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most lopsided logo-to-music quality ratio
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64. Bad Religion, Cross Buster (found 1997)
Washed-out, already ragged with wear and belligerent from a hundred paces, the Bad Religion t-shirt fitted perfectly with the ill-formed political smuggery I wished to visit upon the Northern Irish seaside town where I lived in the early 90s. A town where I was an insufferably precise facsimile of Rik Mayall’s character from The Young Ones, or Student Grant from Viz. I was hoping for heated confrontation, and fastidiously prepared the surgically-precise wit with which I would demolish the brainwashed dolts whose bovine allegiance to the Sky Pixie marked them as lesser beings. All this would happen in front of GIRLS.
No-one was to know that the t-shirt had not been given to me by the band’s drummer (as a token of thanks for talking him through a bad mushroom trip). Nor had it been bought as a sentimental memento of some Michael Moore-esque pilgrimage across the American mid-west, stumbling between sweaty underground punk clubs and fledgling music festivals still in their freshman year. The t-shirt didn’t come from a black-market imports and rarities stall, a rickety-staired independent record shop, or a drunken moonlit clothes-swap at a European campsite. Hell, I didn’t even buy it from HMV. It came, in reality, out of the stuffing of a sweaty cushion in the flat I’d recently moved into. It was smushy, comfy, and had a logo on front that I would use to make a scathing statement on the millennia of oppression which churches had meted upon our goodly species ever since the first shaman waved a feathered stick.
Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, it was not to be. In this village of only two-thousand residents (but five churches) the unlooked-for reaction to the very visual message thermally bonded across my chest, was a secretive thumbs-up camaraderie. The internally-rehearsed spiels damning the malicious influence of organized religion – the abuse of confessional secrecy, the ignominy of the burqa, the humiliation of the caste system, the persecution of Palestinians – found no outlet. I was, with delightfully apt irony, preaching to the choir.
What I did get, was something obvious and predictable. My failure to foresee it speaks volumes about my teenage need to be insufferably superior. To an initially friendly inquisition, which later turned mocking, I had no recourse, no rehearsed patter. I was neither informed, biased, skewed with the fervour of a zealot nor bolstered with the unassailable knowledge of the well-drilled proselytizer. I was simply without any applicable knowledge. Defenceless in the face of a believer’s faith, and fast becoming the object of a well-deserved mockery, the event left me chastened, publicly humiliated and stinging. Worse, it happened in front of GIRLS.
I met a Bad Religion fan.
Sean Keenan
