Change is constant. Change is necessary. Change is…not always good. (Remember New Coke?) So when Harley-Davidson folded its Softail and Dyna lines into one new lineup for model year 2018, purists were, naturally, alarmed.
Another group of Harley enthusiasts was also unnerved by the change, and it’s one that should most concern The Motor Company. The FXR craze of the past few years has spawned a new movement of H-D enthusiasts, one more rooted in fun, adventure, and style than in tradition or heritage. This vibrant generation of wheelie-popping, fairing-wearing Harley riders has to be considered one of the few bright spots in what’s often considered a pretty bleak picture of Harley-Davidson’s future, so when the new line of Softails was released last fall, it was interesting to see how these young Dyna enthusiasts would react.

Josh James is the founder of HD Hooligans, one of the world’s most spirited and successful online motorcycle communities. With an Instagram following of more than 93,000, Josh and the rest of the Hooligans are widely seen laying rubber, planting palms on asphalt at ridiculous angles, and sparking showers of DIY fireworks down roads all over the world. It’s a fun, fantastic feed, full of risk-takers, death-cheaters, and, yeah, the occasional moron. But it’s always an entertaining scroll, and Josh is one of the lunatics who started it all.

“The day Harley released the 2018 lineup, [my partner] Katie and I were watching the live releases pop up on Instagram and were texting each other as each model was released,” Josh says. “Having a lot of influence with my Hooligans page, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to shift the negative hype surrounding the ‘death of the Dyna’ or whatever.