Early this May, the blog “What I Learned Today” posted an insightful article examining American music culture’s controversial adoption of the keffiyah, a distinct checkered Arab scarf. As the garment-of-choice for both militant anti-Zionists like the late Yasser Arafat and not so militant rap musicians like “Meet the Spartans” star Method Man, the popularity of the scarf has raised a degree of National debate. 

I respectfully bowed out of this debate since, despite stumbling my way through Thomas Friedman’s “From Beirut to Jerusalem” this Spring (spoiler alert: Arafat and Rabin make up in the end), most aspects of the Middle East remain a complete fucking riddle to me: Who’s good? Who’s bad? Who do I sympathize with when someone brings up the Lebanon War? What the fuck was the Lebanon War? Sometimes the answers seem at once deathly important and totally meaningless. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if Laura Dern toted an RPG and midgets were replaced with martyrs.

As a sort of built-in defense mechanism against such heavy debates, I tend to focus on trivial details of the greater story at hand. In the case of Kanye West’s controversial headscarf, I focused my energies on another foreign piece of the rapper’s attire: his sunglasses. The distinctive slotted “shutter shades,” worn by Mr. West during live performances and in the music video for his single “Stronger,” are a relic from a place far more terrifying than the Gaza Strip: the 1980s.

From the moment Kanye first donned them in 2007, the shutter shades were instantly identified as a distinctly ’80s accessory. However, visual evidence of the glasses from the period is harder to come by than I had anticipated. In the end, I was only able to find two exhibits of the glasses from their alleged decade of origin. The first is the1985 film “The Last Dragon,” in which they were worn by the character Sho’Nuff. The second is the music video for Animotion’s hit 1985 single, “Obsession.”

Depressingly, the one ’80s icon I most vividly remembered sporting a pair of shutter shades, Michael J. Fox’s randy “Teen Wolf” sidekick Rupert “Stiles” Stilinski, did not dawn a single pair in the film’s entire 91-minute running time.

He did, however, wear this shirt. Which, incidentally, is far more offensive in my opinion than even the most egregious pro-terrorism scarf…