[LEMONS]
12.30.2005
An Iconic Image Is All That Stands Between A Lifetime in Topeka and a Fistfull of Squid Shoved Into A Legendary Orifice
I was riding the 7 Haight the other day, sitting in the row of seats up in the front of the bus that face sideways. The cranky-old-Chinese-lady-with-a-sack-full-of-pistachio-nuts seats. Five or so people can sit side by side in these seats, and as we got to the intersection of Divis, a teenage girl and her mom got the bus on and sat down next to me.The girl was wearing big-ass, old-school headphones, straight out of 1983, with a Rolling Stones sticker on the earpiece. My first thought, which naturally was God, the Stones suck now, was immediately followed by two others: Oh, right, irony and then man, that is one iconic logo.
And after a brief and depressing digression in which I pondered how hip kids in San Francisco are, and whether that's a good or bad thing, I began to think about band logos.
Remember when any band worth its drug habit had a logo? The Stones, Kiss, AC/DC, Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, Public Image Limited (the PiL), Ozzy, The Ramones, D.R.I., Van Halen, Maiden, Public Enemy, The Doors, The Beatles, Priest, Zeppelin, Metallica--logos were mandatory if you wanted to rock the fuck out. Back in the day, you couldn't even call yourself a band until you had your own font. Even Prince had a logo. Kind of.
But I can't readily recall any band's logo I've seen in the past, oh, fifteen years or so. Aside from maybe Weezer, which is such an ironic, Halen-esque kind of logo that it doesn't even count. I don't like condescending W's.
Sure, a lot of metal bands still have logos these days. But when was the last time you heard a new good metal band. I mean, yeah, yeah, I read John Darnielle's blog, too. And okay, Leviathan is the new Kind of Blue, or whatever, if you say so. I wouldn't be the one to ask.
But I don't remember seeing any of their logos on the back window of the Camero parked next to me at the 7-11 lately. And besides, they all look like bastard children of Spinal Tap. Fuck you and your latter-day umlauts. I remember when a simple schwa e stenciled on a drum kit was enough to get you banned from Young Life.
Where have all the band logos gone? You'd think, with as many bootleg copies of Photoshop as there are out there, that we'd be living in a golden era of rock band logos. What happened? Don't these people know Goopy?
Dio!
What about fucking Dio!?! Now that was a goddamned logo.
Show me an American male between the ages of 30 and 45 who grew up in the suburbs and I'll show you somebody who spent hours at the mall staring at a Dio album upside down. Unless he was afraid to rock, that is.
Obviously, another part of the problem is that it's pretty fucking hard for a band to be evil these days. Remember how evil everyone used to think Ozzy was? In the 70s and 80s he was the stuff of urban legends. But then we all grew up, and now you can see him in re-runs on MTV shuffling around the house in his jammies. And Rob Halford's gay, now, for crying out loud. Or, I guess maybe he always has been, but now he's going around telling everybody. And, okay, sure, I guess it's technically possible to be both evil and gay, but come on. Years of stereotypes involving floral arrangements, hair salons and house music don't exactly translate into Hell Bent for Leather. Or, well, maybe they do.
Oh, and on another note, the Strokes are gay. And all you idiots who like them are gay too. Not good gay, like Rob Halford gay, but gay in a bad way. Gay in the pejorative sense.
But back to what I was saying. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that virtually every evil band that rocked a sweet logo eventually turned into congregations of elderly, balding, pompous jackasses who charge $90 for a lawn ticket. Or maybe logos just fell out of fashion. I don't pretend to know.
But I do know that what I'm hoping for in 2006--aside from an end to war and poverty and seeing George Bush dragged off to federal prison in handcuffs--is more band logos.
Happy New Year. Rock out with your Wok out.
Üpdätë: For more scholarly, better thought-out takes on the same subject see these excellent posts by MacDara Conroy and Tom Vanderbilt. The latter posits
The disappearing logo might just be the canary in the coal mine signifying the dematerialization of music. Sure, there are little JPEGs on iTunes that depict album covers, but the proliferation of digitally acquired music and the rise of “playlist culture” is a threat not only to the idea of an album as a coherent body of work, but the album (in CD or whatever form) as a package. The shift from album to CD represented meant the artist’s canvas was reducing in size to less than a quarter of its original, and now, to essentially nothing.
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