"Fake Streets Hats" is the 11th and final track of The Streets' third studio album, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living. The song is about an incident that happened during the 2004 edition of the Dutch Lowlands Music Festival, where a drunk Mike Skinner openly protested against the handing out of white hats with "The Streets" written on them, because he thought they were fake, and thus illegal merchandise. The hats actually were a gift from his label, Locked On. Mike Skinner also sees the song as a personal reflection on plagiarism in general.
Famous quotes containing the words fake, streets and/or hats:
“The hat I was married in,
will it do?
White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array.
It’s old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug,
but it suits to die in something nostalgic.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can keep on going as a resident member of the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to “dress up like daddy.””
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)