Gultchy Amore managed to piss off the entire KC punk scene. Or, more accurately, a loud little corner of it.

It started with two pictures. One was an AI image Gultchy made that riffed on a T.S.O.L. design. He told Jack, the singer of T.S.O.L., about it. Jack said it wasn’t his design and he didn’t care. The other was a fake flyer for a fake Drug Apostles show at a ridiculous place, with fake bands on the bill. The Drug Apostles don’t play live. That was the joke.

Gultchy posted them in a KC punk Facebook group without realizing how strongly some of its DIY crowd felt about AI. They let him know. One person said the work wasn’t fit to wipe their ass with. Fair enough. Nobody has to like a picture. Gultchy tried to talk about it, acknowledged their concerns about AI and its environmental cost, and explained that he makes his own designs too. These two were something he’d thrown together for a laugh.

The insults kept coming, so Gultchy started giving them back. He compared one guy’s image to an unsolicited dick pic. The guy didn’t appreciate the review. An administrator suspended Gultchy.

What that administrator didn’t know was that Gultchy had already talked with the group’s creator, who had offered to make him an administrator. Gultchy told her he’d been suspended, waited it out, and came back. Then he got suspended again. The creator wanted to be fair to everyone, so she didn’t immediately restore his administrator privileges, but she did let him post.

He posted again. The crowd came back again. By then, it felt like hundreds of people were lining up to have a go at him, and Gultchy was answering as many as he could. All this over a T-shirt image and a flyer for a show that didn’t exist.

As the argument went on, some people suggested he should have paid somebody to make the flyer. Gultchy explained that he’s disabled and lives on a fixed income. Paying a designer for a joke flyer wasn’t an option. Apparently that answer wasn’t good enough.

And that was the part he couldn’t get over. Gultchy came up in punk when you made your own clothes, your own flyers, and whatever else you needed. He still enjoys doing it and lives by it. The Drug Apostles’ motto is “by any means necessary.” Sometimes that means trying a tool just to see what ridiculous thing you can make with it. If you counted up the art connected to the band, AI would amount to a couple of images on the website. Gultchy makes his own designs too, and he thinks you can tell the difference.

He also saw some hypocrisy in being told how to do DIY by people who appeared to buy their buttons, patches, and safety pins. He didn’t know where every person got everything they wore, but looking at their Facebook pictures, he doubted they made it all themselves. To Gultchy, telling a disabled guy on a fixed income to pay someone else to make his fake flyer was a strange place to draw the DIY line.

Despite all the fighting, the group’s creator thought the joke was funny and had allowed the posts to stay. Gultchy eventually took them down because the whole thing had gone far enough. That didn’t end it. People kept passing around his shirt image, asking, “Would you wear this shirt?” That was practically Gultchy’s joke in the first place. Someone put their own band name over his design, so he made a design for them. Suddenly, using somebody else’s image wasn’t so funny.

Then some of them turned on the group’s creator. She had seen Gultchy acknowledge his part in the fight, and she didn’t think the pile-on was fair. She paused the group for a week. When it reopened, people started making pictures of her and talking about her by name. She got fed up and shut the group down.

That group had been a useful place for DIY punk in KC. It’s a shame it ended that way. Gultchy knows he fired back and made the fight bigger. He also knows the whole KC punk scene wasn’t involved. It was one group, with a few people who seemed very comfortable dishing it out.

Gultchy even got hate mail afterward. He talked with one of the people who sent it, and they changed their mind. They offered to buy Gultchy a beer if they ever ran into him.

Gultchy would still talk to anyone about what happened, as long as they’re willing to talk like people. Until then, the fake show remains canceled, the shirt remains controversial, and another chapter of pissing people off is complete.

sorry not sorry love and kisses

Kansas City’s The Fall-Offs have pulled off something remarkable. Their songs sound familiar the first time you hear them. I mean that as a compliment, mostly. Four tracks of punk rock that know exactly where they came from and seem perfectly happy to stay there. Check them out.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvNaPMCeEw

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