Fear band shirt vintage Black Flag Circle Jerks Dead Kennedys Descendents Germs

Description: Well, I spent a couple of hours recently writing one of my rather long, distinctive, often analytic and incisive "descriptions" for this particular item. I went into detail about the band and their place in punk rock history, as well as certain controversies having to do with some of their lyrics and stage antics. I woke up to find that the listing had been "flagged" for offensive content. I'm so tired of this (the same thing happened recently with a Dead Kennedys shirt). Let's be clear: if a seller describes something or someone as having offended others--this doesn't mean that the seller himself is being offensive. Does anyone from eBay--a human, perhaps--actually read these things? Or is it all just software scanning for "policy violations"? Does context even matter anymore? (Do humans even matter anymore?) What follows is the original text (which I was thankfully able to save)--with any wording that could possibly be construed as offensive--redacted: You've been wanting this for a while, haven't you? You've been wanting this particular shirt, in this particular color, for quite some time. I know I have. For some reason, these are unusually hard to come by, which is why I was so stoked to have found this one, even if it isn't "vintage." (Look at it like this: it'll be vintage someday, and since we have the licensing documented here, it'll always be "authentic.") Put this puppy in storage for a few decades and it'll be worth big bucks, but in the meantime, it's just a dope ass shirt. I probably discovered Fear from watching Repo Man--to this day, my favorite film of all time. Around the same time, though, I would see their performance footage from The Decline of Western Civilization (my favorite documentary). They were a fantastic band with many iconic songs ("Let's Have a War," "I Don't Care About You," "I Love Livin' in the City"), no doubt about that, but were they in fact [redacted]? It kind of depends on how you look at it. Like any group of musicians, they crafted the "stage persona," both individually and as a group. Derf Scratch was the funny one, often telling jokes between songs (my personal favorite: How many punks does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Twenty: one to hold the ladder, one to screw it in, and 18 on the guest list). Philo Cramer was the crazy one (sort of like Bob Stinson, he'd sometimes don a dress and act drunker than he probably was). Spit Stix was the quiet one, manning his drum kit like a fighter pilot, playing faster than most drummers could imagine, yet with more precision than the average surgeon (Stix was to drumming what "Ice Man" was to flying jets: ice cold, no mistakes). Lee Ving, the front man, was--is--a very talented songwriter, lyricist, and performer. He was also kind of a [redacted]: a [redacted] who wasn't above manhandling a woman if she taunted him enough. Now, any talk about [redacted] and/or [redacted] in the context of punk rock does require some contextualizing; because there's both a temporal and a cultural context to both the individual and collective personae when it comes to a band like Fear. One must keep in mind that "performance art" was, to a large degree, integral to the punk scene, particularly when it was nascent (think Iggy pop smearing peanut butter on his chest, or Siouxsie Sioux sporting a [redacted]). There was always a satirical aspect to it: an irony that the artists trusted us not to misread. The single best example of how Fear "performed" as a band was captured by Penelope Spheeris in the aforementioned doc, Decline of Western Civilization. Here you can see "vintage" Fear, riling up the crowd, taunting them with insults, baiting them. It's mostly Ving, with the other members (with exception of Stix) acting like proto "hype men"--adding color to Ving's inflammatory commentary. This was what they were known for. The "act" was that the band despised their audience, who in turn distained them. The degree to which this was true is clearly questionable: the band needed fans in order to make a living, no matter how meagre; and the fans paid to see them, didn't they? It was a total performance. So when that spiky-haired young woman, briefly featured in Spheeris' doc, begins spitting at Lee Ving before lunging at him aggressively, we can hardly begrudge him his (somewhat contrived) reaction: that slow, stagy-looking swing that fails to connect. This was what everyone, including her, expected (and you can see that she's smiling and laughing throughout). That it escalated into a brief melee was also to be expected, and though there was a chance that someone could've gotten hurt, the temperature was brought back down by the stage hands--also, as expected--and the show, as they say, went on. And I think it's important to remember, also, that everyone knew that the cameras were rolling (a disclaimer was read aloud prior to each performance)--which undoubtedly added to the theatrical antics of the "actors" involved. Now, as for Ving's casual deployment of [redacted] slurs--this is much harder to defend, only to say that it was a different time. When you see Lee Ving interviewed nowadays, he seems more like a "mello" old man. I don't know if he's ever been confronted directly about the more offensive aspects of his "stage persona" (he probably has), but I suspect that he would chalk it up to "just playing a role"--or something to that effect. Whether or not we'd find that satisfactory is obviously up to the individual; but I think it's important, particularly in today's cultural climate, not to make too much out of these things. It was nice that the Beastie Boys issued a formal apology to their fans, but did we really need them to? How many times have I been alone in my car, listening to "Let's Have a War," mindlessly singing along: "Let's have a war/give guns to the [redacted]"? Probably more than once. Does that make me complicit? Perhaps. But then again, aren't we all? *Incidentally, this is the second shirt that I've listed recently for a band that was permanently banned from Saturday Night Live, the other being the Replacements. It's also the second time that I've neglected to mention anything at all about the item itself--again, the other being the Replacements. Make of that what you will. Now, if any humans out there should find any of the above to be offensive, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. Thank you.

Price: 69 USD

Location: Westwood, Massachusetts

End Time: 2024-08-09T13:50:20.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD