Wednesday, December 21, 2005

You're number one with a bullet, that's money well spent

You know when you're down and out, and work is a bitch and time ain't flyin' and winter is turnin' in your mind like a non-stop Mobb Deep song, and hate and bitterness is on the menu and the salad bar is closed, and your new crush isn't working out and things are two steps from chronic? You know that feeling?

Well, there is always Fugazi. It is the tonic that cures that ass thong show nice, guaranteed. They never fail. Once every two years we get a major jones and step to the Fugazi for like a month solid. A different record every day, maybe a viewing of the Instrument Doc or two, a visit to the Embrace record, until we regain our flow. Last night, Jessica sold us her old copy of Steady Diet of Nothing, the first Fugazi album either of us ever bought, and an album we have only ever owned on cassette. We listened to it about an hour ago, on our headphones at the corpo-wack job, and our winter rut feels two steps back, already the wind is at our back, and momentum has us on the righteous.

We have a deep personal history with this band. We have seen them mucho times in concert. We have seen people unabashedly weeping at their shows. For some of us, it's the feeling closest to church we can imagine, apart from various natural wonders we have seen. To expand the religious metaphor a little, what Fugazi gives us is a very specific feeling that no other band or artist ever has, really. It is something like fervor. They set fire to the heart. They put a sword on your shoulder and tell you that the divine right of kings is also yours. That the mantle of your life is sturdy, and if you give it care, freedom is yours. The whole game is that simple. Pretty hard for a band, some songs and a few guitar lines to accomplish, but this band does. Maybe its age specific. We know lots of people that Fugazi has this effect on. For the rest, we feel a little pity.

Sean O' Bra. He's the one that got us hooked. Our lives would have been vastly different if Fugazi had not put the fire into our hearts. Sean just had a spare book of matches laying around handy. Thanks, Sean-O. We hope the ether is treating you well. Without you, we might have grown up to vote Republican. Middle class resentment might have turned our hearts charcoal black.




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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

For serious. It's the gospel of suburban kids rejected by their peers for being too weird/smart for their age and put down by their parents' neighbors for having rebellious haircuts and scary clothes -- they are welcomed into the temple and accepted into the body of the believers, the Christ Fugazi. Renew your soul and be born again in the sweat of Guy Piccioto.

I'm not even half-kidding either.