Many of you know Barry Bonds stays in the news because he holds the record for most career home runs in Major League Baseball, and a lot of folks assume he’s been juicing for years. Never mind that the MLB has known ballplayers have been using steroids for a long time and never did anything to discourage it or that it’s never been proven that Bonds ever used steroids – a lot of baseball fans, particularly white baseball fans, hold a distaste for Bonds so rancorous, you would think he was Dick Cheney, Jeff Skilling, or someone who did some truly evil shit – not a professional athlete. (Huh? What do you mean there’s more apathy than hatred for Cheney?)

So Marc Ecko – who made his fortune selling urban fashion, with best-selling brands like ecko unlimited, G-Unit, and Avirex all a part of his empire – won Barry Bonds’s record-breaking homerun ball in auction with a bid of over $750,000. Populist that he is (I say that sarcastically), Ecko created a website where people could vote what to do with the ball, and the result was never really in doubt. The vote was as rigged as the presidential election was in 2004, and – surprise surprise – America voted to give the ball to the baseball Hall of Fame with a big fat asterisk stamped on it, to serve as reminder that while Bonds may have broken the career mark for homeruns, he cheated to do it by using steroids. You know, because guilty until proven innocent and all that.

Now of course a lot of older white folks – who had never heard of Marc Ecko, but whose kids have – are shitting their pants out of excitement that Barry Bonds will forever be remembered as a cheater in the HOF. I wonder if this will have an affect on the sales of clothes from ecko unlimited? I wonder if this stunt has anything in common with the fact that virtually all of the models on the ecko website are white for the first time like ever? Nah, probably coincidence.

But see, we shouldn’t really be surprised, I mean, Marc Ecko has sucked for a long time. You all may have seen a viral video that was going around the Internets a couple years ago of Marky Marc graffiti tagging the president’s plane Air Force One. Of course, it was fake and not at all tied to the impending release of the graffiti-based video game “Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.” (Remember folks, sarcastic.) He tried to play it like he was representing this pent-up frustration with the government that a lot of regular folks feel, but when questioned about the stunt, his true corporatist colors shined on through saying that not just anybody could pull off such a stunt, because “you have to be rich.”

Before all of this business – and I mean that in every sense of the word – took place, Marc Ecko was just doing his thing: exploiting clothing trends in Black urban communities, repackaging them and selling them back to those same communities he stole them from and selling them to kids in suburban mega-malls who assumed he was the trendsetter, not the trend thief.

It’s like he just gets worse and worse and worse. Maybe someone should set up a website to vote on whether we should continue to spend our money on his clothes or if we should start stamping asterisks all over them.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 7:53 AM and is filed under sorry, you suck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.