A$AP Rocky’s upside-down flag
Imagine the scene. You’re a young rapper who goes by the name A$AP Rocky. You once pretended to be President John F Kennedy to Lana Del Rey’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in a music video. You’ve made the American flag a part of your personal brand, using one as a prominent stage backdrop on tour, cloaking yourself in one on your debut album artwork and appearing in front of one on your debut mixtape’s cover. By the looks of it, you love American symbolism.
The next logical step would be to co-design a T-shirt that depicts an upside-down American flag on the chest, flanked with – cliche alert – an anarchy symbol on one of the sleeves, right? Unsurprisingly, that didn’t go down so well, particularly over Memorial Day weekend. Turning the American flag upside down is code for a sign of “dire distress” and is only meant to happen in the most desperate of circumstances. Wanting to sell a shirt at PacSun doesn’t count, unfortunately, and the clothing store learned that the hard way when they were inundated with disgusted social media comments.
Patriots need not fret: PacSun took down links to sell the shirt and will be pulling it off the racks in their stores. As for A$AP, he’s said nothing about the controversy on social media at the time of writing. Whether the design was a comment on the state of police brutality in the country, or just an attempt to be edgy, it’s been a PR disaster.
Worth firing your merchandise manager over? No, because technically this tee was carried by PacSun.
Burzum’s church-burning wares
There’s nothing quite like a spot of arson and murder to keep your band in the limelight. Kristian “Varg” Vikernes’s one-man Norwegian death metal act Burzum has more than enough skin in the controversial merchandise game – maybe it’s the best way to stay in the headlines when people aren’t writing or talking about your music.
In 2014, UK retailer Sports Direct had to remove one of the band’s T-shirts from its stock because it depicted the ashy remains of one of three churches that Vikernes had been charged with burning down in 1992 (he denied those charges). Oh, also this is a guy who served 16 years in prison for killing one of his former Mayhem bandmates and was convicted of inciting racial hatred in 2014 so maybe we could have seen this T-shirt recall coming.
Worth firing your merch manager over? Yes, although the whole convicted murderer thing lowers people’s expectations so much that it may not matter.
Kanye West’s confederate flag T-shirt
Kanye’s Yeezus tour boasted masked performance, loads of Jesus iconography and that old American classic: the Confederate flag. To avoid dragging back you into your high school history classroom, that flag – which, when its design fills an entire rectangle is actually the army of Tennessee’s battle flag – was linked to the Southern slave-dependent states’ confederacy during America’s Civil War. For many people today, it smacks of racism and white supremacy and when hung over a bar or in a restaurant is a sort of short-hand for a place that the average black person from America’s north might not want to step into.
So, of course, Kanye put it on a tote bag. He also put it on a T-shirt, and wore it draped over his shoulders and on a sewed-on jacket patch. Remember, post-Yeezus Kanye does not care about your feelings and will rile people up in order to make money. Sorry, I meant to make art. Using the so-called Southern cross in this way was obviously meant to be a way for Kanye to reclaim its significance, but maybe that’s better suited to a bachelor’s degree thesis than what looks like an Ed Hardy t-shirt.
Worth firing your merch manager over? No, but worth a tiring talk about why this isn’t that interesting a gesture.
Iceage’s pocket knives
In 2012 Danish punk band Iceage flogged both knives and locks of their own hair at gigs. This was all before people started to think that they were neo-Nazis for a variety of reasons in early 2013 (they’re not, just to be clear) so may have offered up good practise for dealing with PR nightmares.
But hindsight’s 20/20 and at this point in their career, the four young Danes seemed happy to sell custom-designed pocket-knives on their merch table. To be fair, they did preface the sales with a “no stabbing” note. That would hold up in a court of law, surely.
Worth firing your merch manager over? Yes, if someone was actually stabbed.
Emmure’s Columbine shooting T-shirts
Frankie Palmeri, of metalcore band Emmure, pissed off a lot of people with a few of the T-shirt designs he offered up on his Cold Soul online store. Similarly to Kanye, he seemed to want to use shocking imagery to draw our attention to the fact that we’re all mush-for-brains sheeple blindly falling victim to the pitfalls of political correctness. Or something.
It’s hard to know what else inspired him to design a shirt featuring the now-infamous CCTV photograph of the Columbine high school shooters in their cafeteria, before they killed scores of their peers and then turned their guns on themselves. In case that wasn’t enough, Palmeri added the message “shoot first ask questions last” to the back of the tee and also designed one featuring a screengrab of Edward Furlong’s neo-Nazi character from film American History X blowing smoke in a black man’s face. Needless to say, it didn’t take long before Palmeri decided to take down the merch.
In his own words: “The shirts were made to be offensive. They were made so people would remember harsh realities. To say that they reflect racism or bigotry of any kind though, is absurd.” Stop, Palmeri. Just leave it.
Worth firing your merch manager over? Yes, although in this case it looks as though Palmeri was in charge of this decision. Can someone fire themselves?
JLS condoms
Shortlived, manufactured UK boyband JLS made a brief foray into the contraceptive market, in a move that none of us deserved to witness. Guys from boybands tend to look so smooth that I’d imagine they’d slip from your grasp like a bar of soap, so picturing them in a sexual situation just feels like more of a logistical hassle than anything else.
That didn’t stop the boys releasing a line of condoms in 2010 – following in Kiss’s footsteps, maybe – and inviting a few breathless blogposts from female-focused publications. Though this feels more weird than controversial, it earns a place on the list nonetheless for its major cringe factor.
Worth firing your merch manager over? No – ridiculous as this was it was all in aid of a charity promoting safe sex, and that’s pretty hard to knock.
