Here’s a promotional hoodie for The Get Up Kids. I was never really into them, but I have to give them made props for the recent comments they made about the scene:

“Honestly, I don’t often think about the state of ‘emo’. The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It’s like glam rock now. We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us. If this is the world we helped create, then I apologise…If a band gets huge and they say we inspired them, great. The problem is most of them aren’t very good. What does that say about us? I don’t know. Maybe we sucked. We at least can play our instruments.”

Buuuurrrrn! Go cry in a corner, emo kids.

Up in Boston this weekend, The Beach Boys played a free concert. I didn’t make it out from Cambridge in time, but I was naturally inspired to see what kind of merch The Beach Boys offer. Like with any other band, they have a healthy selection of promotional T-shirts, but their offering of promotional apparel does not stop there. Just look at this branded jacket! Since these jackets are not made anymore, it will definitely set you back a pretty penny– almost 90,000 of them, to be exact.

I haven’t spoken to my younger brother all summer because he’s been taking classes upstate, but he texted me this weekend to say he was going to a Wilco concert. Even hundreds miles away, he knows how to push my buttons and make me jealous. Typical. Anyway, I haven’t spoken to him since, so I don’t know what they offered merch-wise at the show. I headed over to Wilco’s online store, and they have a pretty impressive selection– including a whole eco-friendly category. They have aluminum water bottles, seen above, in addition to tote bags and even bamboo shirts. It’s nice to see bands that make an effort to lessen their impact on the environment through merch!

The annual Vans Warped Tour is currently going on (today the tour is in Boston) , which is a huge deal for fans of the emo-ish music scene. My friend’s sister went over the weekend and she came back with a promotional T-shirt, but it seems that’s not all they’re giving away. According to the Warped Tour website, fans in Boston can go to the Vans tent and say “Lobster Bob” to get free promotional sunglasses or playing cards. That’s a good move for Vans since Warped Tour typically attracts a younger crowd and there’s nothing teenagers love more than free stuff.

Death Cab for Cutie randomly came on my iPod yesterday, and it was certainly a blast from the past– I haven’t listened to them since high school. I had a navy blue promotional T-shirt from their album Transatlanticism that I cut up and decorated with patches and stuff. I wore it a lot, and I tried to find it to take a picture and show you guys, but it seems as though I got rid of it when I went away to college. Lame. So I tried Googling the T-shirt itself, so you could at least see what it looked like in its original form, but I couldn’t find an image on Google either. Double lame. So instead here’s a picture of a t-shirt from their current merch offerings– not really my style, but I like the cookies. Just looking at them is making me hungry.

TV on the Radio is playing at Prospect Park next month, so in my anticipation I decided to Google- search what they offer as far as merchandise goes. Like every other band in existence, they do have promotional T-shirts, which I bring up in just about every post, but TV on the Radio also offers another band merch staple that I often overlook: the promotional button. Buttons used to really be my thing; they’re cheap, so I’d buy a few at every show I went to. They served as a unique way to customize my bag– even in high school I only really carried around tote bags, so the buttons were a nice way to liven them up. TV on the Radio has some nice ones, so maybe I’ll resurrect my old habit at their show in August.

I’ve been on a huge Dylan kick lately, so I decided to head over to the online store to see what the man offers merch-wise. I was impressed! Above is the Bob Dylan promotional laptop bag, which I thought was pretty significant considering the man had his heyday long before desktop computers were a household norm, let alone laptops. The store also carries personalized belts and bandanas, which maybe isn’t so rare, but the creme de la creme of unique merch on this site was a promotional manicure kit. I kid you not. Kind of a weird product for a hippy folk singer to be peddling.

Promotional keychains have long been a staple in the world of freebies and merchandise, so I’m not surprised to have finally come across one. This Kings of Leon keychain is nice– stainless steel with a built-in bottle opener. Can’t go wrong.

With the untimely death of Michael Jackson last week, many are trying to capitalize off the late singer’s popularity and his fans’ grief. Promotional T-shirts like the one above are popping up, and older promotional merchandise is popping up on eBay with jacked up prices. It’s a little bit sick. The man was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt– it would be nice to see if some of these companies that are producing new imprinted apparel donate a portion of the proceeds to his kids to ensure that they’ll be taken care of.