IF ONE COULD TEACH THEM TO THINK IN A NEW WAY THEY WOULD ALSO LIVE DIFFERENTLY
(Message on reverse of sleeve)
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| Sleeve - Front |
DYD Interpretation Pt 1 (To be continued)
Like 2011’s David Comes to Life, Dose Your Dreams, the fifth record from incomparable Canadian hardcore omnivores Fucked Up, is a heavily conceptual album. It is staggering in both scope and stretch.
But where David Comes to Life was the portrait of the artists as a young band, Dose Your Dreams is Fucked Up’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce’s masterwork, it’s a dense and sprawling text marked by intricate nuance and complexity. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative is so stuffed with characters and tangential ideas that it should really come with footnotes.
(Indyweek review)
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| Towers: The jumping off point of more than one story. |
FOOTNOTES # 1.
A Prologue: High Rise / Tower on Time
—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
—Yes, my love?
—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
The doors swing open (our hero enters, the happy office worker, his time fully filled by a fulfilling job. David is not named, but his familiar presence is felt in his straightforward delivery, apparent misplaced enthusiasm and the sense his happiness is fleeting. Mircea Eliade (David's mum) suggests this might be because repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence.) and the smell is back, (recalling the way David perceives things in The Other Shoe: "Love the smell but I hate the taste")
One deep breath in
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| High Rise |
Our Father
Was looking through old zines in the name of research, but the Damian file got knocked off a shelf and landed in this random pile:
It all looked a bit too much like something a movie psychopath might decorate their grimy basement space with, so we tidied up, organised the evidence and archived them in four crime scenes. Please hit the links below to take a look:
Cheap Tricks
Remember that time some nerd asked Brian Walsby to make a couple of sleeves for test pressings?
Brian made this 'Damian Jug' one for "Dangerous Fumes", the nerd liked it a lot but thought it was pretty random...
... then, years later he noticed this Cheap Tragedies 7", and realised that far from being random, it was based on the same 'Jonestown' image as the Dangerous Fumes 7" it's actually haliechukien in its appropriateness.
Even more not randomly, Brian cunningly avoided any copyright concerns by being the artist who did the original image for Cheap Tragedies
Here's Walsby's artwork for the Nerd's Hidden World TP - the nerd loved it and thought it kind of made sense - the David Comes To Life 'mask supper' in the top right seemed particularly apt and the other song titles are on there and maybe the comic book layout was an Invisibles ref and the layout of central circular piece with radiating lines could have be something to do with the Sun - but what the hell was the angels bit in the bottom left about??
Years later, the nerd found this
The Poisoned Arrow
Updated Feb 2019
When I was a boy, Fucked Up would release info / teasers for upcoming LPs in one convenient place. Nowadays, you have to scan multiple sites, picking up snippets like a lot of tasty aperitifs. That's great, but it's difficult to keep track of everything. I prefer things in the equivalent of a family bucket, with indigestible fries, (and pictures, obvs) so that's what this is.
This album is about the freedom to live, to dream, and to make new dreams come alive in our real lives, which have been fed over to the forces of greed, social media, reification, consumerism, and social media. I can still remember when there were other dreams to be had. We read fantasies and history and the adventures of those who came before us, the failed romantic revolutions, and the struggles to make something different. I made this record to remind people that all those dreams are still up in the air, and that it’s up to any of us to grab one and make it real. You still get to have your own dreams and you still get to live your own life, in this era where social media and phones vie for our attention and take away all our time and put our emotions and relationships under lock and key and into shining little boxes, where we are more connected than ever, but more alone. Where we live in a world led by those so afraid that their only dream was to make money, and to make sure everyone had the same dream, those who would scold us, and make laws against us, and send us to work and to school, to shoot us and kill us and to lock us up and distract us, and kill us, forever. We remember other dreams, and we remember when living in other ways wasn’t just a dream. FUFB Jul 23
The drama unfolds like a miniature world of many parts being explored, a map being illuminated, location by location.
As with David Comes to Life , there is a story here. David—who once came to life—is now indentured to a desk job. David meets the elderly Joyce who closes his eyes, opens his mind, and sends him on a spiritual journey. David embarks on his own metaphysical odyssey. He sees a stage adaptation of his own life. He speaks to an angel in a lightbulb. He sees an infinite series of universes as simulations within simulations. Meanwhile, Lloyd—Joyce’s lover—was sent, decades ago, by Joyce on the same odyssey, but was lost in the void. Lloyd seeks to be found and reunited with his lover. Where will David end up? Will Joyce and Lloyd be reunited?
Dose Your Dreams—meaning: treat your dreams as you would a dream, allow yourself to be lost within them, allow them to open your heart and your mind, enjoy them as you would a drug. Reach out for my hand and pull me close. Owen Pallet Aug 15
Dose Your Dreams covers -- take a deep breath -- time traveling, anarchy, simulation universe theory, love, existential doubt, self-sabotage, suicidal urges and inescapable corporate culture.
“That's the Dose Your Dreams thing. Everybody has a dream of how the world should work, and certain people and certain companies make their dreams come true,” Haliechuk opines. “Unfortunately, the people that try the hardest to make things happen, it seems their only dreams are about making money and selling things to you.” Billboard Aug 15
“Raise Your Voice Joyce”, the first single from their fifth studio album, the sprawling odyssey Dose Your Dreams. The A-side, an exclusive single mix of the album track, concerns Fucked Up’s perennial hero David as he encounters the revolutionary sorcerer Joyce Tops, set to an incendiary Buzzcocks-inspired stormer that features backup vocals by Jen Calleja of Sauna Youth. The B-side of the 7-inch is a cover of Anna Meredith’s “Taken.” Merge
When I was a boy, Fucked Up would release info / teasers for upcoming LPs in one convenient place. Nowadays, you have to scan multiple sites, picking up snippets like a lot of tasty aperitifs. That's great, but it's difficult to keep track of everything. I prefer things in the equivalent of a family bucket, with indigestible fries, (and pictures, obvs) so that's what this is.
This album is about the freedom to live, to dream, and to make new dreams come alive in our real lives, which have been fed over to the forces of greed, social media, reification, consumerism, and social media. I can still remember when there were other dreams to be had. We read fantasies and history and the adventures of those who came before us, the failed romantic revolutions, and the struggles to make something different. I made this record to remind people that all those dreams are still up in the air, and that it’s up to any of us to grab one and make it real. You still get to have your own dreams and you still get to live your own life, in this era where social media and phones vie for our attention and take away all our time and put our emotions and relationships under lock and key and into shining little boxes, where we are more connected than ever, but more alone. Where we live in a world led by those so afraid that their only dream was to make money, and to make sure everyone had the same dream, those who would scold us, and make laws against us, and send us to work and to school, to shoot us and kill us and to lock us up and distract us, and kill us, forever. We remember other dreams, and we remember when living in other ways wasn’t just a dream. FUFB Jul 23
The drama unfolds like a miniature world of many parts being explored, a map being illuminated, location by location.
As with David Comes to Life , there is a story here. David—who once came to life—is now indentured to a desk job. David meets the elderly Joyce who closes his eyes, opens his mind, and sends him on a spiritual journey. David embarks on his own metaphysical odyssey. He sees a stage adaptation of his own life. He speaks to an angel in a lightbulb. He sees an infinite series of universes as simulations within simulations. Meanwhile, Lloyd—Joyce’s lover—was sent, decades ago, by Joyce on the same odyssey, but was lost in the void. Lloyd seeks to be found and reunited with his lover. Where will David end up? Will Joyce and Lloyd be reunited?
Dose Your Dreams—meaning: treat your dreams as you would a dream, allow yourself to be lost within them, allow them to open your heart and your mind, enjoy them as you would a drug. Reach out for my hand and pull me close. Owen Pallet Aug 15
Dose Your Dreams covers -- take a deep breath -- time traveling, anarchy, simulation universe theory, love, existential doubt, self-sabotage, suicidal urges and inescapable corporate culture.
“That's the Dose Your Dreams thing. Everybody has a dream of how the world should work, and certain people and certain companies make their dreams come true,” Haliechuk opines. “Unfortunately, the people that try the hardest to make things happen, it seems their only dreams are about making money and selling things to you.” Billboard Aug 15
Time-Travelling Indians
Badarayana thinks the Joy in Joyce is a reference to ananada
the substance of Consciousness which emanates the material world - he also thinks the DYD sleeve shows this happening in a way that references comics?
Lloyd in the Void:
Daedalus had so cunningly made the Labyrinth that he could barely escape it after he built it
Time-Travelling Shamanarchists
This is here because
- FU recommended a Tao Lin book that smells like DYD spirit,
- Tao Lin recommended 'banned' TED Talks,
- This banned TED talk has a definite eau de DYD,
- It also has a faint aroma of smoke blown on to pages of Chem Com
- Leaving a lingering Nile Silt aftertaste
(They're not really banned, just tucked away out of site and framed as lunacy)
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