Fucked Up: Everything after the “Generation” single (2006—2010)
[EDIT: The point of this post was to approach, obliquely, even allegorically, a point I wanted to make about Fucked Up. The problem with writing about this band, however, is that they have seemingly forestalled in advance the criticism of the “close-minded hardcore fan who only likes the early singles.” But as someone who likes Eno and Neu! more than Verbal Abuse or Christ on Parade, my point is more that 1) Fucked Up have become a band more about adjectives and spectacle than about hit songs. On the other hand, now that they are more popular than ever, they still have to 2) get on stage and play these new songs. What made the band interesting in the first place was their music; we tolerated everything else because their songs were so good. Now it is the inverse: these songs don’t capture our imagination, but the band’s eccentricities and statements and media appearances take center stage. Anyways, writing about the experience of watching Disfear painfully bluff their way through a set of boring crust/rock songs that nobody liked, was to capture the FEELING of what I meant about Fucked Up and the half-decade since they stopped writing “hit singles.”]
When I was a youngster, the crème de la crème of Swedish hardcore bands were Skitsystem and Totalitär, and then (in no particular order) Avskum, Warcollapse, Wolfpack/Wolfbrigade, Meanwhile, 3 Way Cum, Krigshot, etc. And Disfear were just another of these second-tier bands: better than Driller Killer and Uncurbed, but not mindblowing.
Disfear always had a terrible aesthetic (and utterly stupid name), their albums were on the metal label Osmose (who were also doing the Immortal records at that time), they were overproduced… But even though Disfear were not a great band, they wrote some “hits”—“A Brutal Sight of War” stands out in my memory—entirely in the d-beat Swedish hardcore style.
And then one day, there was the equivalent of the Herschel Walker trade in Swedish Hardcore: the singer from Skitsystem (and At the Gates) was leaving that band and joining Disfear! Now Disfear would be awesome!
Instead what happened is that Disfear was going to be a platform for a new kind of mega-charged Swedish hardcore that was flashy and catchy and rockin’ and Motorhead-influenced and sung in English. Great!, I thought: Disfear, who had always been middle-of-the-road, would now be a rock powerhouse.
The first songs that came out were great and lived up to all of this promise. “The Horns” and “The Final of Chapters” were both memorable compilation tracks—big, catchy—and the first single off of their new album was the huge “Powerload.” Now, this song is idiotic, and impossible to take seriously, but unlike a lot of mopey hardcore, it was irresistible and fun: a guilty pleasure, like if Guns ‘N Roses played a d-beat.
Now comes the sad part. When Disfear toured the U.S., it was a pathetic affair. Playing to punk crowds, the singer preened and pumped the crowd and said things like, “Are you ready for a powerload tonight, Cleveland?” in a hoarse scream—but desperate for approval and adoration of an Elton John sort. And then they would play “Powerload.”
And then… they had to play all the other “huge anthems” they had written, i.e. they had to fill out 40 minutes with non-stop, grandiose, Motör-hardcore. Sure, at some point they would play “A Brutal Sight of War,” but their hearts weren’t in it. And nothing could be more tedious than these songs, as much as they were dead in the water, creatively—as much they were tiresome exercises for all involved—still HAD to be displayed. The saddest aspect of all this is the embarrassment that what a band ultimately produces are NOT t-shirts or interviews… but music. And these shoddy wares still had to be pathetically hawked.
Their album art from this point on would be all brass knuckles, bullet belts, tattoos, and vaguely threatening aristocratic crests. How COULD they go back and run through their “monotonous” and low-tech d-beat catalog? No—we had to hear every fucking song on their new album, in their new 2.0 style.
This was all accompanied by a sorry display of professional excitement and execution out of all proportion to the drab, long-winded, and cut-rate hardcore/rawk hybrid to which we were being subjected. Non-hit after non-hit was being heralded to us as “Off our new album… on Relapse Records… are you ready for? … I say… are you READY FOR… ? THE TITLE TRACK… “Misanthropic Generation!!!!” Alright!” and then bludgeon us for 4 1/2 minutes with the most redundant palm-muted metalcore (basically).
It was like what I imagine living in L.A. is like all the time. The worst part wasn’t that a good bad turned into a shitty band who thought they could make it big—who, I can only assume, have made a good deal more money with the albums Misanthropic Generation and Live the Storm, than they ever did with their violent but monotonous albums for Osmose. (Although one can only assume that was also more lucrative than being in Totalitär.) THE WORST PART was this gap between the endless ratcheting-up of how intense and huge and tough and monstrously hard and apocalyptic and melodic and cutting-edge and everything-I-ever-wanted-in-heavy-music and this future #1 hit was going to be… and then having to suffer through a tiresome, generic, mediocre, totally lackluster and energy-less celebration of their own bland “aggressive” aesthetic.
Everything is possible up until the time you have to play the songs that you wrote. In the case of Kanye West, when he is offstage, giving interviews on TV, ruining the internet: he is the most hated asshole in America; everyone wants to see him fail. He performs a new Kanye West song, it is a work of genius, nothing else matters.
But nothing is more exhausting than being hustled and prodded in this way, and then hearing the music and finding it nothing more than a gallery of tired bloviations. It is as though we aren’t expected to know what liking something is unless we have paid for some “total experience” and inundation of external enthusiasms to act as our taste-superego, while we basically… get burned.
