“Cuz I’m the Klaus Dinger that’s built to last / if you fuck with me, I’ll put my foot in your ass.”
This T-shirt was on an audience member at last week’s Faust show at Union. Sitting at the bar, I stared at it longer than I meant to; it seemed to hold a secret about my hometown, Los Angeles. Did this apparition signify that someone in Berlin, say at an X show, had on a Guru Guru shirt emblazoned with a blue circle and the face of Darby Crash? Was some Rastaman, clad in a Burning Spear tee decorated with green, gold and red Black Flag bars, watching Fear play in Kingston? Or had my gaze penetrated the veil of space-time itself, uncovering the very matrix of the hybrid musical forms LA has played Luther Burbank or Dr. Moreau to since the days of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Beck, whose Mr. Potato Head permutations of genre traits heralded the inevitable, depressing combination of everything with everything else? Had I, in short, trespassed into forbidden realms of knowledge? Was one man’s motorik indeed another man’s Poison? Was I really paying eight dollars per beer?
By the next morning, these questions had lost their urgency, if not their poignancy. But my matchless Google-fu led me to the creator of this thing straightaway: an LA-based retailer called Skim Milk. They also sell a T-shirt with a picture of Roky Erickson and G.G. Allin busting a hang, a detourned DEVO tee that spells “DEBT,” and a sweatshirt depicting a hit of blotter acid that looks like the American flag—unless it’s really a tiny American flag that looks like a hit of blotter acid—at rest in a young woman’s mouth.
Personally, I wouldn’t go back to Coachella for 100 million dollars, but if this N.W.A. reunion comes off, people are going to lose their shit when Hologram Eazy E-Musik comes onstage to sing “Neuschnee On Ya Chin.”
More after the jump…
