{"id":407075,"date":"2025-11-26T23:37:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T23:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/407075\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T23:37:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T23:37:19","slug":"after-deterring-homeless-people-with-baby-shark-song-a-barber-offers-free-thanksgiving-trims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/407075\/","title":{"rendered":"After deterring homeless people with ‘Baby Shark’ song, a barber offers free Thanksgiving trims"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Shalom Styles woke up around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday to pick up his barbers from his downtown business and start cutting hair at Los Angeles Mission in Skid Row. <\/p>\n

By 9 a.m., he\u2019d shaved and shaped up more than 100 heads of hair, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels good. I\u2019m happy I can do this, do the right thing,\u201d said Styles, whose store got some unwanted attention in May when the building owner that leases to him started blasting the children\u2019s song \u201cBaby Shark\u201d<\/a> from their Main Street building to deter homeless people from staying in the area. <\/p>\n

Styles has been cutting hair since he was 13 in New York, he said, and was looking forward to the morning trip to the shelter to give some free cuts before a host of city leaders stopped by for a Thanksgiving giveaway for Skid Row\u2019s residents.<\/p>\n

The event was also part of a way for him and his staff to give back in the wake of the \u201cBaby Shark\u201d incident, when police officials met with the landlord and told them they\u2019d have to cut the music. Soon after, representatives from Los Angeles Mission reached out to Styles and the landlord to discuss their concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the incident, L.A. Mission CEO Dennis Oleesky contacted Shalom to discuss it and found that Shalom felt genuinely remorseful. He acted out of frustration and did not consider the consequences, as many of us often do,\u201d mission spokesman Greg Mielcarz said. <\/p>\n

Styles said within a year or two of starting his barbershop, they\u2019d started having issues with homeless people gathering in front of the business. The issues prompted his landlord to blast the annoying earworm of a song to bring the city\u2019s attention to the problem, he said.<\/p>\n

Hostile architecture and novel ways of trying to disperse homeless people have become somewhat common in L.A. in recent years. Businesses have installed planters and other noisemaking devices<\/a> to make staying in front of a storefront inconvenient.<\/p>\n

In 2019 a 7-Eleven in North Hollywood played classical music. Others put up fences and prickly shrubbery to deter loiterers.<\/p>\n

But everyone was singing a different tune on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Shalom Styles of Styles Barber Lounge and his crew gave out 100 haircuts from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. at Los Angeles Mission on Nov. 26, 2025.<\/p>\n

(Myung J. Chun\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Mikey Resendez, all smiles and red converse shoes, sat down in the morning and thanked Styles for his haircut before it was even done. The 35-year-old has been sober for a month and living at the mission, he said.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a musician and had an appointment at a nearby recording studio later in the day. That\u2019s after his first round of facial tattoo removal, Resendez said. <\/p>\n

When an L.A. Mission social media worker walked by, Resendez offered to play \u201can entire album\u201d for their website. \u201cI have 15 songs ready to go,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Another resident who wanted a cut was Gilberto, who declined to give his last name. He sat quietly while Styles trimmed his hair. He said it had been four or five months since he\u2019d gotten his hair cut \u2014 not too long, he said, but still a fresh trim was a nice luxury to have. <\/p>\n

After the cuts, mission volunteers cooked and served 2,500 meals at their Skid Row location alongside local politicians, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna, Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell and gubernatorial candidate and former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. <\/p>\n

Gilberto, now with a clean cut, ate a traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey, gravy, rolls and other fixings outside the mission on a warm fall day. \u201cIt\u2019s good,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shalom Styles woke up around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday to pick up his barbers from his downtown business and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":407076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[191927,76682,1582,276,191930,4565,171975,7768,54659,2961,9103,224,2444,5337,191928,6522,191929,58644,40288,19514],"class_list":{"0":"post-407075","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-baby-shark","9":"tag-barber","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-city-leader","13":"tag-cut","14":"tag-downtown-business","15":"tag-hair","16":"tag-homeless-people","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-landlord","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-los-angeles-times","21":"tag-losangeles","22":"tag-mikey-resendez","23":"tag-mission","24":"tag-shalom-sharp","25":"tag-sharp","26":"tag-skid-row","27":"tag-song"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115618634558815874","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}