"Bogan [identity] is very much connected to a bar or to the concert venue. In the book I talk about how bogans will go to a concert and you have this amazing experience where you feel connected to everyone in the arena and you feel like you're part of this big community, but to a certain extent it is an imagined community, because you're never going to meet every single person at that concert ..."
This is how Snell talks. Don't let the leather, sideburns and scruffy mien confuse you; he's far from an ordinary bogan. Last year, after a decade as an undergraduate, master's student and finally doctoral candidate, Snell gained his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Waikato with the acceptance of his thesis, a 235-page epic with the title "The Everyday Bogans: Identity and Community amongst Heavy Metal Fans".
His book, which includes interviews with 13 other bogans, is principally based on this thesis (and the one he wrote for his master's degree), which are, in turn, the product of more than half a decade of academic research into heavy metal and the bogan lifestyle - not to mention two decades of living it. Snell, who now works as a research administrator at Wintec, has since become world famous in Hamilton for all this and is now known, at least in these parts, as "Doc Bogan". I will chance it and suggest that he may well be the smartest bogan in history. He has even been - and he gets rather excited as he tells me about it - the subject of a trivia question on the cap from a bottle of Waikato Draught.
"A friend at uni was having a few beers with some other friends and they were asking each other the questions on the bottle tops, He went to ask the question and realised what it said ("Q: What did Dave Snell receive in 2007? A: A scholarship to study bogans").
I had no idea that Waikato Draught were going to do that, so it was a complete surprise to me - and everyone else. It's probably one of the highlights of my career so far!
"As my sister said when she found out: 'finally the Snells are immortalised in beer'."
This, you'll agree, is a very funny, very bogan sort of quip indeed.
Everybody has their favourite bogan joke, of course. (Mine is: why did the bogan cross the road? To start a drunken fight for no reason whatsoever.) This is because to non-bogans - which is most of us, really - the bogan oscillates between being a figure of fun and a figure of fear.
"We're frequently stereotyped as troublemakers," Snell writes in Bogan, "as a drain on society, as that stupid, drunk guy with the funny haircut. We're held up in contrast to the civilised world, a world that's supposedly interested in fancy paintings, wine and philosophical debates about the value of Sartre. The bogan cares not for these things. We want to talk about who the better AC/DC singer is - it's Bon Scott by the way - while drinking beer and wearing a faded black shirt. Yet, these are things we are mocked for."
Well these, and a few other things. There is the mullet, of course, a hairstyle which looks more like a medieval affliction (this impression is only enhanced by the presence of a scruffy goatee). Then there is the timeless bogan uniform: a black T-shirt - typically a faded concert shirt for a favourite metal band - matched with black jeans (or leathers) and black, steel-capped boots. Finally there is the bogan's idea of a really great night out, something that typically features very loud metal and copious amounts of beer, bourbon and burn-outs.
It is of little surprise that the Oxford English Dictionary, which included the word bogan for the first time last year, defines one as "an uncouth or unsophisticated person, regarded as being of low social status". It's really no wonder then that among the middle classes the bogan is a bogeyman.
So why, if bogans are such a contemptible rabble, would we care to know any more about them than we already do?
Actually, this was pretty much the question asked back in 2007 when it became public knowledge that Snell, who had just finished a master's degree thesis on heavy metal and a Hamilton heavy metal bar, had been awarded a scholarship of $96,000 (over three years) by the Tertiary Education Commission to study the ways of the bogan.
Newspaper letter-writers, talkback callers and at least one National MP, Paul Hutchison, blew a collective foofoo valve about it being a waste of taxpayers' money, blah, blah, blah.
"I say good on him," Hutchison said at the time, "he's managed to get the award, presumably, on merit. The point I'm making is: God help the Finance Minister [then Michael Cullen] when he thinks this sort of research will underpin the New Zealand economy ... I will wait with bated breath and see if [Snell's thesis] will transform the New Zealand economy."
Funnily enough, some newspaper leader writers weren't quite so negative. The Waikato Times declared, rather obviously, that "bogans were people too", while a Herald On Sunday editorial concluded Snell's research would be "all the better to understand bogans".
Five years on from the so-called controversy and with his doctorate in community psychology now completed, Snell says he did feel a bit defensive about his researching bogans because it felt like a personal attack.
"For me and the people I associate with and the people in the book, [the subject] is important. I think it is also important on a national level. I think there is a lot in there that is really important in an understanding of not only who I am, or who my friends are as bogans, but also what New Zealand is as country compared to Australia and the rest of the world. I like the fact there is no exact equivalent term that I've come across for who we are as bogans. That in itself seems to speak about its importance and speaks to the relevance."
So who the hell - beyond the tired cliches and the dreary prejudice - is the bogan?
Well he is someone exactly like Snell. Born in Lower Hutt and raised on a farm in Kaeo, a tiny village in the Far North, by an ex-copper (now social worker) father and mother who left nursing for early childcare, Snell was just another young kid in provincial New Zealand who developed a taste for black T-shirts and jeans - in his case not long after hearing AC/DC for the first time at age 12. Hard rock and heavy metal music, you see, are almost always the gateway drug into bogandom.
"My dad had bought a cassette tape called The Razor's Edge ... It had songs with titles like Thunderstruck ... it was awesome. The tape had it all: the chanting crowds, the pounding drums, the guitar building up in the background. It made me want to put on a cap, lace up some steel caps and stand in front of millions singing about how great it is to be working class."
At his district high school of 200-250 kids, there were only five or six bogans - Snell and his mates.
"We dressed all in black. I even used to play tennis in black jeans and a black Metallica T-shirt. I think I've gone soft as I've got older, because I have no idea how I did that. Five years of tennis in the Far North dressed in black and in boots!"
While his diagnosis at 15 with Crohn's disease - it put him in hospital for months at the age of 17 - seems to have disturbed his post-secondary education somewhat (though his experiences of being unwell lead him to move to Hamilton at 21 to start his degree in psychology), the disease certainly didn't disrupt his love for all things bogan.
In Bogan he recounts growing a mullet, buying his first metal T-shirt (Metallica), his first tastes of "drunken bogan chaos" and, most influentially, his first major concert (Metallica again), which happened to be at Auckland's most bogan concert venue, the Mt Smart Super Top.
"During the concert seven people passed out nearby," he writes, "including a shirtless guy who staggered into me. Another guy climbed one of the giant support poles. I stood there transfixed as he nimbly made his way up, disappearing into the darkness at the top.
Despite being quite agile, he was very drunk, swaying from side to side as he shimmied up the pole. As I tried to spot him the darkness, a shower of puke rained down upon those unfortunate enough to be in the blast radius."
Your reaction to this particular anecdote - disgust, nausea, contempt, bafflement or amusement - is likely to suggest how open you will be to Snell's central contention about bogans: that for all the metal, mayhem, mullets and (sometimes) drunken silliness, the bogan is not, as the Oxford English Dictionary implies, a mindless scumbag, but a working class hero of sorts.
The word bogan comes from across the Ditch. Snell's research suggests it's a corruption of an Aboriginal word, and it was used to name both a river and a district in New South Wales. The word seems only to have become a pejorative in Australia sometime in the 1970s or 80s, however, with it taking a meaning similar to a larrikin - though much more negative and much more about class. In Australia, bogan is something like the British "chav" or the American "white trash".
In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, Australian academic David Nichols writes, "Whether you define the bogan as your nemesis, the essence of your own and your nation's spirit, or some vast army of amoebic plebs easily kept happy with reality television and Hollywood gossip, I believe the concept is ultimately more dangerous than empowering. Believing in the bogan creates a rift in society where old racist rhetoric is resurrected to describe and demonise places, people and practices in a way that sanctions inter-class hostility and neglect. The bogan isn't someone with opinions, problems, needs or values: the bogan, to the anti-bogan, is just 'other' - someone not worth thinking about beyond funny put-downs, much less talking to or engaging with.
The bogan, in this way of thinking, is what the 'lower races' were to most whites a century ago."
In Bogan, Snell makes the case for New Zealand bogandom being, in the first instance, not an expression of class, but of fandom; the Kiwi bogan is foremost a music fanatic, specifically of heavy metal and its many variants (though not all metal fans are bogans).
The Kiwi bogan might also love cars (Holdens mainly), tattoos, bourbon, beer and a party, but the music is the glue that holds bogan-dom together.
But most importantly, being a bogan is, in fact, not about where you were born, what you do, or how much you earn, Snell says, it's about "a state of mind".
This is something he calls "roach class". This is a state of mind that means you understand "higher" culture but choose "lower" culture.
"Bogans get a bit of a bad rap for being uncultured, but it's just because they have different tastes ... roach class is about recognising Masterpiece Theatre, but preferring Beavis and Butt-head."
"The heart of my argument is that bogans may be old-fashioned and might be uncouth, but we're definitely not uncultured. Sure there's booze, cars and stirring up trouble every now and then. There's also loyalty and friendship, loving your family and having some fun along the way."
Snell goes further than this declaration of community, however. Bogan is a gentle, funny plea for non-bogans to see the bogan as worthy of respect.
One of the bogans Snell interviewed for the book, a chap called Chopper, makes the point that "bogans are a key part of New Zealand society, a group of people that keep the country going through their mostly bogan occupations".
Says Chopper, "You've gotta have the people who are willing to crawl under you house to fix your drainpipe or crawl under the bonnet of your car or build your house for ya."
In the end, Snell says, the bogan state of mind is not much different from the Kiwi one.
"Bogans," he writes, "embody the very things that New Zealand promotes to other countries: the laidback person with a beer in their hand and everything is made of No. 8 wire (or something like that)."
Which is why, if you call Dave Snell - Lion Red drinker, bourbon enthusiast, aficionado-of-all-things-metal, soon-to-be-published author and academic - a bogan, you'll just make him proud. As another bogan Snell interviewed for his book, a chap called "Death", says, "I don't really sit there and think about being a bogan. I mean initially when I was wearing metal shirts and dressing like a bogan, I denied it. 'You're a bogan.' 'No, I'm not.' Now it's, 'You're a bogan.' 'Yeah, shit yeah [laughs], and you're a c***'."
Bogan: an insider's guide to metal, mullets and mayhem (Penguin $35) is published on Thursday. The free book launch will be held at Biddy Mulligan's Irish Bar in Hamilton from 9pm this Friday and features three bands.
A Bogan Lexicon
• The bogan emoticon: \m/
• Boganette: a bogan female.
• Fauxgan: someone who tries to appear bogan to be fashionable.
• Goon bag (or sack): the bag from a box of cheap wine.
• Mosh: bogan dancing.
• Sauce: booze.
• Stunt beers: cheap bourbon.
• Talk shit: bogan conversation.
• Undercover bogan: a bogan wearing a Pantera T-shirt under his business shirt.
• Westie: a bogan who lives in, or is from, West Auckland.
* (source: Bogan: an insider's guide to metal, mullets and mayhem)
