I can't say I am thrilled to learn that hair is back in the news. There is nothing good about hair when it makes headlines.

The last time I remember hearing about hair was in 1993. That was when President Clinton reportedly closed down air traffic at LAX to get himself a $200 trim from a fancypants L.A. stylist named Cristophe Schatteman. Clinton said he had checked with the Secret Serv­ice to make sure the airport would not be affected and that he did not pay $200. He claims the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. Maybe so. Who knows? Whatever the case, the incident caused every­body to be in a lather about the president's follicles.

Before that episode, the most memorable period for hair stretched from the mid-'70s to the early '80s These were hair's Dark Ages. Rock bands, known previously as a scruffy bunch with messy heads, began emerging on the scene with stylish cuts. So alarming was this development that the groups created their own subgenre: "hair bands." Trivializing rock with ostentation (Boston) and artifice (Duran Duran), their crimes against music were bad. But those were rectified by punk, which celebrated rock by stripping it down to its three-chord roots. Which, speaking of roots, those emanating from the heads of punks were shaped into spikes and mohawks, lending their movement an endearing, if frightening, cartoonishness. The hair bands' sins against fashion went considerably deeper, leading, as they did, to a hairstyle known as the mullet. Short on top and long in the back, the mullet is more or less like sporting on one's head a raccoon whose back has caught on fire. The style launched a thousand late-night jokes and, according to Google when I entered "mullet haircut" as a search phrase, about 30,000 websites. That is double the number of websites of some small countries.