Fucked Up’s latest tour of Europe ended in a fistfight. Outside of Heathrow airport, singer Damian Abraham, guitarist Josh Zucker, and drummer Jonah Falco actually started throwing punches at each other. “In the kiss-and-hug area of Heathrow,” laughs Abraham, “with all these families saying goodbye, we’re throwing each other around, smashing into vans. It just spiraled out of control.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the band’s name, after all, is Fucked Up, and its members were collected deliberately as a group of guys who would not get along. Zucker and fellow guitarist Mike Haliechuk actually sat and racked their brains to come up with a group guaranteed to have serious issues. This is either the worst or the best idea for putting a band together that anyone has ever had. We’ll have to wait and see.
Regardless of the wisdom of the idea, the initial goal has been achieved: Fucked Up can’t stand each other. They will happily tell you so. (This is a refreshing departure from the usual shtick of bending over backwards to compliment your bandmates and what they “bring to the band.”) They haven’t been able to stand each other now for about a zillion singles and two full albums—for going on seven years and for much longer, in fact, than many bands that started out as best friends.
“It’s like that thing, you know, you gotta love something to let it go? We don’t love each other enough to let it go,” says Abraham. “Some people in the band really party, and some people really don’t party. So there’s that conflict. Some people in the band are really healthy, and some people want nothing more than to eat French fries all day. So there’s conflict there. There’s really no common ground.”
“Most bands form out of friendship, common musical taste, drive, ambition,” adds Falco. “This was done completely inorganically. It was like a social experiment.”
Naturally, they didn’t expect things to go this far. A deliberately fractious band? “That’s great if you’re just playing local shows,” says Abraham. “But here we are six years later, and we’re touring the world.” The original goal, as Abraham (a.k.a. Pink Eyes) describes it, was really just to play as many local shows as possible. According to Falco, the plan was even more limited: “Ten [shows] or less, never tour, hate each other, self-destruct.”
It’s worth mentioning here that the members of Fucked Up are also famously untrustworthy, hiding behind their many aliases (the band members go by Pink Eyes, 10,000 Marbles, Mustard Gas, Mr. Jo, and Concentration Camp, but also sometimes Father Damian, Slumpy, Laundry, Gulag, and Guinea Beat, and probably many more).
They have disseminated wild stories, such as the recurrent mentions of “David Eliade,” their possibly fictional manager/Svengali figure, whom they credit with both spiritual and professional guidance, but who no one seems to have ever seen. (They can, however, take things seriously. The most notable example of Fucked Up as a sober, businesslike entity is their ongoing lawsuit against Rolling Stone and Camel Cigarettes, who used the band’s name as part of an “indie universe” without permission.)
So when they—mostly Abraham—talk in a low-key, straightforward way about their creation, and about their intra-band troubles, one has to wonder. But they obviously do get along, at least some of the time. They’re currently all packed into a vegetable-oil-powered bus, touring the West Coast as part of the Fuck Yeah Tour, and everyone seems to be getting along fine.
As recently as 2006, Falco and Haliechuk were groomsmen at Abraham’s wedding. Most likely, Abraham is embellishing. He’s a myth-maker. These are not lies—and I would lay good money that they did in fact fight at Heathrow—but he knows what makes a good story.
The members of Fucked Up naturally are the main sources of information about their past and present, and they’ve made such a habit of spreading misinformation that now even the simplest facts about them are murky. Doubt creeps in everywhere. Undoubtedly, they were assembled in an unorthodox way; definitely, they’ve had their differences. But nothing about Fucked Up is simple.
Here is what we know. Fucked Up formed in 2001 in Toronto, in what was a surprisingly fertile hardcore punk scene. Haliechuk and Zucker added Falco, Abraham, and most recently, third guitarist Ben Cook to their volatile mix. They’ve cranked out a relentless series of singles and EPs over the years.
Their debut LP, Hidden World (Jade Tree), was generally seen as a big step forward for both Fucked Up and hardcore music. From a creative standpoint, things have gone consistently well for Fucked Up.
They also quickly developed a tendency to grab attention for many, many things other than their musical output. Fucked Up takes a shotgun approach to the art of provocation. Why aim? Just fire. See what you hit.
Obviously, there is the name. They’re not entirely alone in this territory: there’s Fuck, Fuck Buttons, The Fucking Champs, Holy Fuck, and Total Fucking Destruction, not to mention every FCC worker’s favorite, Anal Cunt, as well as the granddaddies of this particular family of band nomenclature, the Butthole Surfers. Even so, you place yourself in a smaller camp when you name your band Fucked Up.
It’s earned them attention as part of a phenomenon: both Slate and Exclaim have run articles on the implications of the F-word band names. The name has presented all kinds of challenges along the way. A gushing New York Times article could not even name the band, MTV resorted to calling them “Effed Up,” and numerous record distributors have refused to carry the albums.
And that’s not the worst of it, as Abraham explains: “I will tell you that at the border, when you have to tell the officer that you’re in a band called Fucked Up, you really start wishing that maybe you’d picked a different name.”
And then there is the fascist imagery. In the middle of the bewildering swirl of obscure references and hilarious lies that are constantly pouring out of this band, there were occasional comments about Nazi mystics. Some people took notice, and so, being true punks, Fucked Up responded by including a picture of a Hitler Youth rally in a later release.
There they’d found an old, familiar nerve. As a society, we still really, really don’t like Nazis. And the blurred lines in some minds between hardcore punk, skinheads, and out-and-out racists meant that it was easy to assume the worst about Fucked Up: that they used those images because they want to promote those ideas. (Abraham was even assaulted by someone who took things that way. They’ve since become friends.)
In fact, there isn’t much to the whole fascism “controversy.” It’s easy to see, in the course of conversation or even quick research of the band, that they’re not fascist, or promoting fascism, or any such thing. Their reasons for using fascist imagery may be complicated; Abraham tap dances skillfully on the topic, talking about the power of symbols, irony, etc., and Zucker, likewise, can talk about the end of Western culture and the effect of standing at Nuremberg.
And maybe it’s all true: maybe they had profound, artistic, intellectual reasons for their use of Nazi symbols. Or the reason could be simple: they like to cause trouble. With a couple of marks on a page, you can create a very hostile environment for yourself,” says Abraham. “And that’s what we did.” This is, after all, a band that named one release Baiting the Public.
Fucked Up has dabbled along the way in all kinds of obscure art movements; they usually have a handy, completely indecipherable explanation for the meaning of their latest lyric or image, referencing something like Belgian neo-surrealist shapeism. “Who on Earth would ever accuse Fucked Up of being pretentious?” laughs Falco.
They pull in a mind-numbing array of esoteric influences: the Vienna Actionist movement, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Kabbalah (naturally), Italian traditionalism, Corinthians, and Mircea Eliade, to name just a few. Reading their blog is like attending a symposium full of over-caffeinated academic revolutionaries. Thomas Pynchon probably loves Fucked Up.
On top of all of this is their live show—a show that frequently ends with Pink Eyes naked and bleeding. Abraham himself professes shock at this little detail of the Fucked Up universe: “I really, really, was not like this growing up. I was a real…not conservative, but a real shy guy. I’m shocked at the level of debauchery I’ve achieved. I’ll hear the next day about me stripping naked onstage, and I’m like, ‘No, I didn’t.’ Then I see the picture, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I guess I did. I really did.’”
In one of the more publicized events from their band history, they played a show on a pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas that was reported as causing a “police riot.” Subsequently, the publication NME—which was the main source of the “riot” story—has been accused of sensationalizing the event (NME? Overreacting? What? Did someone call NME a hysterical publication?) and there’s been plenty of back and forth online, none of which hurt the band’s profile.
It’s possible that, by NME standards, most Fucked Up shows cause riots, and this one happened on a bridge. But it was a wild show by all accounts, even raising Fucked Up’s standard for crazy. “From a technical standpoint, that’s got to be one of the worst Fucked Up sets we’ve ever played,” says Abraham. “We didn’t get through one song. There would be a wave of people. We would do a verse and a chorus, and everything would fall down. It was one of those moments when the band is totally secondary to the event.”
All of their craziness might overwhelm the music, but the music is, of course, part of the craziness. Fucked Up has consistently pushed at the boundaries of any genre that tried to hold them. They’re clearly from a hardcore punk world, but they consider Pink Floyd and psychedelic music a major influence, and they regularly mix in long-form experimentation with their bang-it-out punk.
The new album, The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador), moves through more variety of atmosphere than your standard punk/hardcore, with peaceful, otherworldly intros and layers and layers of guitar—more than seventy guitar tracks at one point (or so they say…). There’s less stop-start fury than Hidden World—more sheets of sound. There are tracks on Chemistry that have almost nothing to do with hardcore punk: “Golden Seal” sounds like a darker Sigur Rós, or even Jean Michel Jarre. Their sound in general is more epic and complicated, more big-time rock band than most punk/hardcore.
They recorded the album separately, and in fact, with The Chemistry of Common Life all done, they now have to learn to play it together. “We’re going to come home now and learn how to actually play the record,” explains Damian. “We’ve never practiced the songs as a band. We’ve all played the songs individually, but we’ve never played them as a group.”
Naturally, their own takes on the album are contradictory: Falco describes it as a much more cohesive record—Zucker as a more disjointed one. Listening to Chemistry, it does sometimes seem that they don’t all want to be in the same band. The guitars—well, can a guitar sound arrogant? But justifiably so?
This guitar work is detached, assured, and somewhat at odds with Pink Eyes’ crazed bark. There’s not much in the way of drones or experimental noise here; Chemistry is melodic, almost shoegazer at times, like a sped-up Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine. “Blissed out” is how they’ve described it, and that works if your idea of bliss moves quickly and includes a fat, bald guy shouting complicated lyrics at you. “We’ve always been riding on the crest of our own wave,” says Falco. “The very crest of the wave is an unstable place. It’s not uniform. For this one, we decided that instead of being right on top and breaking all the time, we’re more in the middle, calmer, and happier to flesh out ideas.”
Fucked Up is now a Matador band, which implies that they’ve arrived in indie-hipsterdom, and maybe that they’ve left the insular world of hardcore punk. Or, possibly, it means that the world of hardcore punk is stretching out. In fact, this band is taken often to be a symbol of that change: they’re still legit hardcore punkers, but not following the usual HP playbook. So maybe that playbook is done.
Jane’s Addiction released Nothing’s Shocking twenty years ago; now, in 2008, Fucked Up erodes that assertion from all angles. All of their provocations have brought more eyes and ears to Fucked Up. This is a punk band; this is punk behavior. What they’ve accomplished—and it’s no small feat—is to get a conversation started again about punk.
They make the idea of punk music more difficult to file away as history; they’ve brought an element of unpredictability back into punk with both their actions and their records. As soon as we all started wondering just what the hell they were doing, they’d already succeeded.