WOW! This bicycle would be SOOOO HOOOTTT if it wasn't for those tacky 'Ape Hanger' Handlebars. I love the color, the fan style spokes, sprocket is nice and small, seat could use some work...but WHAT IF they did something alot funkier with the handle bars and got rid of those played out black tires? I give this design, as low riders go anyway a solid C+ FELLA!
Save the emails dear readers complaining and whining about the fact that I am not a low rider fan, how I don't appreciate the art in it, saying I am insulting the Latino culture..blah-blah-blah...The great thing about blogging is it is usually opinion based and used to drive some one's agenda...My blog is no different...My agenda is going to War against crappy bike designs and my opinion matters because...well, this is 'My party and I'll cry if I want to!'
If you think I'm playing, listen to the song...
After some angry emails concerning my feelings on Low Rider Bikes, I have to respond. But first, click on the above video and enjoy. In my post I did recognize that Low Rider Bikes was a niche market and some readers to objection to my opinions on these bikes. To them I say "Hey...get mad if you want to but I still think they are OVERDONE!" That is my opinion and I am sticking to it! I love elegance mixed with simplicity in bicycle design.
Another reader thinks I have a problem with Mexicans. NO I DON'T! I am a black man, born and raised in the cornfields of Iowa, stopped by police because of that, etc. I just don't like Low Rider Bikes, I just think, as I have said in many posts, they are like a steak that stays on the grill too long, OVERDONE.
You guys and gals can keep giving angry responses by I would encourage you to go to the bottom of this blog and sift through pasts posts. I have said the same things about 'Futuristic' designs, I have said the same things abut expensive performance bikes with too many gadgets on them, and a few more. That is the beauty of a blog folks, one thing they are for is posting your opinion, I gave mine....AND THAT IS THAT!
Oh yeh...that sound system thing...I put one (powered by a motorcycle battery) with a tape deck on my design back in 1985!
During my search for the great bicycle design, I came across MANY lowrider bikes and after much thought, I have finally decided to address the issue. I have gotten a few emails asking my thoughts, one from a guy with a bicycle company that was looking to expand his product line. Wwhat I told the company owner was this; "Don't sell anything that you aren't an expert on, can't build, is SO NICHE, and requires a certain race of people to make the product line viable. In fairness, most of the pictures in this post consist of 'Show Bikes' but there is some of ones people ride everday also.
Lowrider bicycles, in my opinion are too niche to EVER be mainstream and unfortunatley, when people see these bicycles, they think of Mexicans. That isn't racial, it is just the truth! Like african americans, as latinos start to understand their buying power as a race and demand better housing, civil rights, fair wages and the like, their standard of living will go up as a people, and the old ways, like with black folks will fade into the past. I am ceratin spanish, no matter how well they are doing, will continue from generation to generation.
Back to the lowrider bike issue, it is RARE to even see a latino kid on these bicycles, here in Denver and believe me, we have a VERY LARGE latino population and they are at least 50% of the homeowners in the area where I live and I can't even remember the last time I saw a lowrider bike. I said all of that to say this, this market is WAY TO NICHE to ever flourish in the mainstream. ALL OF THE LATINO KIDS AND TEENS where I live ride regular bikes (although ugly ones) and truthfully, they could buy a lowrider bicycle for about the same cost as some of the bikes I see them on....what does that say? And what does that say about the mainstream viability of this niche market?
To those of you who build them, GREAT! Keep on doing your thing cause I ain't hatin on you, but it is a tough sell where 'Cross over appeal' is concerned when anyone, no matter what race, looks at a product and says "You know a ***** person designed that." Offended yet, OH BABY I GOT MORE! When you see, or hear of 'Bling-Bling' Jewelry, what color man do you think of? A Black man! Don't lie, that's who I think of and I AM BLACK! For those of you who live here in Colorado, when someone mention the city of Boulder, Colorado, what type of people do you think of? WHITE PEOPLE!
It's true so get mad if you want. Anyway, I think low rider bikes, for the most part look, well, OVERDONE!
Out of the hundreds and hundreds I have looked at, the one pictured below is the ONLY ONE I have ever seen that I kinda think is ok. Even this one....white wall tires.....PLAYED OUT! I vomit ever time I see a bicycle with WHITE WALL TIRES! YUK!
As has become my custom here on this bike blog, I will answers some questions that my readers have posed to me. Please understand that I am not trying to be rude or arrogant, but why ask me a question if you do not want the answers people? HERE WE GO;
Questions
"If you want your blog to be successful, why aren't you posting everyday?"
Answer
What is your definition of success and are you comparing this to other blogs? Listen Matt, my definition of success is doing what I want to do on my blog the way I want to do it. If you even do a light search across the 3 big search engines, you will find that all of those other bloggers are posting the same stuff and their is VERY LITTLE originality! Outside of Urban Velo and Bicycle Design Blogspot, everyone else is, well, the same! I am not trying to be different for the sake of being different, but because I am myself, an original in my own right, my blog has to reflect who I am.
Question:
"You seem to be all over the place with your posts, I thought this was a bike design blog?"
Answer:
I have alot of differing interests! But I encourage you to at least go to the bottom of my blog, read past title posts and I know you will find a consistent theme.
Question:
"Why don't you have a widget for readers to subscribe?"
Answer:
I want people to come back to my blog because they want to! I am not going to send someone my posts if they aren't in the mood to read them. Don't you get enough junk in your inbox? Besides, the truth is people put this widget on their sites to show off how many subscribers they have and it has no practical purpose other than that! Yes you could argue it is important for traffic, yes you can argue it shows you have a following...but I am only interested in people who have the love and conviction to visit my site because they like what I do, not because they came across it, subscribed and have to be reminded to read!
Question:
"What do you have against products that are already on the market?"
Answer:
NOTHING! As a recreational bicycle designer myself, I am just sad that the folks who ride these bikes are settling for what is there instead of demanding something better. If folks didn't demand WHAT THEY BELIEVE to be better during this last Presidentional Election, would Obama have won the presidency?
Question:
"I like the bikes I saw at Target and think they are nice!"
Answer:
Joel my friend, you do because you just don't know any better! Poor guy.
Question:
"You suck!"
Answer:
Indeed I may, indeed I may! But I am going to suck SOOO BAADDD that you are going to run out to the store in the future, see my FUNK and give me your $$$- Count on it!
Monkey Lectric www.monkeylectric.com is doing big things for bikes people. I posted a few times about a company called Scaper bikes www.scraperbikes.net a few times and if you go 2 posts down from this one you can view a youtube video that was a HUGE viral marketing success from Scraper. Scraper Bikes and Monkey Lectric are 2 opposite ends of the creative spectrum. Why do I say that? Scraper Bikes is:
- Very low tech yet SUPER CREATIVE! An example of what ANYONE can do if they just FREE THEIR MINDS and use what is available to them instead of believing they have to have alot of money to launch something big.
- Monkey Lectric id VERY HIGH TECH and also SUPER CREATIVE. By the technology they are demonstrating, it had to cost A MINT to develop this concept and I am sure they are wise enough to apply for at least a Design Patent. Bicycle lights aren't a new concept by any stretch of the imagination but what they are doing is FREAKISH and original.
- Scraper is something for the average person who wants to personalize their rims while Monkey is something you got to spend some CREAM on.
- 'Scraper Bikes by Day' 'Monkey Lectric by night'.
All in all, their are huge opportunities for bike companies who are original and have a love for what they are doing. Major Taylor was a bicycle racer and VERY ORIGINAL in his day! Enjoy!
Some Fool cried about the $3,500 price tag..they would rather ride on something that 10 million other people have...COME ON MAN!
I have found him! Who you ask? Someone I have come to know as ‘The Fabricator of Funk’. Over the last 7 weeks or so, I hinted at the fact and posted a raw frame picture, concerning the fact that I was working on one of (the 1st) of my prototype designs. I posted on craigslist in an attempt to find someone who could fabricate some of my designs. I got a response from 2 people and both of them referred me to the same person (one gave me his email address) who I only knew as ‘Casey’. I contacted Casey and the rest (when our launch comes) you will be able to say is history! I will not give you details, contact information and such about him because he is launching his own machine shop dedicated to building and creating original works of art (you may know them as custom designs) to remind the world that originality is king! Although I love design and talking about bicycle design, where aesthetics is concerned), there is much I don’t know and Casey my friends, IS the ‘Missing Link’.
We are closing in on completion of my 1st design in a few weeks. This design is called; ‘Illuminati’ which means; Someone possessing or claiming to possess a higher level of enlightenment. This name is very appropriate although I know that I do not have a higher level of enlightenment, but I certainly do claim so, do I not?! I think where bicycle design is concerned, enlightenment is ‘Relative’ to what you like and think is HOOOOOOTTTT! I saw some heavy weight ‘TREK’ Beach Cruisers in a shop not long ago, and I must say that I thought they were VERY NICE. Not HOOOTTTT (ala the Nuvinci by Ellsworth) but nice all the same. Someone else may look at that same ‘TREK’ and be like ‘YUK!’ Anyway, Casey has viewed a few of my designs and saw fit to refer to me as ‘Eccentric’. The purpose of the 1st design, Illuminate, was to not only build but for me to get a feel for Casey’s fabrication\alteration style and for him to feel where I was coming from. In my opinion, I couldn’t have found a better Fabricator-Machinist than he! Standby my dear readers for the roll-out of the 1st Signature Line of ‘RYDZ’ by Marshall Taylor in the spring of 2009….. REMEMBER THIS TERM… PROVOLUTION; Bringing the best of the past, forward to the present, and carrying that ideal into the future.
I saw a movie some years ago called ‘Baby Boy’ starring Tyrese Gibson and Ving Rhames. There is a video on youtube.com with the movies theme song but after listening to a little bit of it, although there is no cussing, the material rapped about is not appropriate for this blog. However, I did run across this picture of the main bicycle in the movie and it is posted below. Before I go any further, I want to tell all of you that I am in no way looking down my nose at those in the video (Snoop and Tyrese) because the truth is, I saw the movie many years ago and was a huge fan of the song at that time, but after reviewing the song I realized that I am at a different place in my life and this type of music to me now, is extreme.
Tyrese Gibson’s character. Jody, was a 20ish young man still living at home with his momma. His momma had a new boyfriend played by Ving Rhames. The part that jumped out at me wasn’t the plot because essentially, that consisted of Jody bumping heads with his momma’s new boyfriend. Often times when a divorced or single mother has teenage or young adult male son (especially if the young adult son lives at home), when the mother starts to date again, and eventually marry, the young son will have an issue with the man his momma is involved with. It seems the longer the mother was single and alone, the bigger the problem. These young cats want to be the man of the house (Although, in my experience, they almost never want to (nor do they) pay any bills as a real man would) and when they momma focuses her attention on another man they get mad, thus the head bumping!
I recently read a very popular bicycle blog where the writer made the statement "Some of the designs I receive are good and some are totally unrealistic". I do not know what he meant by unrealistic but let's wax philosophical on what he might mean. He might be talking about whether the bicycle has mechanical challenges and thereby making it unrealistic. In the 1940's or before, men were dreaming about space travel and there were those who thought that was a pipe dream, today, men being launched in space barely makes the news. When it does, it is because some millionaire has decided to pay $20 million to make the flight. The challenges with space travel are vast, yet, if men and women can travel in space, what is so hard about overcoming challenges with the industrial portion of bicycle design? Maybe he meant the cost would be to high IF it could be done at all. So what! If I bicycle costs $6,000 to $8,000, the company may not sell a ton of them, but there is a market for that as we find with the cost of some electric bicycles topping $8,000.
I helped launch a watch company a few years back, and the concept of the watches was to put all sorts of luxury woods down in the face of the watch (http://www.bannekerwatches.com/), the manufacturer that we worked with was totally resistant to the idea because as he put it "Their is a reason why this hasn't been done." He then agreed to make the watches, but said "We will not put our names on them as the manufacturer." The longer he worked on the proto-type designs, the more of a fan he became of the whole concept and now, one of the designs is even featured on his website. Not only that, others have copied the designs and are now marketing them. As a Reebok commercial proudly claims, "Impossible is nothing". This also applies to bicycle design. Yes there are some staples such as round wheels, a round sprocket, and the like that will stay consistent,(although even round sprockets have been challenged by the advent of the chain less bicycle of the late 1890's) but the design possibilities are infinite!
When I look at bicycle designs that are on the market now, I marvel at the lack of risk associated with the most simple designs by major brands. Take for instance the brand manufactured for Wal-Mart, "Next". I compared this design in 2006 to the designs by Huffy and Mongoose in the 1980's and it is sad to report that they are virtually, from an aesthetic standpoint, THE SAME! What would happen to Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Levis, Nike and other big companies if they manufactured the same products, with virtually no change, as they did 20 years ago. The answer is, they would be OUT OF BUSINESS because some young, hungry entrepreneurs would have exposed their weakness and bought them out. The same with Microsoft. What if they were still writing software like Lotus 3.1? They would be irrelevant today instead of commanding a market share of computer operating systems worldwide of 92%.
I am very excited on today because once some young Bicycle designer wakes up, designs funky and relevant bicycle designs that kids can relate to, want to ride, show off to their friend, and compel their parent to buy, Pacific Cycles, Huffy and the like are going to find themselves with a shrinking market share! I ask myself this question about the big boys "How can they pay someone to show up for 40 to 50 hours per week to design bicycles, day after day, week after week, etc?" Bicycle design isn't something that you can just show up and try to do, like a good song or book, it comes from INSPIRATION. They are wasting their resources conducting business like this. Again, think outside of the box or become irrelevant.
At this time, I am calling on young and hungry graphic\industrial designers to challenge the status quo. You do that by coming up with your own bicycle designs, product designs, fashion designs, software and anything that you may be passionate about. Yes people are going to laugh at you, mock you, tell you it won't work and that you are just a dreamer. Remember, a dreamer named Thomas Edison changed the world, an eccentric man named Albert Einstein made possible space travel, a pirate named Bill Gates and his company Microsoft now command 92% of the world's computer operating systems, a man named Stephen Knight, Founder of Nike starting by selling athletic shoes out of the trunk of his car at track meets, a few years later he signed a rookie in the NBA named Michael Jordan to a shoe contract and the rest is history! Live the dream designers.
Inspired by:
Marshall 'Major' Taylor
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