Some band artwork is so simple that it just stands out. Some bands prove that you don’t need anything complicated or fancy to really create a great logo. For today’s Iconic Logos, we are taking a look at Bad Religion and their Crossbuster logo and how something so simple can last for years. Let’s take a look…….
Anybody who has even caught a glimpse of this band’s artwork has seen this logo. It’s pretty much everywhere and every single piece of this band’s merch that I own has this logo. It’s so simple yet so familiar at the same time. I have no doubt that when parents first saw this logo it definitely pissed them off. I mean, even now sometimes when I’m out and about wearing one of my Bad Religion shirts, some people will give me a weird look because of that very logo.
Back when the band was first starting out guitarist Brett Gurewitz drew it on a piece of paper, showed it to the rest of the band, and the rest is history. In the documentary Along The Way, bassist Jay Bentley said the following “Brett made that when we were fifteen years old. Brett came up with a piece of paper and said, ‘Look at this!’ and, and we all laughed and said, ‘That’s really funny,’ ’cause the concept of taking that symbol and putting the ‘no’ thing on top of it was just … it seemed shocking enough and good enough, because it represented … sometimes people took it that it represented that we were like Satan worshipers and that we were not liking God, but it was more against, in America, is [sic] there’s too much TV evangelism, of, you know, ‘Send me monies and God will love you’, and it’s like [scoffs]. So that was, at the time, that was very popular, when we were starting, so that was one of the, one of the things that we still hate the most, is having to pay to be saved in some, like, ridiculous … you don’t need that. You don’t need anybody to tell you that you have to pay money. So, that was one of the reasons why we did that, and it’s just … it’s one of those things that, it happened and we took it and, maybe … it was a really easy symbol for kids to spray paint and it’s an easy symbol to put on a shirt and, so, it became, maybe, bigger than what it really was in the beginning. It was just, it was something that we liked and we thought that it would piss our parents off or something, you know? And then, when the records came out it just came everywhere, and so then everyone said, ‘What does that mean? What does that mean?’
Whatever you want it to mean, you know … you decide.” Personally I am a big fan of the Crossbuster. It’s simple it pops and it definitely pisses off the self-righteous Christians. Any logo or icon that does that is absolutely perfect and the fact that this band has been around for as long as they have and can still draw that kind of reaction means that they’re doing something right.
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