Then they came for our T-shirts … but why stop at Joy Division, Sussan Ley?

It was only a matter of time before the woke brigade came to cancel our band merch. According to Liberal leader Sussan Ley, “at a time when Jewish Australians are facing a rise in antisemitism”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Joy Division T-shirt went down at Sydney Airport this week like a lead zeppelin.

Sorry, too soon? The Hindenburg disaster, as depicted on a billion Led Zep tees, was no joke. As Ley indignantly implied during question time on Tuesday, neither is a band name “taken from a wing of a Nazi concentration camp where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery”.

That’s kind of the point. Rock is like that: provocative, ironic, often purposefully dark. Joy Division, a late ’70s Manchester band renowned for their austere beauty and profound sense of existential melancholy, is no more an endorsement of antisemitism than Cannibal Corpse, the American death metal band, is for eating dead people.

As a former spiky-haired, dog-collared punk rocker, Ley surely knows that once you start picking at worrisome threads on your Sex Pistols, Slits, Napalm Death or Dead Kennedys T-shirt, pretty soon you’ll be wearing nothing at all.

She may have had a more substantial bone to pick if DJ Albo had rocked off that plane wearing Kneecap merch: the Irish rap insurgents’ rhetorical reclamation of IRA violence is pretty much their whole schtick. Similarly, while he might still brave a generic Midnight Oil number, he’d probably decide against the explicit sloganeering of, say, Beds Are Burning, lest he reinflame the temper of a recent, unfortunately divisive time.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for that innocent Eskimo Joe hoodie, banished to the “colonial anachronism” drawer alongside your dad’s Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys heirloom. The Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) and Lady Antebellum (now Lady A) truckers’ caps might be salvaged with a flick of a sharpie, but nothing can remove the stains from that Barenaked Ladies tea towel.

In the age of opportunistic cancellation, the minefield had grown vast and unpredictable. If Albanese had worn a Pink Floyd shirt, he may have been creatively accused of algorithmic theft. That ubiquitous T-shirt legend was scraped from two unsuspecting bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, without consent or data-usage agreement.

AC/DC and Iron Maiden, collectively responsible for more T-shirt sales than Cotton On, are no less politically sensitive in the wrong light. The former, once shorthand for bisexuality, is a culture war waiting to dawn: surely too binary for the gender-fluid age and too queer-coded for their blokey heartland.

Maiden’s most famous fan of the moment is Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, a former heavy metal drummer keen to lean into the “Iron Lady” image. If she’s worth her salt as a fan, she owns a dozen tees with monster Eddie the Head wreaking satanic havoc, but the one quoting Iron Maiden’s Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter might best sit this term out.

The wardrobe risks in the age of outrage are endless. Emerging from a ministerial aircraft, would a Crowded House T-shirt be howled down for insensitivity to the housing crisis? Would a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds stubby holder fuel agricultural outrage in drought season?

The Police, The Church and Suicide are all timeless brands at the mercy of the news cycle. Savage Garden sounds like a colonial metaphor, The Killers a police inquiry, The Saints a breach of church-state separation. What began as rebellion shrinks to risk management. The endgame here is a plain white tee that, come to think of it, has its own racial connotations.

The truth is that rock culture has always trafficked in incitement, irony and theft. It’s a collage medium: half the names, riffs and slogans we cherish began as bad jokes, grim puns or borrowed blues lines. The moral purity test came later, when social media trained us to parse everything as confession or manifesto.

The point here is not to mock Sussan Ley for caring about history. It’s to note how irresistible the performance of offence has become. Outrage has gone bipartisan. The right polices symbolism with the zeal once reserved for the left, while the rest of us scroll the wreckage, half-exhausted and now, to be safe, half-naked.

Michael Dwyer is an arts and music writer.

Ausmusic T-shirt Day, a fundraiser for the music industry charity Support Act, is on November 27.