What happened to lads?

mini article

Writing about something that’s already been talked about, theorised on, pulled apart and surgically analysed is something my, “everything you meme about needs to be new and fresh” self-imposed rule of thumb struggles with. Perhaps it has something to do with the sheer speed at which information is commentated on in the current social media era – If someone else has already made a point about something, then I better have an even newer spin, or point of view on that thing if I want to talk about it. Just how some fashion people’s greatest phobia is wearing a piece of clothing that has spent too long in the mainstream, the meme page admin has a phobia of making an outdated piece of commentary. Additionally, the same way the fashion person will instinctively say “oh no I just wear what I like”, the meme page admin will claim the same – In an attempt to shield themselves from the “trying too hard” label. This insecurity has its benefits, people want ‘new’, they want ‘fresh’. But it also has its downsides, it makes writing about “Lad culture” a jarring task, because it has been the go-to youth culture to scrutinize for cultural commentators for the past 20 years – There is a worry of not saying anything new, and wasting everyone’s time.

What has made writing about Lads so tempting for budding cultural writers for over two decades is the personability of it all. Everyone in Australia has some sort of a relationship to this culture, whether it be through siblings, neighbors, youtube, school or the local skatepark. It’s such a loud subculture that everyone has some story about.

My Lad story is intrinsically tied to my current meme page , it’s where my urge to post things online started. My first ever foray into the world of funny images with text on them was in year 10 at highschool. It was a Facebook page called the “Skeamo Appreciation Society”, an ode to local rapper Skeamo, an ironic worship of this niche Sydney icon that had other like minded highschoolers in a chokehold that year. Skeamo, an infamous graffiti writer, member of the notorious 210 crew and rap collective “Sydney Serchaz” was somewhat of a boogeyman in these years.

“OMG I saw Skeamo at Town Hall steps”

“Skeamo was on the back of my bus afterschool yesterday”

Skeamo was an insulting, loud and proud Lad during a time in which this subculture really had no representation anywhere in the media other than mainstream Australia parodying it. He was early to use the power of the internet, and harnessed a curiosity so many kids in Sydney had with a subculture that they were somewhat scared to interact with in real life. There is no doubt in my mind that if Skeamo was to do everything he did back then, now, he would have amassed a TON of curious onlookers on social media. His uniquely foul mouth (even for Australian standards), confidence and bravado made him one of those characters you couldn’t look away from, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry – along with his self-appointed title as: The Polo (Ralph Lauren) King Of Australia, a nod to the lad pastime of stealing luxury clothing from David Jones in the city.

Skeamo’s hard to ignore persona made having a meme page about him extremely easy to grow. His outrages, unrefined rap videos would always go “Sydney viral” and every Skeamo Appreciation Society member would have their go-to Skeamo catch phrase. It was a very early instance of being a fan of someone online ironically, simply for how outrages they were, which has come to be the norm online nowadays.

Eventually my mockery of Skeamo caught up to me. Someone from school had given my name up to Skeamo and one afternoon I was met with a tirade of messages from the man himself telling me he knew where I went to school, my name, etc etc. Like any good meme page admin faced with the lightest level of confrontation, I deactivated the page and moved on – never losing my sometimes ironic, sometimes genuine love for a guy that started the “gutter rap” movement and broke the glass ceiling for lads posting online.

There’s a weird thing that happens online where working-class culture gets turned into meme material before it’s ever taken seriously. I was guilty of it, and still am in some ways. Turning Skeamo into a running joke wasn’t just entertainment—it was a way to interact with a culture I was fascinated by, but didn’t feel part of. Lad culture became an internet shorthand for “housing commision” reduced to TNs, striped polo tops, and pig latin, while the actual social and class realities behind it got flattened into comedy. And that’s the thing with meme culture—once something becomes funny online, it becomes difficult to take it seriously again.

That page gave birth to two of my great loves, low-quality, raw, housing-commission Australian rap and memes.

The more time that goes on between the present and that afternoon I decided to deactivate the page, the more I have this invasive sense of middle-class Inner West guilt about that whole era.

At the time, I thought I was just taking the piss out of a loudmouth lad with a dri-fit hat and a vocabulary entirely made up of pig-latin (the lingua franca of lads), but in hindsight, I was documenting something way more culturally significant than I gave it credit for.

While I was busy pretending to be too ironic and internet-savvy to engage with it seriously, Skeamo—and the entire Lad archetype—was actually building one of the only authentic, Australian working-class subcultures this country has ever produced. Unfiltered, proudly local, and completely allergic to the polish of Triple J-approved coolness, this scene wasn't looking for validation from the arts scene, the media, or middle-class kids like me. It wasn’t curated or campaign-managed or begging to be understood. It just was.

It was doing the opposite of what every Chippendale living art school graduate at kick ons complains about when they comment on how little culture there is in Australia.

Looking back, the irony is that the thing I treated like a punchline was actually a rare example of something uniquely Australian, emerging straight from the guts of the suburbs without asking permission and doing exactly as I had later learnt was how culture is created.

In 2025, we have reached a time I never really thought about back then that was obviously inevitable: The original lads are old now. Like, pushing 50 old.

A subculture born from pre-gentrified inner-city Sydney figures like ‘Taven’, —a prolific graffiti writer still active today, who’s tag has become a permanent fixture on Sydney’s walls since the late 80s— who were first known as “Searchers”, soon spread west to the suburbs, then outwards to other capital cities, until Lad culture became synonymous with disenfranchised, working-class youth on every corner of this continent.

Now that we have reached the point in history where we have old lads, we get everything that comes with being ‘old’.

Older lads often warn of the death of the sacred subculture, lamenting its rebrand under the bastardised label of “eshayz”—a word they insist was once just a throwaway slang term of affirmation, never meant to become the actual name for who they were. Which is similar to how a “searcher” in 1993 Woolloomooloo was being labeled as a “Lad” because that is what he called his friends.

As culture changes, fractures and bends organically, the older members of that subculture will decry its inauthenticity and ignore that much of the slang they use everyday had a totally different meaning originally.

This new discourse I’ve seen from veteran lads on social media is how it goes with any legacy sub-culture, I actually view it as a cultural win for them tbh.

As the lines between what is and isn’t a lad continue to blur, many older lads and those from that era find themselves nostalgic for a time when the label had clearer boundaries — when you either were a lad or you weren’t. But I see this shift as Lad culture reaching its final form — a stage that most subcultures never achieve. It has influenced the mainstream so deeply that it’s melted into the broader identity of young Australians. What was once a distinct, working-class subculture has now dissolved into the larger melting pot of Australian culture. Any shopping centre in the country there's a teenager dressed with echoes of lad culture, a bum bag here, a dri-fit cap there, but never identifying or even knowing they are following a long tradition. Art exhibitions in Australia’s gentrified inner cities are not complete without a girl in a long dress wearing Nike TNs, once exclusively worn by lads. The vernacular of Private School boys has been so influenced by guys like Spanian that pig latin can be heard in the corridors of some of our most elite educational institutions.

Lad culture isn’t dead, it’s just integrated itself so deeply within Australian culture due to its longevity and refusal to go away, that it is invisible in the same way butter is invisible in pancake batter.

So no, this hasn’t been the freshest take. It’s not some cultural thesis pretending to crack something new open. Maybe the point isn’t to outsmart the algorithm or say it before anyone else — maybe it’s just to say it honestly. Lad culture wasn’t waiting for think pieces. Lad culture just happened. It shaped Sydney youth culture, despite its demonisation. And maybe that’s the most interesting part: real culture isn’t created by the ‘cultured’ inner city art types that have culture so high on their priority list, nor is it bothered by people talking about it — it just keeps going, even when you’re not paying attention.

The story of lad culture is the same story as any other successful working class culture, it got appropriated by the mainstream.