If you've ever stood in front of your cupboard gnashing your teeth about which tee-shirt to wear - the Coldplay ringer or your maketradefair.com number - this Christmas all your problems have been solved. Introducing the Whatever It Takes range of teeshirts, clumsily designed by rock stars, with less than ten percent of the sale price going to some damn charity.
We adore rock stars for their ability to write songs that touch us in our special places, or at least facilitate the gyrating of such. We do not admire them for the doodles they scrawl on the back of bar coasters. Yet the Whatever It Takes organisation has decided that people will wear anything even vaguely related to their favourite acts, regardless of how amateurish it looks.
These are the big guns. Chris Martin has scribbled a conspicuously Justice 'D.A.N.C.E' clip-inspired cross (or plus sign, judging by the "positive" addendum below) comprised of rainbow crayon scrawl endorsing love, chocolate, U2, football and music, among other common and proper nouns.
Previously cool cat Dave Grohl contributes a sub-preschool drawing of a demon and the vaguely motivational phrase "Take life by the horns." Here's hoping that the buck-twenty generated doesn't go to the Foo Fighters-backed Alive & Well – a baffling organisation that insists HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
The Darkness have chipped in as well, producing an illustration of a guitar, which is probably the most creative thing they've ever wrought on the public. Gwen Stefani's effort is shamelessly promotional – merely a Love.Angel.Music.Baby item that her fans can actually afford. The Killers drew a stereo. The Neptunes drew a flashy car and a house, adding a scribbly necklace to the teeshirt. Slash drew a stick figure of himself. Brilliant.
It may seem churlish to denigrate musicians for offering admittedly very little of themselves for the benefit of charity. It's just that the underground trumps the mainstream once again. The same art/charity deal comes from the Quebec's
Yellow Bird Project, with better bands and better designs.
Contributing to Yellow Bird effort are The National, Devendra Banhart, The Shins, New Pornographers, Bon Iver, Broken Social Scene, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and even our very own Holly Throsby and Wolfmother. It's like an indie Threadless, rather than an embarrassment to the idea of calling all musicians "artists".
Bon Iver's effort recalls Stanley Donwood's cover art for Thom Yorke's
The Eraser. The ex-graphic design students in The National produce a series of discs in an eye-crossing fluoro Venn diagram. Throsby's cute bird escaping a bottle is as endearing as her elfin tunes. King Creasote creates a kitsch retro accordion. The teeshirt for Canadian indie-poppers Stars featured a winsome watercoloured tiger listening to vinyl and dreaming of, well, stars.
It might be tiresome to assume that indie acts with invariably produce something cooler than megastars, but this quick comparison bears it out. Also, one hundred percent of the profits from Yellow Bird tees go to their nominated charitable organisations.
If I wasn't obliged by the family to chip in for a village full of pigs this Christmas, I know where my festive buck would be going.