Attitude Out the Ears

"I had my own world," says Collins, from whose shaved head sprouts a twisty-turny crop of neon-red coils and dreads.

"The world around me was insane. So I had to make peace with me. . . . I am who I am because of my hair."

Just don't call it a fro-hawk.

"It's not a fro-hawk, it's a Mohawk," Collins says. "We just put a twist to it."

Says his buddy Tim Slayton, 26, a visual artist who rocks a locked Mohawk, "Just because I'm a black guy with a Mohawk doesn't mean that it should be called 'fro-hawk.' "

"It's a little racist," Collins says.

There are others who embrace the word. Fro-hawk, they say, is specific to a hair texture, a people, an attitude.

"I think it's descriptive," says Zilla, for whom the hairstyle is at once a homage to her Afro/Sioux/Blackfoot roots and a sign of affiliation with the 21st Century Maroon Colony, a black arts collective.

She chooses not to relax her hair, she says, so the "fro" in "fro-hawk" is apt.

"It is what it is. There is a difference to me between a person of color who wears a fro-hawk and white person who wears a Mohawk."

And then there are those -- like Damon Locks (yes, that's his real name), a 39-year-old veteran of the punk scene -- who draw a distinction between the fro-hawk and the Mohawk's '80s-era punk roots. And not in a good way.

"I'm not a fan of the fro-hawk," says Locks, who first Mohawked his hair in '83, as a Silver Spring teenager. The Mohawk, he says, always had an agitating element. On the other hand, the fro-hawk, he says, "is not only soft and fluffy, it's kind of trendy and not agitating, really -- it's more like a popular haircut." Even toddlers and tweens can be spotted sporting it.

"It's strange, [nearly] 30 years later, to see it as a fashion statement," says Locks, who appears in "Afropunk." "I see it taken on by black kids that want to express themselves and show that they're different. . . .

"It has almost nothing to do with punk today," continues Locks, who now alternates between a big curly 'fro and hacked off. "It's clearly a stylistic choice and devoid of any potency, and that's kind of upsetting. Now it's lost its vigor. Its objective from the get-go was to make a point."

Don't even get him started on the faux-hawk: Ricky Martin. "American Idol's" Sanjaya Malakar. Patti LaBelle. Celebs who sport full heads of hair gelled and manhandled until it reaches skyward, toe-dipping in the waters of rebellion. A good strong shampoo, and it's gone. A true Mohawk, its fans say, requires commitment. A willingness to expose scalp.

"If you're gonna do it, just do it right," says Spooner of "Afropunk," who abandoned the Mohawk/fro-hawk years ago. "When you see somebody who has two inches of hair and they've only shaved two inches off the side, it looks so lame. . . .

"If you're going to do it, do it. Otherwise, you just look like a poser."