Answer: The Beastie Boys

U.S.-based hip hop group the Beastie Boys didn’t invent the mullet, not by a long shot, but they did coin the now ubiquitous term used to describe the hair cut.

The first references to what we now call the mullet, hair kept short in the front and long in the back, date all the way back to the Byzantine empire in the sixth century when the scholar Procopius noted that many youth were wearing their hair in such a fashion. Back then it was dubbed the “Hunnic” look to distinguish it from the traditional Roman hair styles of the day.

In the United States, Britain and the USSR, the look became popular in the 1970s and 1980s before falling largely out of fashion. It is shortly after this in the early 1990s that the Beastie  Boys made fun of the haircut with their 1994 track “Mullet Head.”

Surprising everyone, including the Oxford English Dictionary scholars in charge of hunting down word origins, the Beastie Boys were the ones who coined the use of the term to describe the hairstyle.