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I've often been asked where the name "badstyle" comes from. Given that it is very much the name by which I present myself to the World, I guess it makes sense that I explain where it comes from.
I first chose to use this moniker to identify myself when I was playing Quake 2 with my friends back in 1996. I used this word simply because it was a word I used often as a child at school and felt that it resonated as being quite typically self-deprecating when applied with the context of ‘style’, given my background as an art and design student, which I was at the time.
From there it stuck as a pseudonym, I bought badstyle.co.uk when I was in my final year of university to create my online presence. This was pre-social media, hard to imagine a time before social media isn’t it!
To answer this, I will need to dig a little deeper, bear with me while I explain.
In my youthful days we would use the word ‘bad’ to describe something actually considered ‘good’. I had always though that this derived from the highly successful album ‘Bad’ by Michael Jackson. It was a massive commercial success and in many ways it was far from being percieved as Bad by any accounts, it resonated with the mainstream youth culture at the time, through it’s slick production and marketing promotion, along with it’s era defining music videos for the MTV generation. It borrowed an aesthetic of gritty New York street post-punk gangs, B-Boys, and rock that it simply couldn’t be ignored by a huge array of people. To my young mind, I thought that’s where it started and that satisfied my perspective on the matter.
The youth of my generation elaborated on the word ‘bad’ (as we now recognised as meaning ‘good’) to express the extension of ‘good-style’, which at the time meant something to be done in a quick manner, changing it to become (you guessed it!): ‘bad-style’. In our circles we elaborated on it's meaning a little more than simply being an alternative way of saying 'good-style'. In context we would use it to express something that was intensely desirable and wanted with urgent need. In context for example one might say; “I want that car bad-style!”. This was much more intense than simply stating “I want that car so bad!”, ‘bad’ alone simply wasn’t enough of an intensifier - it had no sense of urgency!
Fast forward 30+ years; I then found out that the first time the word ‘bad’ was used to describe something other than something actually ‘bad’ was way back in the 1600’s, when it started to get used as an intensifier. Joseph Glanvill’s ‘Saducismus Triumphatus’ which was a book written on the subject of witches and apparitions contains a line that reads: “Haunted almost as bad as Mr. Mompesson’s house.”. In the 18th century Joseph Bellamy wrote in True Religion Delineated (1750): “We hate him so bad, that we cannot find it in our Hearts to love him.”1
For decades counter-cultures would use alternative ways to present themselves to distinquish each other, normally through overt means such as the clothes they wear, the music the listen to, groups of like minded people would congregate and how they spoke amongst themselves. My youth culture was no different – though being so young with influence and scope so limited, it meant that the way we differentiated ourselves meant that it was pretty much limited to the words we said, and the mainstream culture we exposed to and wanted to associate with.
In the ignorance of my youth, I had and I highly suspect many other youngsters had no idea of the etymology of what I perceived to be a subtle edgy way of expressing ourselves was actually already strongly rooted in the history of our language. Indeed there was nothing edgy about it.
In any case, it’s roots in history mattered not in my eyes.