How is this for a shirt description of a bootleg. Sellers please take note…
This auction is for an incredibly rare and hard to find Raid shirt, size large. The front features their classic logo over the phrase “ABOVE THE LAW,” whle the back features an excerpt from their classic anti-vivisection/hunting song “Cultured Sadism” in yellow ink:
Tears of blood, fears of another day,
maintain a life of relentless pain.
Be it vivisected in a test for vanity
or toyed with for a profit motive,
these victims of a crime in cruelty
have no voice in which to speak and their freedom is our responsibility.
And we’ll take it by the means necessary.
Hands off the animals.
(Cultured Sadism, 1990)
Raid were in some ways one of the most influential hardcore bands of the 1990s. They started back in ’88 or ’89 as just another straight edge band (although from Memphis, Tennessee) but then discovered vegetarianism through Youth of Today. This was followed by the band’s adoption of veganism and the Hardline ideology of Vegan Reich. They combined this ideology with heavy, intense, metal-influenced hardcore, directly influencing Earth Crisis among others, thus paving the way for the entire ’90s vegan straight edge scene. Along with integrity they were one of the first bands to play really metal-tinged hardcore, opening the door for the metalcore genre, for good or (in my opinion) for ill. They also significantly helped to popularize the Hardline ideology; without Raid, the idea most likely never would have gone much further than Sean and whoever he got to be in Vegan Reich with him. This obviously had a huge impact on the hardcore scene at large.
This shirt was printed back in 1996 by Maurizio (Er Vegan), at the time of Surrounded Records and soon of the now-legendary vegan straight edge band Purification. He made these because Raid had only ever made a very small handful of shirts and these were impossible to come by. He printed a very small number of these, mostly for his friends in the Roma Straight Edge Legion but also for other vegan straight edge folks in Europe and the US. I have personally never seen anyone else with one of these shirts anywhere.
I hate to part with this shirt, especially since it fits me rather well, but I haven’t worn it in a few years and it feels stupid to let it just sit in my closet untouched. The real catalyst for getting rid of it is that I’m moving in the not too distant future, and I need to get rid of all of my shirts that I no longer wear and music that I no longer listen to if I want my back to survive the move in one piece. So my bad back can be your good luck, since these shirts never come up for sale. Good luck!
This shirt is very rare, out of print and unavailable.
BID HARD!!!
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