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| November 5, 2002 | |||||
| It's
like that: Jam Master Jay Let's
talk about sex Rolling (the 20-sided die) with
Lil' Pocketknife Return
to a Savage Republic Chapter
two Uneasy
listening Punctum Correct
Techniques
|
Our
brand could be your life IF YOU WANTED to take T-shirt designs as a barometer of youth culture, you might notice, as I have, the dip in kids at college campuses with band shirts. I can't recall with specificity the exact state of such things 10 years ago, but I remember a general sense that kids were different. I started conversations with people because they wore the shirt of a band I liked and had the same happen to me. When I look around a classroom now, such outward displays of stubborn musical pride are a rarity. When I do occasionally see something from my era, a Big Black shirt or Nirvana patch, I cheer on my fellow anachronism as if we were trapped in a mutual Ren fair or Civil War reenactment. While there are some vestiges of Bay Area past, some political protest shirts, and the ever popular Beatles or John Lennon peacenik nonsense, I now notice more logos for Christian youth groups and tech companies. I saw a shirt with a Google logo and one with a Verizon design on the same day. I haven't had the time or attention to keep tabs on what other shirts happen to parade before me, but these arbitrary samples struck me as extremes. About 70 percent of the shirts I own have some sort of band logo on them. That just so happens to be the only new clothing item I will buy; the rest are usually castoffs. I justify the accumulation as anthropological evidence of my formative years. Most of them will never be worn again, but I figure they stand as a chunk of personal history and a means of directly supporting artists. Besides, I spent hours making a handful of shirts with a crappy silk screen, manually correcting blank spots that failed to burn properly from the low-wattage bulb. These were labors of individuated love, imperfect value additions that made each shirt a little more than a mere commodity. For a few months last year I worked at a big T-shirt company. Mainstream artists, sports teams, and punk bands had all passed through those presses, or at least their images were rendered via a goopy chemical gun and squeegeed over cotton fabrics. For some reason I thought it might be a good place to work, but there's nothing particularly romantic about a job producing shit when it's not your shit. I knew that bands were treated as businesses, but this was the most extreme proof of it. Some well-established bands were pulling hefty markups for stuff that cost very little to manufacture. I knew that one client had taken issue with the fact that some of the bags we produced were manufactured in Myanmar, but I think they slipped through to customers anyway. Since that job, I've been more curious about what motivates someone to willingly pay to use their torso as a billboard. You might not need to spend too much time reading into the implications of shirt logos. Not when a kid in class complains that one of the guest lecturers is "so anticorporate." Shades of Alex P. Keaton spring to mind and instantly reconfigure what all these shirts are telling me. In this postironic world no one would wear a corporate logo as a joke. Jamie tells me about seeing someone with a tattoo of the Nike swoosh. The lack of irony is disturbing because it doesn't really indicate a decline in cynicism or a rise in sincerity. My obsession with the T-shirt semiotic seems to come from another world, one that is hung up on self-determination and the right to not be controlled by forces that are not in your interest. It's like being that one conspiracy nut who won't admit that capitalism has won and demands a recount. What's most frustrating is that I know the younger me wouldn't listen to myself now, a bitter ranter who won't concede the fight or shut up about the old days. I'm confronting my first generation gap from the perspective of the losing side. Of course, this is all moot as the only matching pairs of socks I own have the Yahoo! logo, and I got one of the made-in-Myanmar bags at the company Christmas party. So if the music shirts aren't being replaced by South Park or Jackass shirts, where is the hero worship of this generation going? The answer is glaringly obvious: corporations are the new rock stars. Which is more newsworthy, the litigious cluelessness of Michael Jackson or the epic decadence of Enron? Bringing a CEO home for dinner is a surefire way to get back at your parents. Bill Gates is the new Jim Morrison, fighting for the freedom to do what he wants on his platform. And why are the biggest singing superstars coming from the fecund belly of Disney's Orlando clone farms? Are the stars of American Idol really what music is supposed to be about? And are the rights of individuals being transferred to entities with no ethical, national, or physical boundaries, not even at the borders of your own cortex? Stay tuned after these messages. George Chen lives in Oakland. He is cofounder of the magazine and record label zum (www.zumonline.com). E-mail him at georgezum@yahoo.com.
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| Design by Rhatia Carr |