Originally published at: The next time you are bored in a public place, play the "T-shirt game" | Boing Boing
…
10 Likes
Through the years, looking at random people (of all ages) wearing the famous Ramones t-shirt always makes me wonder about the percentage of true fans among them. I guess some of the celebrities in the article below could be fans.
I am a fan of the Ramones; I have cassettes, vinyls and CDs, but it just so happens that I don’t own a Ramones t-shirt.
11 Likes
NEVER underEStimATE the
AWESOME FURY of a
SAGittaRIUS kraftwerk fan
BoRn in 1978.
Fuck no, wrong star sign. Not even close.
9 Likes
T that says “My other beer is bourbon.” Um, no. Who even came up with that?
Presumably somebody who drinks both beer and bourbon.
As a drinker of both beer and bourbon (which is a kind of distilled beer), I would. . .well, probably not wear that shirt. But it could fit me. (Depending on the size, I guess.)
3 Likes
Thanks for the idea - this will be worth remembering and trying with family along.
On a different note, how about creatively modified t-shirts of this type?
4 Likes
A couple of decades ago in a large Southeastern city I used to play “Yankee? Not a Yankee?” in Publix.
6 Likes
Meh. I don’t see any value in gatekeeping fandom. Maybe people just like the shirt even if they’ve never followed the Ramones on tour in a van or whatever. I used to wear Oakland Raiders stuff when I was a teenager because some part of me knew they were cool but I had never seen a game. I may not have even known they were a football team. But I liked the style of the clothes. Judge me if you want.
13 Likes
It’s been a long while since I scrolled around T-Shirt Hell. Amusing but I can not believe anyone would wear one in public.
3 Likes
I was once given a t-shirt that said something like Backwoods Air Guides and provided a “since” date that was earlier than powered flight has existed. I used it as a night shirt.
2 Likes
I wear a lot of band tee shirts, most of which I’ve actually bought at their gigs, plus a few I’ve got included with a CD release. It’s also almost a law that real fans never wear a band tee to one of the band’s concerts. Unless it’s a very old tee and the band have reformed.
I also wear mountain biking tees and shorts, having been a biker for years. Arthritis in my knees and hands has stopped that for a while, though.
And I do look at the sort of tees that others wear, and quietly roll my eyes and think, ‘really?’
2 Likes
I think we live in different Michigans.
5 Likes
I have three sections of T-Shirts:
Band shirts - half of them KMFDM
Star Wars Shirts - 90% of them Boba Fett
Misc Popculture or humor shirts.
4 Likes
3 Likes
I worked back stage security at one of the venues on their reunion tour, does that count (I srsly do not like this band, though)?
5 Likes
Five year old me would have loved that. We had a copy of Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park on VHS in the house. That was the beginning and end of my knowledge of Kiss, but I was a fan.
2 Likes
I used to work at one of Atlanta’s largest restaurants, which was attended by tons of normies, during the peak of the Ramones t-shirt trend. my millennial coworker expressed disbelief when I told him about how the only person who had a Ramones t-shirt during my entire high school tenure was my school’s lone real punk, and only because he got it from one of their concerts. me and other punk-adjacent kids would have had them but they just weren’t available. I did draw the logo onto my pair of Chuck Taylors, though.
4 Likes
And how do you know that Shania Twain is not a fan? Because of the genre of music she makes? Would you have believed that Big Boi of OutKast was a huge Kate Bush fan, because he’s a hip-hop artist? It’s not like the Ramones are some super-sekret underground band… they are one of the best known examples of punk music that is well-known outside of punk circles. They are in the R-n-R HOF, the exact opposite of punk rock, if you ask me… it’s not like they’re Cipher or GLOSS or even Teen Idols or Bad Brains… They never even pretended to be interested in maintaining some underground status only for insiders…
Also, you know what’s REALLY punk rock? Demanding that people remove their ad-blocker to access your content!!! p4nK R0Ck, MOFO!!! /s
It’s mostly to keep icky girls out of their super-sekret punk rock club!!! Everyone knows girls can’t be REAL punkers! They can only be eye candy!!! /s
8 Likes
When I first came to LA in the late 70s there was a place that sold new T-shirts in lots of 3 or 5 for almost the same price as a typical new T. They must have got bought excess stock from custom shirt printers or something, because most of the shirts promoted obscure businesses, conventions, bowling leagues, and the like. The nice part was that most of them were silkscreened on good-quality shirts. They lasted forever. And it was fun to know that you were probably the only person in town with a Sterling Tool and Die Pin-Smashers shirt.
We made the mistake of ordering from a mail-order catalogue some years back and we’re pestered by them to this day. Many of them have several pages of “funny-saying” T shirts. Alongside the expected dog/cat/kids jokes there is always a group of shirts seemingly aimed at stereotypical “rednecks.” They include macho gunwaving, patriotic cliches, bragging about excess drinking, and misogynistic jokes that barely skirt the edge of “adults only.” There has to be a market for these things since they keep appearing in otherwise general-interest catalogues. I must say though that I’ve never seen anyone actually wearing one, even in casual photos of MAGA nut events.
