Showing posts with label Fugazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fugazi. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
BOTH BOOKS OFFICIALLY RELEASED TODAY!
Newly EXPANDED EDITIONS
DOGTOWN - The Legend of the Z-Boys and
KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN - The FUGAZI Photographs
25% discount order HERE direct http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/dogtown/
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25% discount order HERE direct http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/keep-your-eyes-open/
I am very happy to have both of these books back in print, it's been a couple of years and they are now BETTER THAN EVER.
The Dogtown book was first released in 2002 and the Fugazi book was first released in 2007... both critically acclaimed and loved.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Visualizing the [Information] History of Fugazi
This is an amazing set of graphics and information:
go HERE to see it.
Subjects include:
The International Fugazi Tour Network
Unconventional Venues
Local Activism & Fundraising
Fellow Travellers
Family Tree
small screen shot sample below of one of the several graphics.
Data & Methodology
List of shows scraped from the Fugazi Live Series website, using the Data Miner Chrome extension. I then used a geocoder to generate latitude and longitude coordinates for each show, based on the city, state, and country fields. For the shows in Washington, I replaced the generated values with more precise values, by looking up the lat + long coordinates for each DC venue based on their street address.
Detail pages for each show often noted when the show was a benefit. I manually added benefit show information into the data table, and then used the following calculation to figure out how much money they raised: Door Price multipled by the Number of Attendees, minus 20% to pay the sound person and other incidentals. These are approximate amounts. I also pulled “Bands played with” data from the show detail pages, and used Tableau Prep to separate the list out to individual entries, correct any misspellings or duplicate entries, and then get counts.
For the Family Tree visualization, I sourced the data from bandtoband.com, an online database of connections between bands, by shared members. Bandtoband.com considers a band member to be someone who played on a recording, so someone who was only part of a live lineup or just joined for one tour are not in the database. Technically Fugazi had a fifth member for their last years as an active band: Jerry Busher. He played a 2nd drumkit and other instruments, both live and on the album “The Argument.” I left him out of the first ring as a he is not a “main member” of Fugazi for most of their career, but represented him on the Family Tree by his appearance in the bands French Toast, All Scars, and Fidelity Jones.
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Thursday, August 30, 2018
NPR's Tiny Desk:
The Messthetics
It was Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day when this somewhat loud and sometimes frenetic band came to play at my desk. I couldn't help but wonder if The Messthetics would inspire some eight-year old child in the office to one day become a musician, one who'd go on tell the tale of seeing these D.C. legends at an office when they were a kid.
For me it was exhilarating to see musicians I've known and loved for years be invigorated by younger talent. That's what happened when the bass and drums from D.C.'s pioneering punk band Fugazi crisscrossed with the brilliant, skillful and younger guitarist Anthony Pirog. It's only fitting that this Tiny Desk Concert happened on D.C. turf.
I've seen Anthony in a number of settings around town, including the brilliant duo he has with his wife, cellist Janel Leppin called Janel and Anthony. His playing can be understated and over-the-top all at the same time. It never feels self-indulgent and his music always serves the song. Drummer Brendan Canty saw the guitarist perform once and they eventually formed a band. Together, Brendan and bassist Joe Lally are a brilliant pulse of energy and that allows Anthony the freedom to fly. The music they create is like no other. The instrumental music they make is memorable, relatable and transcendent.
Set List
"Radiation Fog/Crowds and Power"
"The Inner Ocean"
"The Weaver"
Credits
Producers: Bob Boilen, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Morgan Noelle Smith, Beck Harlan; Production Assistant: Stefanie Fernández; Photo: Morgan Noelle Smith/NPR.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker (5 Minutes mini Doc.) | from Pitchfork media
No band pushed back harder against the commodification of the underground as Fugazi. With the release of their third LP, In on the Kill Taker, the poster children for DIY punk ethics found themselves caught up in of one of the most turbulent times in the subculture’s history.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Fugazi Returns... Through Opera?
from Pitchfork:
by Andy Beta Contributor
Last November, Washington Post pop critic Chris Richards posted a photo from a Washington Wizards telecast, featuring former Fugazi and Rites of Spring member Guy Picciotto taking in the game. Soon after, another indelible image of Picciotto on a basketball court circulated online, of the guitarist and vocalist performing at an early Fugazi show, dangling upside down from the basket, shirtless and screaming. It was a searing reminder that Fugazi’s vitality has seldom been matched. For nearly 20 years, they were an inspirational force in the underground—as kinetic as a severed power line, night in and night out.
“They're still the greatest rock band I've ever seen live, as electrifying as your imagination will allow,” recently said Richards, whose post-hardcore band Q and Not U was signed to Dischord Records, co-owned by Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye. “Fugazi taught me how intense live music could be, and how that intensity can help bind a community.” After the band’s sixth album, 2001’s The Argument, and its subsequent tour, Fugazi went on indefinite hiatus in 2003. Every so often there are rumors of a reunion (and even an April Fool’s Day joke), but the band has never played live again. In 2011, they offered a consolation of sorts: an 800-show live archive spanning from 1988 to 2003 and containing over 1,500 hours of music, uploaded to Dischord’s site.
When Brooklyn-based experimental theater group Object Collection announced It’s All True, a so-called “opera-in-suspension” based on that archive, fans, music sites, an even the band were flummoxed. “I was really left-footed by it–I couldn’t read the tonality at all,” Picciotto said recently, via email. “It seemed kind of arch at first, though I was hugely relieved that it wasn’t some kind of hagiographic take on the whole thing.” It’s All True premiered in Norway in 2016, was staged in London last year, and now makes its U.S. premiere at New York’s venerated experimental theater home, La Mama, where it runs from February 8th through the 25th.
Before the idea of “Waiting Room,” “Glue Man” and “Reclamation” being strung together into a cringeworthy storyline about two Gen-X lovers crosses your mind, none of Fugazi’s songs actually appear in It’s All True, meaning that the band thankfully won’t be having its Mamma Mia! or American Idiot moment. Instead, Object Collection’s composer Travis Just and writer/director Kara Feely pulled their material solely from stage banter, feedback, guitar re-stringing, and confrontations between Picciotto, MacKaye, and their audiences—a bewildering mix of incidental and interstitial moments that suggest every performance is in a perpetual state of collapse. How fitting for a troupe that most recently presented a hardcore take on the Russian Revolution (and the legendary Sergei Eisenstein film about it) with cheap&easy OCTOBER.
“Our work is non-narrative and there's already 1,000 versions of ‘Reclamation’ available for everybody to listen to, so what's the point of us doing that?” Just said. “We're not gonna tell the story of the band, either. As a composer, I've always loved uncontrollable feedback and drums that sound like they've been thrown down a flight of stairs. That's kind of my thing.”
Even after Fugazi granted usage rights (they are selective, generally allowing student films and non-profits but not most corporate and industry requests), they still didn’t think anything would come of the project. “Frankly, I didn’t fully understand what they were going to do with the material, and I also wasn’t 100 percent convinced it would ever happen,” Picciotto said. But after the premiere, the band saw video footage and couldn’t quite believe the end results. “We all started exchanging emails of the ‘what-the-fuck’ variety,” Picciotto added. “But the more we watched it, the more it started to grow on us. I think the willful perversity of the undertaking really appealed to us—the literal notation-scoring of the incidental music by Travis, all the crazy quilting of the stage speech by Kara.” Picciotto even admitted that no single member of Fugazi actually made it through the entirety of their own live archive, a process he called “pretty fucking grueling.”
“They maybe weren't expecting us to go as deep as we did, but when you're working with an archive, you kind of have to go through everything,” Just said, though the process did start to have adverse effects on him. “It was brutal, I won't lie. I was having weird dreams that I was in the band or just some disembodied head.”
In the years since Fugazi went on hiatus, their legacy has grown, though the band’s convictions have become at times distorted. “It drives me insane how people talk about them today,” Richards said. “‘Fugazi? Weren’t they that straight-edge band who hated dancing and liked to scold their audience?’” Yes, the band held to convictions about keeping shows cheap (often $5-$7), all ages, and safe. If the mosh pits grew hostile toward women and younger kids, MacKaye would immediately bring things to a halt. Rather than regard it as nagging and hectoring a paying audience, such pauses and verbal sparring were ultimately about fostering inclusivity in the scene. As a 16-year-old living in central Texas, Fugazi coming to play in my town felt seismic: an all too-rare event that didn’t involve going to a bar, needing a chaperone, or borrowing money from my parents. Even more mind-boggling is that I can revisit that exact show.
Although neither Just nor Feely ever saw the band play live, Fugazi’s dedication to a DIY ethos—their willingness to book the tours, rent the PA, and cart their own gear—spoke to the theater group. “Being involved in performance, it's all about the live show for us,” Feely said. “There was just such a huge amount of activity going on around [Fugazi] shows, whether they were playing a benefit concert, or there was a rally going on that they were playing in front of, or even just how they conducted themselves live and what they expected of the audience.”
On Thursday night, It’s All True made its U.S. premiere, every bit as confounding as the video clips hinted at. Propelled by a din scored and conducted by Just for the Dither Guitar Quartet, bookended by drummers Shayna Dunkelman and Clara Warnaar, the noise accompanied four actors as they thrashed and shouted on a simple stage of armchairs, folding chairs, metal tables, and stacks of cardboard, moving seemingly at random. It was gestural yet resistant to a through-line, the music similarly disjointed: tunings, drum rolls, amp buzz and, at one point in the performance, amplified sipping from water bottles. “Surprisingly, the incidental music triggered weird ‘feelings’ for me,” Picciotto said. “Stuff I heard a million times–certain time-killing drum fills or tuning patterns–and it was weird how resonant that felt.”
Although much of this stage banter was first uttered by Fugazi in the ’90s, as the band railed against Exxon, Mobil, Bush 41, and the “television miniseries Desert Storm,” there are passages highlighted in It’s All True that become eerily resonant in the present moment: lines about police violence, gun deaths, the unchecked growth of for-profit prisons, affordable healthcare, “male lame asses,” and even a diatribe on “shitholes,” all woven into the din. The opera starts to reflect the mass confusion that is palpable in 2018, wherein we’re in need of action yet flailing over how exactly to act.
“I always hated the whole question of, ‘Does politics have a place in music?’” Picciotto said. “It’s moronic. We are all in politics all the time, and the play reminded me of how much that was foregrounded at the shows—we were all in it. And we’re still all in it. It’s a combination of that depressing feeling of ‘fuck, this shit AGAIN?’ with the more resilient, combative ‘FUCK this shit, again!’”
Amid the jumble of feedback and shouted lines, something resembling that heartening relief of being in the crowd at an underground show or a protest march emerges: the paradoxical realization that while no one person can make a difference, a difference can nevertheless be made. It’s All True explicitly addresses that near the end, taking a line from the band and shouting it anew: “You look around and go, ‘I’m not alone!’”
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Friday, April 14, 2017
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Sunday, November 22, 2015
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