Shirt Stains: Shirt And Ernie
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
1-2-3-4-5! Five bad shirts! AH-AH-AH!
43% Spelling Errors
Dillinger Escape Plan may have gone to the great band boneyard in the sky, but we still have the bruises to remember them by. Oh, and we also have their shirts. Lucky us. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. This isn’t a Dillinger Escape Plan shirt. It’s a DLLNGR SCP PLN shirt. To pronounce it correctly, you either have to remove your tongue or butt chug Icehouse Light.
This shirt joins the inexplicable trend of writing out words in weird and unnecessary styles. Not including the vowels is right up there with TyPiNg LiKe ThIs or typ1n4 l1k3 th15. It’s annoying and dumb and I don’t like it. This is why our national literacy rate is now 7th out of 60. Well, that and public education being gutted in favor of garbage charter schools. Why remove the vowels? Did they not want to spend the money a la Wheel of Fortune? What do those symbols mean? Is it a message? A message from the future? It is! I think I can make it out. It means “We’re going to reform in a couple of years. Thanks for coming to our ‘final’ shows. See you soon.”
Miley Grin
Oof. Everything about this is grossly unnecessary and probably not 100% on the up-and-up. I was going to make some sort of joke that Chelsea Grin was the UK’s favorite tossers, but I just forgot that they’re from Salt Lake City. I probably should have remembered that since we’ve covered them in Shirt Stains before, but I’ll just chalk that up to my brain doing a little bit of self-preservation.
What are the odds that the band or their management had the rights to use Miley’s image? Slim to fucking none? How about showing a picture of Miley with horrible wounds across her face? [Ed. – The wound in particular is actually called a Chelsea Grin, otherwise known as a Glasgow Smile. It’s a wound popularized by gangs in Glasgow before being appropriated by English street gangs like the Chelsea Headhunters. That doesn’t make this design less skeevy, but it is a bit of an explanation]. Yeeeeeeah. And of course the band puts their name on the back of the shirt because they knew they were playing second fiddle to the pop star on their own merchandise. Is this some sort of “LOLOLOL ironic/not-ironic/post-ironic that’s popular with the kids of today. Like is it a “This is dumb, but I like it, but don’t let anyone know I like it” sort of thinking? I don’t get it, but according to a brief poke around the internet, these shirts sold out. Fingers-crossed it was due to being an incredibly short run of shirts since they knew they’d get the ever-loving shit screwed out of their gaping earlobe holes by Miley’s legal team. One can only hope.
Listen to Ri-orm
Oh, Ringworm. You’ve never really gotten your proper due. I’m not sure why that is exactly. A wide variety of metal fans seem to like Ringworm, and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone bash them. They’ve toured with well-established bands over the years, so they’ve reached different audiences. Who knows? I’m not blaming it on this shirt, but it definitely doesn’t help.
While it has become a bit overdone in recent years, I still enjoy seeing They Live get some love. It’s one of Carpenter’s most entertaining movies and the message still resonates today. That message doesn’t really translate to the shirt’s message of “Listen To Ringworm” when Ringworm is covered up. The designer recognized this issue and rather than reformatting the billboard or the alien, they just put Ringworm’s name on it again. Way to acknowledge the error and not fix it. That’s the American way!
GOtep To Your Room
Otep is certainly never one to shy away from speaking her mind, whether it’s music or politics. She even jumped in to razz Phil Labonte after Joe made him lose his mind. So this type of shirt fits right in line with her personality and attitude. All that being said, this shirt makes my heart cringe. I know I’m not the target audience for this shirt since I’m over the age of 18, but still. It’s this kind of merch that makes me not tell the average person I listen to metal. For every tender piece of musical composition and beautifully-crafted album art, we get something like this. The shirt manages to be “in your face” while somehow managing to be crammed entirely up its own ass.
Is that boney hand missing the rest of its fingers or are they all just small and nubby? I like the fashionable-yet-meta skull bracelet. It really helps separate it from other dumb shirts with skeleton middle fingers on them.
Dezja vu
Wait. Time out. Hold on a second. I’ve seen this shirt before. For Coal Chamber’s sake, the same stupid Dez Fafara design is used for two shirts. We already covered the first one here. I guess his run for president didn’t go so well. Is this shirt pro America? Anti? I get the sense that I’ve already put more thought into this shirt than the designer, printer, marketer, and Dez himself. Maybe I’m expecting too much from someone who wrote “Big Truck.”
