Late last summer as I sat at a red light near the Ouachita river, a painted sign at the base of a utility pole caught my eye. It was so bizarre I pulled over to take a closer look, the more I looked, the more this sign intrigued me.
It appears to be a stencil. The image portrays a white male in a black suit and tie, he is wearing shooter’s ‘earmuffs’ and holding a shotgun, or perhaps a rifle.
In bold black letters, the words ‘Ghetto Blaster Hunting Club’ circles the picture.
This is NOT a picture taken outside Rick Perry’s Hunting Camp
As the months passed the sign sat on that corner and on my mind.
What did it mean? What was the artist thinking when he or she painted it? Is it something plastered there by my local Ku Klux Klan or is this Ghetto Blaster Hunting Club street art representing a gang?
Is it some type of guerrilla art, the work of a enterprising urban street artist, a graffiti tagger?
For that matter, do they even still call them taggers? I’m so uncool…
So, employing my crack investigative skills (I googled ‘Ghetto Blaster Hunting Club’) I learned… not much.
There is a link to a blog by renowned Monroe artist Jason Byron Nelson (Flowers in the Attic) – http://gutterpark.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/dont-f-with-the-gbhc/- he wrote it after spying the design around Monroe and linked a few pics of other locations where the GBHC could be found in our neck of the woods.
Then a guy who goes by the handle of Anthony Turderken, he has a Flickr account – http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonyturducken/ – anyway the mysterious Mr Delicious Poultry Dish posted even more pics of the GBHC… logo? Design? Painting? Tag?
What is it? I dunno, maybe that’s why I can’t get it off my mind…
Whatever it is, my liberal streak made me see something racist at first glance. We all seek our own comfort level when confronted with something new and I saw this sign and my first thought: RACISM!
But as I grew used to the picture, and driving past that corner several times a week I had lots of time to get used to it, I started to wonder if my knee jerk reaction was naive’?
Somehow I doubted any of our local Klanners or Neo Nazis could be that artistic.
This is the corner, it’s a block away from the Louisville Bridge in West Monroe, at the intersection of Cypress and Mill streets.
A commenter on Jason Byron Nelson’s blog called the sign a, ‘gun-toting, sharply dressed Quentin Tarantino icon’ and that is close, as good a description as any, no?
For some reason, when I consider potential sources for the Ghetto Blaster Hunting Club, the shooter’s earmuffs (the headphones the man is wearing) keep tickling something in my subconscious.
That small detail, more than anything else leads me to believe the GBHC is something churned out by a professional designer, or a very talented amateur, I can’t explain why, I just don’t think anyone with malevolent intent would be so meticulous about details.
But maybe I’m being naive again, after all Hitler was a decent painter and still found time to be history’s most notorious mass murderer, so maybe GBHC is the work of a racist local artiste’.
What do you think?
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jennifer barnett
March 13, 2013
here in Houston it is on almost every street corner, overpass, or building and goes by the name of street art!
griffinscott
March 13, 2013
Really?!? Take a pic for me JB please
betsy holmes
April 30, 2014
That’s the dumbest shit I’ve heard lately. They’re just trying to get a rise out of somebody and obviously it worked.