"Snow flakes make your bones ache in winter." - The Jayhawks.

In our opinion, the importance of iconography (or what we suppose would be called "brand building" nowadays") to connecting a band to an audience can't be overstated. For example, our cousin's Dead Kennedys t-shirt, with the welded together D and K logo, provoked instant fascination from us when we were kids. Of course, when Nine Inch Nails dropped the megaton bomb that was Pretty Hate Machine, the NIN (picture the second N reversed, natch) logo prompted much puzzlement and speculation among the mainstream kids and parents and just about everyone. Another similar example is the S superimposed over the inverted T that comprises the Suicidal Tendencies logo. When we attended high school ST's Lights, Camera, Revolution! hit the racks and directly preceding it and for an entire school year thereafter a group of punker kids took the liberty of spray painting ST's name and logo all over school grounds. One thing helped defuse the ominous aura of the ST logo: The overzealous fans who were graffitiing their props for the band weren't the best spellers. Often times the words "Suicidal Tendencies" would end up on a wall as "Suicidal Tendendencies" or "Suicidle Tendencys." Everybody, including the school newspaper, had a good laugh about that. Often when we were kids powerful band iconography, be it the previously mentioned logos or the smacked-out cover art for the Jane's Addiction records, suggested to us that a band's music was going to be too extreme to be palatable. But that has never been the case: ST was just a metal band by the time Revolution!! came out; Jane's first record, the live release on XXX, is probably the straightest rock record they made (save for the spine-tingling closer "Chip Away," of course); Never Mind the Bollocks was tame compared to the filth and fury we had contrived in our head prior to hearing the record; and on and on and on. We don't know if there is a bigger message here. We do know you can download ST's "You Can't Bring Me Down," a hot rocker from Lights, Camera, Revolution!

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You can skip Pfork's well-conceived leveling of the new Weezer record and click right to CRM's infographic. Special bonus interesting content from Pfork today: An interview with the last original Ramone.

More info on The Texas Governor. An interesting profile here. And here is the band's MySpace page, which we can't remember if we posted previously. And an old, good piece about the Elevator Drops.

Brighaaaam likes Yello. The Bster likes Yello. We sense a trend.

That is all.