A Letter From the Editor

This article is taken from VICE magazine, v29n3: THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.

About a year ago I started seeing the signs everywhere.

Tattooed on the arms of teenage drainers at dive bars in Warsaw and trance nights in London. Stickered on toilet cubicles in Brooklyn and Berlin. Worn on hoodies by pouting Ukrainians raising money for war casualty prosthetics and taped to the bedroom walls of mephedrone addicts in Tbilisi. Plastered in graphic wraps across the car bonnets of boy racers and chosen as the emblem for a shopping precinct in Walsall, for some reason. Just last week, a friend of mine even had a run in with the signs on a quiet suburban street near to where he grew up, a “life before your eyes flashback,” he called it, prompted by the sound of a lone and unseen guitarist murdering a song from his youth on a practice amp escaping through an open window.

The barn owl. The mascara-leaking Ohms eyes. And most of all the white pony. 

I don’t really believe in signs. But 30 years is a long time in showbusiness, and somehow both VICE and Deftones are still here. So why not make a magazine about it?

The Be Quiet and Drive Issue is ‘about’ Deftones, in a loose sense. But more than that, it’s about the dents they’ve left on the culture—and how the world has flowed around and through them, as one of the few enduring constants from the mid 90s. Whether it’s playing their music on a bar jukebox until we get attacked, documenting outdoor sex parties in LA, or asking why sad kids are still using Deftones tattoos to signal to each other three decades on from the band’s first album.

If you don’t like Deftones, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re wrong but there still ought to be something for you here. And if you find that there isn’t, maybe just roll the magazine up into a tube and cry into it.

Thanks,

Kevin Lee Kharas
Editor, VICE magazine

Read the cover story of this issue of VICE magazine—PRECIOUS METAL: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEFTONES.

This article is taken from VICE magazine, v29n3: THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.