About 11 years ago, I wrote a little rant here about an online concern called Do You Remember Tees, an outlet that sold t-shirts emblazoned with the names and iconography of many long-vanished nightclubs, from the widely celebrated to the comparatively obscure. I had a bit of an issue with that, as I expressed here:
Personally speaking, I'm not sure how I feel about this venture. I mean, I love the notion of preserving and celebrating these places, but it kind of gets back to the whole notion of whether you should be wearing the t-shirt of a place you never actually went to. I mean, here in 2013, as much as I cherish my own memories of, for example, seeing bands at The Ritz, sporting a crisp, brand-new t-shirt with the Ritz's old logo on it seems a bit disingenuous. Beyond that, I don't think many of the places ever sold t-shirts to begin with, but that's a pedantic quibble at the end of the day.
Suffice to say, I never bought any of their stuff. I doubt my sniffily disparaging post had anything to do with it, but the link to Do You Remember Tees went offline a while back and, as far as I can tell, that business is no more.
Cut to 2024 and along comes DEFUNCT, a similarly inclined venture as Do You Remember Tees, hawking t-shirts and coffee mugs with the names and logos of more since-vanished New York City clubs, bars and record stores, and I have many of the same nagging reservations. I mean, in this instance, not only are they offering t-shirts splashed with club names like The Ritz, Danceteria and The Palladium, but also several shops I held quite dear like Rocks in Your Head and Rebel Rebel and some dear-departed bars like Chumley’s and Lucky Strike. While, yes, I was a huge fan and regular patron of all those businesses cited above (devoting a laborious number of posts to each one of those spots here on this stupid blog), the whole thing just feels like a shallow rip-off. I have no recollection of Rocks in Your Head ever selling t-shirts, but I’d sincerely wager that, if they did, they sure didn’t look like the ones on offer here. I can guarantee you that Danceteria never sold friggin’ coffee mugs.
Maybe I’m being the gatekeeping “Name Three Songs” guy that I’m entirely capable of being, and maybe I’m making much ado about absolutely nothing (I mean, at the end of the day, ….t-shirts, coffee mugs …. It’s all just stuff), but the whole thing just reeks of (obvious) inauthenticity.
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