This one is a bit of a personal rant.
And I’ve had to rewrite much of it to avoid sounding like an angry boomer.
When I was in my teenage years and early 20s, I wore band shirts with ripped jeans and, yes, my hair was past my shoulders for some of it. Part of the metalhead culture. Still a metalhead to this day, despite appearances.
We were in full swing back in 2008.
And in 2026, I still own a fair few band t-shirts.
For every gig (concert) I went to as a youngster, I bought a t-shirt (I was young and not a Minimalist.)
Eventually, I had to radically declutter and gave many shirts to several friends. I still wear a few (Tool, Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd, Opeth and The Beatles.)
And these are bands I love – really love. Trust me, I can talk for hours about them.
Something weird happened. I noticed people stopped wearing the band shirts – the Metalhead community sort of diminished. Maybe I somewhat left the culture behind when I switched things up for polo shirts and chinos.
(Note: the Metalhead sub-culture it is still very much a movement – up the Irons!)
In recent times, I would intermittently see people wearing band t-shirts. And I would go make conversation about the bands.
At a wedding in 2023, a woman was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt. I went up to her and struck up a conversation about the album Animals. She looked completed caught off guard, as if I was talking backwards in Latin. Then she confessed she did not know who the band were and simply liked the shirt.
Conversation killer, right?
Another time, someone was wearing a Slayer shirt at the pub. Ale in hand, I went on a speech about Seasons in the Abyss; the bloke shrugged and said he just liked the song Raining Blood, after hearing it on Guitar Hero. And that was as far as the conversation got because I went to drown my despair in humanity.
This type of behaviour winds me the fuck up. For several reasons.
Because wearing these band shirts has become a form of fast fashion. It has become popular. It has become something that is the hip thing to do. People like the t-shirt, not the music. And quite often, we would use a word for this in my heyday.
A poseur.
But doesn’t wearing a band shirt arguably promote the name of the band?
*sighs*
Truly promoting the band is listening to the music, seeing the band in concert if you can, and learning to understand the nature of their genre. Once upon a time, it involved owning a stack of CDs by the artist – if anyone remembers what those were?
One of the reasons I have always liked metal music its dynamic sounds; the misunderstood genre(s) that actually accommodates everyone. Many people will not be aware of a band unless they see the shirt, but hearing the sound is a completely separate matter. (Go watch an Opeth or Dream Theatre in concert and understand what I mean.)
So, when you wake up in the morning and decide to wear a band’s shirt, make sure you are wearing it because it firstly gives you joy, but secondly, you understand what that band represents.
Some bands have questionable ideologies (looking at you, Burzum). Some have said some very stupid things in the past. Some have written some bloody awful songs over the years. And some went completely off the rails and fallen into the deep blue sea.
I think we can all think of some examples.
My point stands – know what you are wearing because it speaks about you, just as much as you want it to speak for you. It will tell others where you stand – and in the case of not knowing the first thing about Pink Floyd when you wear one of their shirts – a fucking idiot.
Wearing band t-shirts with zero awareness is not hip or fresh.
It means that you are using time to earn money, to spend the money on these material items, in order to impress people, you don’t know, in order to be proven to be an utter moron when a true fan of the music confronts you.
It’s pathetic.
Stop it.
Ta,
Charlie