Shirt Stains: Ride In Blood
Cycle Illusion.
Slayer has been creeping into the KISS/Misfits merch territory for some time now. Beyond the usual shirts, hats, banners, and the like, Slayer now sells swimming trunks, backpacks, leggings, and freaking rolling paper. We’ll get to all of those some day, I promise. Those are all deserving of our ridicule and scorn. Despite to specificity and overall ridiculousness of some of those products, they’re all relatively affordable. I may not personally want a Slayer skate deck, but it’s only $49.00. That’s not terribly expensive for a non-traditional piece of merchandise. It may seem silly to me, but it is fairly priced. Someone can use it for real or display it on their wall. The same can’t be said for the official Slayer bicycle currently being sold through Nuclear Blast’s website.
$749.99 for a Slayer bicycle. I’ll repeat that for those of you who just went cross-eyed, passed out, smashed your head on a table, and just woke up. $749.99 for a Slayer bicycle. Is it made of platinum? Is Kerry King’s beard hairs infused into the handlebars to give you a better grip? Did Tom Araya splash his ball sweat onto every seat? Did Gary Holy do the toxic waltz with it? I’m far from a bike expert, but $749.99 seems like a really high price. By being one penny off from $750.00 are we supposed to feel like we’re getting a good deal? Are we supposed to believe there’s a skeevy salesman at Nuclear Blast wearing a cheap suit saying “Look, at this price it’s a steal! I’m practically giving it away! A little old lady used to ride this bike to church on Sundays. Because I like you, I’ll give you the special clearance price and give the the undercoating for only $49.99!”
Don’t worry, though. If you can’t shell out over seven hundred dollars for a bike that barely advertises the band it’s promoting, you can just pay in Nukes. What are “nukes” you ask? Nukes are the points one can accrue from buying things off of the Nuclear Blast webstore. Spend a dollar, get X amount of Nukes and then use all those Nukes to buy something else. You achieve “Gold” status when you reach 30,000 Nukes. So how many Nukes does it take to buy the Slayer bicycle? 299996! That’s like “Quintuple Diamond” status. The best part is that buying the bike only gives you 6,000 Nukes. It’s like how they say a car loses values as soon as you drive it off the lot.
Why is this bike so expensive? I checked out the Huffy website because I was curious if bikes had sudden;y replaced currency in certain Third World nations and were all expensive as hell. Nope. All moderately priced and nowhere near the asking price for the Slayer bike. Maybe the description will give us some clues:
SLAYER Urban Terrain Bike The Slayer 700 is a speed machine built with shortcuts in mind! If you need to get around town in a hurry this is the bike for you. It is built for speed with a BMX soul. The Urban Terrain Bike will handle hopping curbs and cutting through alleys all day.
Nope. No help here. They want us to ride a bike that costs multiple nights in a good hotel through dank, piss-soaked and syringe-filled alleys. There’s no tassels on this bike. The wheel spokes don’t even form the Jagermeister symbol. Blood doesn’t spurt out of the seat in hilarious/mind-scarring fashion. It doesn’t automatically explode if you play Sum 41’s “What We’re All About”. We don’t even get a basket which is a real shame because I would love to see Tom Araya riding this bike with Kerry King in the basket E.T.-style. Or maybe the entire band riding a big tandem bike together. That’s worth at least a few thousand Nukes to see happen.
