I made the arguable mistake of buying a t-shirt online for my son, not too long back. For whatever reason, he’s taken an interest in vexillology, which is the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags. Don’t ask me how or why he’s gotten into this stuff, but hey — better vexillology than vaping, right? In any case, I spied this t-shirt with a cool flags-of-all-nations design on it, which seemed right up his alley, so I bought it for him. He loved it and now wears it all the time. Yay, Dad!
The only problem, however, is now the social media algorithms have figured out that I like t-shirts. They already knew I liked bands. And because I paused at a knockoff XTC shirt on the same site I bought Oliver’s flag shirt on, I have been duly sussed out as a potential band-t-shirt customer. As such, whenever I’m whining about my sorry lot in life over on Facebook, I am besotted by ads and images of t-shirts to buy. Fair enough, I guess. I brought it on myself.
None of this is especially extraordinary, but one particular shirt keeps coming up, and it stirs my inner pedant no end. It looks like this…
Sure, Led Zeppelin were super-dupe keen on American blues, allegedly helping themselves rather liberally to whole songs by legendary bluesmen who, by comparison, never enjoyed the same variety of financial fruit from their creative labors as them Zepsters did. Led Zeppelin cannily adopted the swagger of the American blues, peppered their songs with lyrical allusions to Chicago, California, Honolulu and certainly made very emphatic whoopee with many a comely American girl during their legendarily decadent world tours. Whole books have been written about that … some involving fish.
But here's the thing -- Led Zeppelin were British. British to the BONE. The surviving members all live in England. They’re not an American band. They’ve never been an American band. They’ve always been British.
Put simply, this shirt's design is vexillologically compromised. Like so many other things here in 2020, it's a goddamn lie.
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