Celebrity Fuck-Ups: Missed Opportunities to Co-Opt Metal Culture
Dear Celebrities: If you were born after 1989 and you leave your house wearing anything but a metal shirt, you are a colossal fuck-up and you deserve to wilt in obscurity.
I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but it makes me puke every time your garden variety Channing Tatum appears in a photo op wearing some popular metal band’s shirt. And you know what makes me puke twice as hard? Every time your garden variety Channing Tatum appears in a photo op not wearing some metal band’s shirt.
Example: Here’s America’s sweetheart, Taylor Swift, wearing a vintage Iron Maiden baseball T while carrying a kale smoothie in one hand and some kind of miniature alien creature in the other. Followed by a photo of her NOT wearing a vintage Iron Maiden baseball T for some unimaginably stupid fucking reason.
What a wicked game these young celebrities play, taunting metalheads all over the world by appearing in public one day, ostentatiously decked out in popular metal brands that do not need any more exposure, only to appear the next sans metal merchandise ostentation. Make up your minds, famous kids! Are you or are you NOT metal as fuck?
Because there is a deep, essential truth that every true metalhead learns the first time the badass riffs of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest or Skillet graze their lilywhite ears: Either you wear a metal shirt every fucking day of your metal life or you go back to your normie clothes and listen to . . . Kylie Minogue or whoever the fuck.
In fact, if you are not wearing a metal shirt as you read this–even if you are not a celebrity–you need to go and put on a metal shirt RIGHT NOW. For those of you self-respecting metalheads who had the self respect to put on a metal shirt before leaving your bedroom this morning, celebrity or not, come along and help me heap opprobrium and vehement derision upon any and every celebrity who dares pose for the paparazzi without some desperately ironic piece of metal merch clinging to their person.
THE OFFENDERS
1. ZACH BRAFFRON
Here, we see young Zachary posing on the set of Fast and the Furious XVLLMX: Sluggish and Not Especially Furious Anymore, bare-chested and shirtless as the day he was expelled from the artificial uterus which spawned him. Why isn’t he wearing a Metallica shirt, a Slipknot choker, or a Coal Chamber underarm merkin? I don’t know either.
And here is the tanktop Zach’s publicist should have coerced him into wearing:
The improvement to Zach’s social status, desirability, and overall index of chic irony is much improved, is it not?
2. MORRISSEY
We’re not here to debate the hotness of this young Englishman’s bod. This hotness of this bod is clearly beyond debate.
You know what else is emphatically beyond debate? The fact–the fact–that this bod’s hotness would be multiplied by several million factors of 10 with just a suggestion of metal cred.
See? Sooooooooooo much hotter. You feel that? That is the humidity index in your general vicinity rising by several million factors of 10 because YOU ARE NOW IN HEAT.
3. ONE OF THE KARDASHIAN KIDS
This young whippersnapper looks acceptably dashing, I guess, in this non-metal-themed cashmere pullover . . . I mean, I could see how you would think that if you were a TOTAL FUCKING PLEB.
But no one who reads the Toilet is any manner of pleb, total fucking or otherwise. You know better. I know better. This young Kardashian clone-thing should know better. How can we fix this atrocity of the banal?
Regardless of the boxy, scratchy, unflattering fit of this Gildan metal T–and regardless of its glaring bootleg quality–it makes all the difference. If you didn’t believe before that this little rugrat was capable of stabbing acclaimed Mayhem founder Fenriz to death over a record contract dispute, YOU DO NOW.
4. FLANNERY O’CONNOR
This young socialite (or whatever she’s famous for) showed up to a red carpet event wearing . . . well, basically nothing. Nudity, even if it’s only 1% partial, is not cool anymore. Nudity is soooooo, like, third quarter 2016. Nobody wears nipple tape anymore.
You wanna show your adoring masses that you respect yourself and love your body? Here’s how:
5. ONE OF THE CULKIN KIDS
This brave little debutante thought she could cure racism with a toxically sugary and lethally addictive Pepsi product. Coke tried the same thing in the ’80s. It was cute back then. Now it’s just oblivious. And the worst thing about it is that there is something missing. What could it be?
Oh yeah, here you go. The mind-blowingly transparent and cynical ad campaign totally would not have backfired if the young Culkin had worn THIS instead:
6. JUSTIN BIEBER
Remember when this pubescent Canadian heartthrob tried to cash in some edge cred by filming a hedonistic music video in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest? That didn’t work out too well for him, did it?
His problem isn’t that the whole endeavor was too crass. He just failed to follow through and maximize his edge, like so:
7. CANYE WEZT
Genius:
Geniuser:
8. BLACKTHONY WAVETANO
And finally, we come to perhaps the most notorious, the most ubiquitous of these young and inexplicably famous people who only see fit to leverage the prestige-inducing power of metal culture when some Facebook algorithm tells them it is cool to do so. Look at this first screen cap. Do you want to listen to anything this little ankle-biter has to say? Do you want to subscribe to his Youtube channel? No, no you don’t.
How about now?
Yes, now you want to like his videos and contribute to his Patreon account so that you, too, can bask in the glory of THAT BLACKWAVE LIFE.
Did you like this article? If so, please tweet harassingly at your favorite celebrity every time you catch them in public without a piece of level-upping metal merchandise in sight. If not, do nothing and sleep soundly in the knowledge that you are PART OF THE PROBLEM.
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