years before America bought a record number of cars, btw):
The United States, with its broad expanses and suburban ideals, had long been one of the world’s prime car cultures. It is the birthplace of the Model T; the home of Detroit; the place where Wilson Pickett immortalized “Mustang Sally” and the Beach Boys, “Little Deuce Coupe.”
But America’s love affair with its vehicles seems to be cooling.
Guess what? We all got older, had kids, and bought cars. It was fine. We maybe bought more efficient cars than our parents, we may drive less because we can work online, but that’s a net good for society. What all these articles got wrong was that commuting does not equal enthusiasm. More people living in cities and not being forced to drive doesn’t mean they like cars less. If anything, not having to drive makes you like cars more as they seem like less of a burden.
I remember thinking my car culture looked too weird for older people to understand. It was blogs not magazines, Gran Turismo not Knight Rider, and R32 Nissan GT-Rs not Tri-5 Chevys.
Gen Z car culture does feel a little different for me, too. I’m a little less interested in hypercars. I use Instagram, though I think my Instagram algo probably delivers a different result (I’m guessing they get fewer Widow’s Bay memes and old Volvos).
You know what we do have in common, other than a predilection for older BMWs? We love gawking at cars. The least jaded people at Car Week were the BHP (Broccoli Head Patrol) and, also, maybe the least problematic. A common complaint is that everything has gotten too expensive and, while there are definitely kids there who have money, most of the young people I spoke with were staying an hour or more away. It was my generation, and older generations, buying all the expensive hotel rooms and driving the prices up for everyone.
By virtue of being in media, I also had passes to almost every event, which means I was constantly driving from Laguna Seca to The Lodge to downtown Carmel and back to Monterey. Most of the kids I saw found a corner to sit on and stayed there, which means if anyone was clogging up roads it was me.
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My biggest sense that the kids are all right came early in the trip. A big goal of mine was to grab footage of kids staring at our cars and, also, of driving by real, actual supercars. We connected with Gabby Downing who, despite not having a curly perm, is young and qualifies as an influencer. She wanted to film on 17-Mile Drive and I had a sense of exactly where I wanted to take her to film that would accomplish both our goals.
There’s a little outcropping just north of the golf course and it’s usually crowded with DSLR-toting young people as well as expensive exotics. Pulling in with our Autozam we passed an admittedly stunning yellow Pagani Huayra.
The kids, much to my delight, were excited to see the Autozam and, while not all of them knew exactly what it was, many of them did. Even those who didn’t grasp the joke-inside-a-joke of the car immediately appreciated it. Everyone there was respectful, calm, and willing to share space with our car. When we needed to film they gladly moved, which is not something I can say of everyone at Car Week.
Our friends at XPEL did a great job capturing the spirit in this reel:
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From the start of the week to the finish, nearly every encounter I had with a Gen Z/broccoli head/whatever was pleasant, whereas I saw more people closer to my age drive or act foolishly. I certainly saw way more older people act indifferent to the amazing cars on hand. Other than a little bit of jaywalking to catch a car, the average person under 25 seemed no more disrespectful of the rules than anyone else.
What the kids had, more than anyone, was enthusiasm. If you care about car culture, if you want there to be a future for car culture, then you have to accept that enthusiasm for cars is going to look a little different. The people are going to look a little different. They certainly look different from me.
I probably lack enough hair to be a broccoli head, though maybe I could pull off being a Broccolini Head.
Top photo: Griffin Riley
I’m not surprised. Maybe this is just the Southern Californian in me, but from what I’ve seen, an overwelmingly majority of broccoli heads come from weathier families. Obv not all, but most, at least where I live.
I don’t mind them as long as they’re not causing any issues. We need all the car enthusiasts we can get. I’m sure I’d be friends with them if I were that age, though, I would never rock that hair style with my natural blonde hair lol.
That picture of the supercars on hwy 1 was doctored, you can see the other stills from the same video here that don’t appear to be doctored: https://www.reddit.com/r/BigSur/comments/1vrepc0/the_real_cost_of_car_week_2026/
Basically, the white line was moved to make that blue Pagani(?) look like it was blocking the lane. Was still shitty that they took all those cars down the highway when there was an active (and at the time very dangerous) wildfire and that road is the only way for fire crews to gain ground access.
A few comments on the generations:
Boomers – got it all
Gen X – kinda got screwed over, many of us graduated into recessions and got off to slow career starts which never got better, had high student loans and low expectations, if we worked hard and were lucky we could own a decent house and a newish car or two
Millennials – the economy rebounded for most of this generation so careers were better, but more student loans and higher house prices, more likely to benefit from wealthy Boomer parents & grandparents
Gen Z – totally fucked over. Bad economy for entering the workforce lots of student and other loans. In many cases, appropriately, just don’t give a fuck.
None of this applies to car week, because even if you got there as a spectator, you are not in the middle or lower class, and money changes things. These kids seem to be respectful and into the cars, so good for them.
I loved the AI video with the boomer complaints – thanks for sharing.
“commuting does not equal enthusiasm”
Perfect!
+1
Commuting can equal ennui. But only if you let it. In my experience, good tunes or other interesting audio goes a long way to combatting it. I no longer commute, so other than medical appointments, nearly all of my time in a car is getting somewhere I want to be.
I just went to Grid Life Lime Rock this weekend with my 19y/o son and 8 of his friends. They are nuts about car culture too.
We got to sit in on a fireside chat with Sung Kang about his upcoming film Drifter and we also talked to everyone in the pits that had cars. I’d say it was 25% Gen X and older, 50% Millennials and 25% GenZ. Car culture is alive and well. It just looks different depending on what age bracket you are viewing from. The best part is when you all get together and realize you love and understand the same things. The feel of a sports car or running a trail in a 4×4, finishing a job with friends on a car late at night and then going on that first drive. Starting up a car while the exhaust is removed…just because of the curiosity to hear it wide open.
I’m old enough that I and all of my teenage peers had mullets and the girls all had the tight poodle perms with the poof in the front. All of them.
exactly. go look through your high school yearbook and you’ll notice everyone has always had the same haircut.
The only thing I care about with that hair is that I no longer have enough of it to pull it off. Not without looking like a clown, anyway. Don’t need to scare kids that much.
My hair used to naturally approximate that shape if I let it go. I hated it, but it was basically unmanageble unless kept short. If let my hair grow out now I would look like Larry from the Three Stooges.
I don’t disagree that there’s way too much vitriol being lobbed at a bunch of kids who are learning to be people, but that comment on Big Sur Kate’s post reads more as a screed against the rich owners bringing their cars who only care about the cost of the car — hence the comment about the $40k paint jobs — and not against ‘the yutes’.
That’s how I interpreted it too
I appreciate this post, and find it tiring that we have to make the same statements every five years or so.
Personally I’m very tired of this faux generation VS generation shite, it harkens to the my local sports team is better than yours, because they’re from HERE not THERE divisive bullshit.
There are good people, and bad people at every single age point, lumping people into good, bad, soft, lead addled etc. is just another us VS them mentality that is distracting us from the real issues.
The real issue is when am I gonna get to be an Astronaut!
The kids are gonna be alright.
It’s fascinating how people’s world view calcifies. In my observation, it usually starts sometime in the mid to late twenties and becomes readily apparent by the mid thirties. Instead of being curious and excited by new things, people become judgemental and dismissive of things that are outside of their experience. Not everyone, and not in every area, but on average.
I try to keep an open mind about most things. I think it also helps to interact with people from different generations. You see that they are just people. There are things I will never ‘get’ but that doesn’t mean I must express contempt towards what I don’t understand. I just shrug and tie an onion to my belt and try to avoid yelling at the clouds.
Avoiding curmedgeonliness is hard work.
I now have owned two cars I swore in my teenage years “I would never own”. Real exposure to different communities makes all the difference.
I think generational divide is kind of natural, because teenagers are freshly minted adults, their brains are still breaking in, so they do dumb stuff that us older darts cringe upon, mainly because we can (at least deep down) remember when WE were the dumb teenagers fucking around and subsequently finding out.
It’s a hard needle to thread as a parent. I recall the freedom I had at 20 or so (no cell phones, no social media, plausible deniability…) and part of me wants my daughter to have it as well.
And the younger generation sees many of the screwups that their elders have propagated and can’t believe how stupid they are. It’s an eternal thing. There used to be a commercial that started with a quote about young people and how they think they know everything, which sounded just like the railing of an over-40 type. Turned out that the quote was from Aristotle.
Thank you for the correct spelling of ‘All Right’ in the article teaser photo.
When I was in school, back in the ’80s, I remember my English teacher using the following sentence when asking us to spell the words:
“It’s all right with me if you get these words all right.”
She emphasized that while ‘already’, and ‘all ready’ were separate vocabulary entities, there was only one ‘all right’.
Now the Internet has somehow changed the rules.
Language is dynamic, after all. I’ve already come to grips with the idea that words change meaning alright, and when those changes mean that a negative connotation becomes a positive, well, that’s when I know we’ll be all right.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alright
Merriam Webster points out that ‘already’ and ‘all ready’ separated by around the 18th century, while ‘alright’ and ‘all right’ started splitting mid-19th; ‘already’ just got there first. Nothing in grammar and spelling is immutable.
To your teacher’s example–“getting the answers all right” is certainly not the same as just “doing alright on the test” (of course, “getting all the answers right” or just using ‘correct’ avoids any ambiguity).
So this has nothing to do with the oder of one’s iron after eating cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, or Brussels sprouts, which break down into sulfur compounds that pass into your pee?
Monterey County produces nearly 40% of all broccoli in the United States, so I can understand that a moral panic about broccoli eaters pissing about indiscriminately and stinking things up would be a thing,
Usually it’s the asparagus and artichoke pee that has everyone in a bother. The strawberry people seem to dodge that bullet,
That hairstyle seems very 1980s gay disco to me. Except the mustache.
Never heard of broccoli heads before this. Not worried about the trends.
A few years ago, I went to a car-related charity event at a local racetrack, where folks donated toys for Xmas. I ended up going with my wife and toddler-aged kiddos, thinking it would be fun for all.
The event was overrun by the youngish side of the car culture crowd – lots of late teen/early 20s kids, along with their overly modded machines. And there I was, donating toys in my fairly new 2018 Honda Odyssey, living the family life of a late-to-kids Gen Xer, feeling old.
After dropping off the toys and checking out the many cars in attendance, we decided to leave. Between our parking spot and the exit was this kind of parking lot intersection where a bunch of kids had decided to camp out and check the cars as they left. of course, every kid driving by had to stop, rev up, make noise/smoke, and get their bypass gate/valves (whatever they are called) make their weird “boip!” sound (if they had them).
So it formed a bit of a traffic jam. But the young “audience” seemed amused, and it was all safe and all.
I finally got to the intersection. So I lowered all my windows, opened the sliding doors, and revved the minivan as loud as I dared (3000 RPMs or so is plenty, kids!)
At first the folks seemed a bit confused, then they all got the joke, laughed, and gave us a very enthusiastic standing ovation. We felt very young again.
The kids are alright. I hope car culture lives forever.
Well this took a turn I did not expect. I applaud your tomfoolery!
Wow, slow build to that hot trend. That was the hairstyle my grandson and all his basket ball teammates had in junior high. He’s 21 now. Guess he was well ahead of his time. He has a “normal” haircut now and works at the local Honda dealer.
See,they all usually turn out ok.
After the insane hairstyles of the 1970s it’s impossible to fault future generations for anything.
And literally any haircut is better than the fashy, the Third Reich lookalike high-n-tight look that the most toxic members of American society now sport. The broccoli is a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Oh crap, didn’t knew fascists cooped this hairstyle. It is literally the only one that can minimise my bald spot.
Mine’s a remnant of my military time and I keep it because it’s minimal effort and comfortable. I’ve been aware of the skinhead/fascist similarity for a while but it’s also got a lot in common with the more peaceful live-and-let-live “rednecks” that live outside the outer ring of suburbs around here.
Please don’t stereotype me into the right wing.
Yeah, in high school I intentionally put so much hair gel on my head that it would not move all day. Styles come and go, and the hottest ones are usually dumb.
Reactionary old twats complaining about how younger people do everything wrong is an ancient human custom. It’s stupid and annoying and lacking in self-awareness. The kids are all right. They always are.
Hair……black,blonde,brown,blue,white,curly ,straight ,even bald as a cue ball doesn’t seem to affect the lack of common sense in a lot of people regardless of which generation they grew up in.
At least for the “kids” who took the time to drive out to car week, yes they are probably into cars.