“The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Solar Epiphany
I think life is the best idea anyone ever had - I want to pay tribute to it. A lot of people have wondered if Fucked Up became a religious band because we talk about god all the time, but thats not really the case - we are a bunch of people who don't believe in god but know that life would be a lot easier if we did. All the lyrics I write are about trying to find god in nature, like looking for these unexplainable and mystical processes that you can look at with a microscope, you know the memory stored in DNA, or the brightness of the sun - thats god I think and thats what's important for me to think about.
(The artist formerly known as 10K speaking about Chemistry of Common Life)
Scare Tactic / As One
Scare Tactic is where we can begin Jonah's story, for the purposes of this FU related discography. The band comprised Jesse Parker on vocals, Jonah on Guitar, Robert Parker (Jesse's younger brother) on drums and their friend James on Bass. The following quotes from Jonah are taken from email correspondence.
Jonah joined BSE in 1997 or 1998, the band later changed its name to As One, referencing the song by NYHC band Warzone. As One recorded a four song CD "No Less An Authority"circa 2000, then "sowhatifi'mafuckingdemo" during the winter of 2000. The demo was recorded in Jesse's basement, by his uncle and released on cassette.
Jonah: Jesse, Robert, and I were all in school together. James was their neighbourhood friend. The three of them were in a band called BSE and had been playing pop punk shows since a really young age. Jesse and I were in a history class together, he asked me to join their band on guitar. Our first "show" was at high school, opening for a German pop-rock band called "Die Sterne" who came and did a big outdoor gig for the student body c/o the German dept (who the hell knows why...probably something to do with Oktoberfest). The set was all covers.
Jonah joined BSE in 1997 or 1998, the band later changed its name to As One, referencing the song by NYHC band Warzone. As One recorded a four song CD "No Less An Authority"circa 2000, then "sowhatifi'mafuckingdemo" during the winter of 2000. The demo was recorded in Jesse's basement, by his uncle and released on cassette.
Jonah: We changed the name to As One to write more metallic, straight edge hc type songs (FTR, I was never straight edge). Demo was written as we were getting more in to the local hc scene and hearing a lot more music across the eras of punk and hc. When the demo was going to be pressed to vinyl, we switched the name over to Scare Tactic.
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| Scare Tactic: Jonah on Guitar, James on Bass... |
Career Suicide...
...will be along shortly. The CS link in the discog list below is not live, but soon will be. In the meantime, if you like looking at pictures of music containers, (and who doesn't?) you can check out the Mercury Girls page.
Pavilion
(Mercury Girls)
Jonah drums, produces and helps with song-writing in post-punk quartet Pavillion. They were formerly called Mercury Girls, but changed the name shortly after the release of the demo to avoid confusion with a band of the same name from Philadelphia.
Check their music out on bandcamp, details of their physical releases are below.
"Demo / Mercury Girls Demo" (Cassette)
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| First Press - Smoky silver cassette |
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| Second Press - Matte black cassette |
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| Artwork on inside of inlay |
Stats:
Tracks: In Your Hands, Beautiful Sight, Pale Shades of Green, Binds
Released: April 2015
Label: Not on label (self released)
Pressing Info:
1st press - smoky silver tapes with a clear leader, 75-100 made
2nd press - matte black tapes with a red leader, 200 made
Other Variants: Inlays are either ivory or a pale green colour, later copies have the new band name on the spine.
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| Inlays on pale shade of green, or ivory paper - the artwork was updated on later copies to reflect the change of band name |
"Vexation of Spirit" (Cassette)
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| Inlays on hyacinth blue paper, matte black cassette |
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| Inlay - front |
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| Inlay - back |
"Pavilion / Pet Sun " (Split Cassette)
Stats:
Tracks: Pale Shades of Green (Pavilion) / Wish it Was (Pet Sun
Released: February 2016
Label: Long Winter
Pressing Info:
Who?
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Killed Anna?
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Been looking out for the Lonely Wholesome "Who Killed Anna?" lathe-cut for a while. According to rumour 50 records were cut, but most didn't get to the folk that had ordered them because the guy who ran the label (Scotch Tapes) had some kind of nasty boat accident.
Recently I heard about someone who'd found one in a second-hand shop in Canada, so I contacted him to ask for some pics as I'd never seen one... After that one also appeared on Discogs, so maybe the pressing (or cutting) is in circulation?
Anyway, it's a REALLY nicely put together thing, but I have no idea what the artwork is about. (I'm not into conspiracy theories and don't want to get killed / have an accident).
Inside Out
Watson, distressed and fearing for the world's sanity, built the Asylum to put it in and help it get better.
The Asylum is a four-walled house turned inside out.
Deaf Mutations
Flush All feces...
Deaf Mutations was Dave Brown's semi-anonymous hardcore project, Jonah was also involved and "Crash The Clubs" is their sole release. Dave and Jonah were in Career Suicide at the time, so technically it's more of a CS rather than a FU side project, but never mind.
Dave Brown played drums in CS, but switches here to vocals; Jonah plays guitar and maybe bass. He also recorded and produced the EP. Dave released it as a tape via his Sewercide label and a few years later, their friend Tom Ellis released it as a 7" on Static Shock Records.
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| Sleeve - Front |
To be what I used to be, before I was...
Just added Glass Boys to the Discography on the right there>.
It was going to include rambling interpretations about the artwork, but there's a lot of it once you get going and the page was turning into a mess, so have kept it fairly simple and will save the speculation to this bit on the left here.
To be a dog...
"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse... The nearest related Chinese expression is "宁为太平犬，莫做乱世人" (nìng wéi tàipíng quǎn, mò zuò luànshì rén) which can be translated as "Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a man in a chaotic period."
To change a light bulb...
Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
If the body is a light bulb and it burns out, does that mean there's no more electricity? The source of the energy remains. We can discard the body and go on. We are the source.
Quotes from Joseph Campbell
Sunday Mirror
Mirrors within Mirrors (LFG Post August 28 2007)
What's the role of David Eliade in Fucked Up?
David is the coiled filament himself. Our job is to sit infront of giant microscopes to make sure
he doesn't come unraveled. He is the electric DNA at the bottom corner of our music factory.
Is there a connection between David Eliade and the song "David Comes to Life"?
David told us that he was born with 3 strands of DNA instead of just 2. He said the third one
was covered with an osmium coating, and made him the first living cyborg. When he came to life it was like he was born backwards, so we had to write the song in reverse order and upside down by having some people hold mirrors to mirrors in our practice space. Decoding the upsidedown backwards lyrics was a huge pain in the ass. David claims to be able to do all these crazy things like see gas and oxygen molecules. We sometimes think he's kind of retarded, but then also like a wierd genius. No one has ever met his father, if you know what i'm saying. Anyhow, the connection is that "David Comes to Life" is about jesus christ.
What's the role of David Eliade in Fucked Up?
David is the coiled filament himself. Our job is to sit infront of giant microscopes to make sure
he doesn't come unraveled. He is the electric DNA at the bottom corner of our music factory.
Is there a connection between David Eliade and the song "David Comes to Life"?
David told us that he was born with 3 strands of DNA instead of just 2. He said the third one
was covered with an osmium coating, and made him the first living cyborg. When he came to life it was like he was born backwards, so we had to write the song in reverse order and upside down by having some people hold mirrors to mirrors in our practice space. Decoding the upsidedown backwards lyrics was a huge pain in the ass. David claims to be able to do all these crazy things like see gas and oxygen molecules. We sometimes think he's kind of retarded, but then also like a wierd genius. No one has ever met his father, if you know what i'm saying. Anyhow, the connection is that "David Comes to Life" is about jesus christ.
"Spiegel im Spiegel" in German literally can mean both "mirror in the mirror" as well as "mirrors in the mirror", referring to an infinity mirror, which produces an infinity of images reflected by parallel plane mirrors: the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth.
A bore putting her audience to sleep
Philip K Dick
Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of “Satanic mills,” Dick’s Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault.
Foucault argued that a “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.”
Erik Davis
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Michel Foucault
Coming Soon...
I'm not an expert on Career Suicide, but my new internet friend Ethan is - he has a LOT of CS vinyl!
Interview - Swiss Ferdi
Ferdinand Hodler's artwork appears on "Year of The Pig" & "Glass Boys". Fucked Up fans, searching for the meaning of something, frequently misinterpret his images of sleeping scantily-clad men. To avoid further confusion, Ferdi himself, along with French art expert Musee Orsay, took time out of their busy schedules to explain "Parallelism":
Hodler:
Orsay:
The sequencing of the figures according to a principle of symmetry and the search for frontality here are also one of the most stunning expressions of a principle called parallelism (defined by Hodler as the repetition of similar forms), which the artist made the key to his art throughout his life. Parallelism is more than a principle of formal composition, it is a moral and philosophical idea, relying on the premise that nature has an order, based on repetition, and that in the end all men resemble each other.
Hodler:
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