The media-propagated notion that the Canadian sextet Fucked Up is
“saving hardcore” seems silly — I’m not even convinced hardcore
needs saving. (Who’s put it in peril?) The equally widespread
conjecture that Fucked Up has made hardcore “safe” for indie kids is
downright asinine. Although the band’s rendition of hardcore punk is
more diverse and ambitious than the standard, it’s also spiritually,
politically, and sometimes physically more confrontational in a manner
so reflexive that it is, in fact, very dangerous to
everyone‘s sonic complacency, regardless of what T-shirt you’re
wearing.
The members of Fucked Up themselves have denied that they’re saving
hardcore. They have claimed to be making it “more palatable” to
indie kids, but they were mostly joking.
“We said that tongue-in-cheek, just ’cause of the attention we
started getting from indie scenes,” says guitarist Gulag, aka
Concentration Camp, aka Josh Zucker, over the phone from his home in
Toronto. “We started working with more indie artists, just because we
wanted to try different things. The punk scene is really
inward-looking, so you get a lot of flak when you start working a bit
outside of it. Our response to that is to look at indie people at our
shows and pretend we’re making it more palatable to them. Now we revel
in having a foot in as many scenes as possible.”
Gulag and lead guitarist 10,000 Marbles, aka Mike Haliechuk, planted
the germ that blossomed into Fucked Up in 2001 when they got bored with
self-publishing a punk/lit ‘zine and redirected their moxie into a
band. Gulag was designated lead singer, but during a summer of hopping
trains he was replaced by Pink Eyes, aka Damien Abraham, and reassigned
to guitar.
For a band that has cultivated a reputation for bat-shit insane live
performances, Fucked Up has been scrupulous with its studio endeavors.
Its first full-length, Hidden World, didn’t appear until 2006,
though it had released at least 25 singles by then and have had many
more since. Gulag credits this to an appreciation for the aesthetic and
practicality of seven-inches. It also took a while to amass the
resources needed for a record on the scale of its beyond-awesome second
LP, The Chemistry of Common Life, which sports a whopping
seventy instrumental tracks (many of them layered guitars). Gulag says
they’ll shoot for two hundred on their next full-length.
Chemistry is oblique enough to confuse and upset purists, but
there’s an unswerving, corrosive upheaval that’s undeniably hardcore. I
challenge anyone to listen to “Twice Born” without feeling a compulsion
to floor-punch.
The mystical concepts batted about in the band’s lyrics have the
same energy and anarchy as the music. Some are pure abstractions, some
explore Gnosticism, some are morbidly fascinated with Christianity.
Gulag: “The spiritual, political, and historical influences are this
pastiche of ideas that we’ll get fascinated with, so we use them as
inspiration.” Of course, in true hardcore spirit, some songs suggest
that there’s actually nothing that can save us — not even Fucked
Up (even if it did save hardcore). “We play with those spiritual
currents as a way of writing about wanting to believe in something
bigger than the reality we’re experiencing, living pretty material
lives.”
