The saying on the streets, "Everything is everything" really does make a lot of sense when you think about it. So much of today's cultures and subcultures blend and mash into all of our collective unconscious and regurgitates itself into a blend of expression, imitation and futurism. Powered by the internet and text messaging cell phones at a faster and faster rate, newer ideas spark as soon as the latest one is posted to the appropriate blog.
Because we live in such an obvious media culture where nothing is original and yet everything is game, almost any medium can be manipulated or edited. Today living in the millennium all culture is media or more appropriately, media is culture, and so it is saturated with unnatural over-produced images or enhanced, extremely-made-over ideals. It seems society is completely taken with the idea of shamelessly hyping everything to it's nth degree of attention-getting fabulousness and Hollywood bankability.
Unless you've been at an ashram in India meditating with your guru for seven years, or are living under a rock, completely oblivious to modern society, you have to known that one of the sexiest ways of life is our scene, the import tuning culture. And it was born and bred on the West Coast of the U.S. Look at us now. The rest of the country and even the world are checking for us, our scene, our barometers, indicators and our standards. Not 10 years ago the import scene was barely a thought; a notion that became an idea and somehow nurtured itself into what it is today. We started with first generation Datsuns, Toyotas and Hondas street tuned to street race, moved to vinyl covered sub boxes in first gen all-show-no-go trailer queens, and then on to G35 versions of the Japanese super car Skyline.
It used to be, unless you were a race car driver or a famous playboy, your car was hardly noticed. But times have changed and people are more aware of the connection between your car and your self. The obvious success of reality TV is a good example of people all over the world in "show your ass" mode, where anything goes as long as it delivers them 15 minutes of fame. We can't blame Pamela Anderson for a generation of in your face boob jobs and blonde hair, so how can we be mad at candy painted, gull wing cars and wheels that look like they belong on wagons or platinum blond Asian import models who barely have the strength to hold up their own chests?
Mirroring society, body culture, our current obsession with looks, cosmetics and all things superficial, is one of the strongest streams of consciousness that's taken hold in our scene yet. For example, crappy bolt-on body kits that draw heat back to the engine instead of away from it or Time Attack cars whose looks appear totally cosmetic, but are derived from the engineering of race-conscious teams of engineers who have spent the money to employ expensive wind tunnel technology to make aero correct parts. There really is no turning back.