I've got my Helen Love t-shirt on

[venta]

Well, actually, of course I haven't. I don't own a Helen Love t-shirt. But rest assured that, mentally, I'm always wearing one.

I'm just wondering about the etiquette of wearing t-shirts by one band to the gig of another. It's always seemed to me to be overkill to go to see Band A wearing a Band A shirt. It smacks faintly of the obsessive.

My usual choice of what to to wear to gigs is combats (for the pockets), some sort of top, and a long-sleeved t-shirt - the last means you don't get cold on the way home, but it can be unobtrusively tied round your waist when you're bounding about. I own around four long-sleeved shirts, one plain, one with a hazchem warning on it, and two assorted flavours of NMA. So around 50% of the time at gigs I'm wearing an NMA shirt... Yes, this does mean I sometimes go to NMA gigs wearing an NMA shirt - however I have a Good Reason and thus it's not obsessive in the slightest :)

So - is it rude to turn up advertising a completely irrelevant band ? I don't think so. Though you do get some strange mixtures, sometimes.

Black coat, white shoes, black hat, cadillac.

Guess who I'm going to see this evening ?

Comments

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Bands themselves like to advertise their influences through t-shirt popaganda. Even the most egotistic don't wear their own shirts.

[condign.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to conquer the 'always mentally wearing a Helen Lovet-shirt' image. Must be very difficult in the shower.

[deeteeuk.livejournal.com]

Rancid!

I know what you mean about the obsessive look of wearing a band t-shirt to their gig.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

There is something very uncool about wearing a band's t-shirt to their gig. It's a bit like trying too hard - 'look what a big fan I am!'.

Back when I was a teenager and therefore cared about these things I also felt that it was uncool to wear a t-shirt of a band who were too famous or too popular. I felt the most cool points could be scored by wearing a t-shirt of the most obscure (yet still credible) band you could find. A bit like t-shirt chicken, as if the band are too obscure, then of course you score no points because noone had heard of them. You had to affect not to care whether anyone had heard of the band. But then not caring is the heart of cool in any area, so you always have to affect not to care.

I'm so, so glad I don't care about these things any more.

[(Anonymous)]

We work in a company which thinks cool shirts have comments such as:

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

[ http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/ ]

_Any_ shirt which does not include such gems of wit must surely be Good.

--
ros