It has been requested that the title of this article be changedto Make-Up (American band). Please see the relevant discussion. The page should not be moved unless the discussion is closed with a summary describing the consensus achieved in support of the move.
The Make-Up combined garage rock, soul, and a self-styled liberation theology to make a new genre they called "Gospel Yeh-Yeh".[4] This style led to an emphasis on live performances and interaction between the band and their audience, incorporating the audience into the performances as a "fifth member", creating what one reviewer described as ""highly energetic and participatory live shows".[1][3] Parallel to the band's gospel musical stylings, the Make-Up produced music under a communism-influenced political philosophy that they saw as counter to the capitalist form of modern rock and roll and pop music.[5]
In a post-Nation of Ulysses interview, Svenonius explained the formation of the Make-Up from the ashes of his former band: "Nation of Ulysses broke up because the epoch changed with the advent of digital music and the Nirvana explosion. We were faced with what's now known as indie rock, a sort of vacuous form. We had to determine our next move and this [the forming of Make-Up] is it".[12]
In 2000, after releasing their fifth studio album, the Make-Up dissolved, reportedly "due to the large number of counter-gang copy groups which had appropriated their look and sound and applied it to vacuous and counter-revolutionary forms".[3] Svenonius also added in retrospect, "[The Make-Up] went on for five years. We had a five year plan like Stalin. It was becoming redundant and people were copying us. That's fine. We don't have to do it anymore because they can".[13]
Recordings
The Make-Up's first release, "Blue is Beautiful" 7-inch single
During the Make-Up's five years of activity, they released four studio albums, a live album, a compilation of singles and B-sides, and a number of singles and splits.[6] A posthumous live album was also released in 2006. The band was also the subject of the short film Blue is Beautiful by James Schneider, later repackaged as part of In Film/On Video in 2006.[14]
While the Make-Up released both "live" and "studio" records, their recordings were all created with an eye to spontaneity. Most studio songs were cut as they occurred to the group at that moment. Therefore, the Make-Up's studio records were in a sense, quite "live".[3][12]
The Make-Up's first release in 1995 was "Blue is Beautiful", a 7-inch single released on the band's own Black Gemini Records–a label which only released a handful of the Make-Up's releases, many of which used a characteristically simple single-color album sleeve.[6] Their second and third releases were also 7-inch singles: a split with the Meta-Matics, again on Black Gemini, and another split with Slant 6 on Time Bomb Records.
The band's first full-length studio album, Destination: Love - Live! At Cold Rice, was released in 1996. The album was touted as a live release, though it was actually recorded in a studio with "live" sounds added into the mix later.[12] In 1997, the band released two more albums less than a month apart: After Dark, a live-recording from London, and Sound Verite, a studio album. The two albums shared a number of tracks, recorded either live or in-studio. The same year the Make-Up released "Free Arthur Lee," a 7-inch single promoting the release from jail of Love singer Arthur Lee, who was incarcerated in 1996.[1][15] Also in 1997, the Make-Up were the subject of James Schneider's fictionalized tour-documentary Blue is Beautiful.[14]
The following year, The Make-Up released their fourth studio album, In Mass Mind, as well as a split 7-inch with Scottish band Lungleg.[1] In 1999, the Make-Up released I Want Some, a compilation album of previous singles and B-sides. A month later, the band released what would be their fifth and final studio album Save Yourself.[1]
A posthumous live album, Untouchable Sound, was released in 2006 by Drag City and Sea Note. The album included the addition of Alex Minoff on guitar.[3] The same year, Dischord Records released In Film/On Video, a DVD collection of live performances, music videos, and Blue is Beautiful.
Politics
As the Make-Up's frontman and mouthpiece, Ian Svenonius often contextualized the band's music in terms of larger socio-political themes. Svenonius typically described the band and its gospel attitude in Marxist and socialist terms, in opposition of what he saw as the capitalist, bourgeois, machismo paradigm of rock and roll.[5][16][17] This political position was typically presented during live performances and interviews with Svenonius, rather than in the music itself or its lyrics. Svenonius compared the Make-Up's ideology to the Situationist International group of the 1950s and 1960s, since both presented a critique of the modern, capitalist lifestyle, specifically of capitalism's effect on popular and consumable culture, such as rock and roll and pop music.[18] When asked if, in line with the title of The Nation of Ulysses' 1991 album 13-Point Program to Destroy America, he still hoped to "destroy America", Svenonius responded simply: "Of course".[19] This aversion to American culture was crystallized through their self-style musical genre "Gospel Yeh-Yeh," a belief system through which they advocated to their audience to "get theirs" and to "off the pigs in all their forms".[20]
The Make-Up's aversion to capitalist American culture was echoed in the 1998 short film Blue is Beautiful, in which the band starred. The film follows the band's fictionalized escape from America as "cultural refugees", where they are hunted by mysterious government agencies and find refuge in coffeehouses and underground night clubs.[5] Much like the assumed personae and personalities of all of Svenonius' bands and projects, a make-believe mythos and back-story surrounds the Make-Up, primarily based on the band's gospel approach and its pseudo-political, socialist aesthetics.[21] The political identity of the Make-Up was ideologically and semantically similar to Svenonius' other bands and projects, all of which culminate in his collection of essays, The Psychic Soviet, published through Drag City Press in 2006.[22]
Musical ideology and style
The Make-Up intended to create ad-lib performances in order to re-energize what they saw as the stale, bland, and formal ritual of rock and roll.[3] Appropriating gospel music's use of the congregate as a "fifth member", the Make-Up incorporated audience participation through call and response vocals, lyrical "discussion" techniques, and destruction of the fourth wall by physical transgression.[3]
Discussing the appropriation of the form of gospel music (as opposed to its content), Svenonius said:
“
Our music is gospel-based. It's rhythm-based, with a subverted guitar. And that's because the guitar exists at the same tone as the voice. It's the same frequency as the voice. We don't want those things to compete. We want to make a gospel, oratorical, sermon-based, ad-libbed form of music.[18]
”
“
Gospel music seems the most immediate, the most passionate and bendable form. We want to revitalize rock'n'roll and make it a communicative thing, rather than an alienating theme; the rise of dance music seems to be because rock bands seem to be increasingly dropping the ball in terms of making their music relevant to anyone but themselves.[23]
One concern of the group was to keep their music "stripped down" and minimal. This was indicative of the Make-Up's aversion to letting communication be upstaged by technology. Svenonius explained that "the problem is that the high creatures are the server mechanisms of the technology and the system they have created, meaning that we're dictated to as much by cars. We've turned the world into a parking lot. Similarly we use musical technology that we create, and it finds a use for itself".[12]
Due to the Make-Up's consideration of the audience and the special techniques they applied to performing, their live shows exhibited a convergence of soul, surf, and punk – an example of which is their single "I Want Some" from their 1999 album of the same name.[3] Citing the Make-Up's soul influences, one reviewer stated "If you didn't know it, you'd swear that the four members of The Make Up had stolen the soul from James Brown himself".[1] The Make-Up were also highly influenced by bubblegum music, particularly the French variety called Yé-yé.[18] The factory style of production Yé-yé music had utilized interested the group, who were interested in expanding the labor force involved in the production of pop music, a movement which they saw as in opposition to the rock and roll trend (begun by The Beatles) toward self-sufficiency and "downsizing" labor.[16] Through the synthesis of these two disparate and contradictory forms – gospel and Yé-yé – the Make-Up devised a hybrid style they called "Gospel Yeh-Yeh".[4] Live interpretations of this style can be found on the Make-Up's two full-length live releases, After Dark and Untouchable Sound, including "They Live by Night," a song recorded both in studio and live, on Destination: Love - Live! and Untouchable Sound respectively.
The Make-Up's gospel attitude was related to utilization of the audience as a group member,[23] which Svenonius likened to the rise of the 90s dance music scene: "We're not interested in countering it. It makes sense to me that techno, rave and dance music should go over in the face of rock and roll because it's democratic for everybody to express themselves. Whereas a lot of rock and roll isn't even entertaining at all, let alone allowing people the voice for expression. That's what the Make-Up has come to remedy. We want to be at once entertaining and inclusive in terms of using the gospel form to sort of breathe life into the old Frankenstein monster".[24] Svenonius would often interact with the audience in a number of ways, including call and response lyrics, direct address, and leaving the stage and going out into the crowd.
Despite the band's "gospel" and "ad-libbed" approach to recording, the Make-Up's live performances were often quite structured, as opposed to the typical "jam session". Svenonius explained that "there's a skeleton that we create and the form of our shows is unchanging - there's an intro, an outro, a middle break. It's very vaudevillian in form".[12] The Make-Up always wore matching uniforms on stage. Like most of the Make-Up's identity, the uniforms were an ideological statement, meant to "[destroy] individualism. Instead of there being this person [or] this member, and them having their separate personalities, or having them as separate entities. We're trying to create a unification. A one-ness. That's basically what it is: they're uniforms".[18]
AC/DC are an Australian rock band formed in Sydney in 1973 by Scottish-born brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. Their music has been variously described as hard rock, blues rock, and heavy metal; however, the band themselves describe their music as simply "rock and roll".
Fugazi is an American rock band that formed in Washington, D.C. in 1986. The band consists of guitarists and vocalists Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, bassist Joe Lally, and drummer Brendan Canty.
Rites of Spring was an American post-hardcore band from Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s, known for their energetic live performances. Along with Embrace, and Beefeater, they were one of the mainstay acts of the 1985 Revolution Summer movement which took place within the Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scene. Musically, Rites of Spring increased the frenetic violence and visceral passion of hardcore while simultaneously experimenting with its compositional rules. Lyrically, they also shifted hardcore into intensely personal realms and, in doing so, are often considered the first emo band but Rites of Spring itself rejected any association between themselves and emo genres.
The Argument is the sixth and, to date, final studio album from the post-hardcore band Fugazi released on October 16, 2001 through Dischord Records. It was recorded at Don Zientara's Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, VA and the Dischord House between January and April 2001. Upon release it was met with critical and commercial success. It was the band's last release before going on indefinite hiatus in 2003, until the release of First Demo over thirteen years later.
Brendan John Canty is an American musician, composer, producer and film maker, best known as the drummer for the band Fugazi.
Scream is an American hardcore punk band from Washington, D.C., that originally formed in the suburb of Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, United States. Scream originally formed in 1981 within the vanguard of the Washington Hardcore explosion. In 2009 the band reunited, and as of January 2012 were on tour in Europe. As of 2017, the band was still touring in both America and the United Kingdom.
Post-hardcore is a punk rock music genre that maintains the aggression and intensity of hardcore punk but emphasizes a greater degree of creative expression initially inspired by post-punk and noise rock. Like post-punk, the term has been applied to a broad constellation of groups. Post-hardcore began in the 1980s with bands like Hüsker Dü, and Minutemen. The genre expanded in the 1980s and 1990s with releases by bands from cities that had established hardcore scenes, such as Fugazi from Washington, D.C. as well as groups such as Big Black and Jawbox that stuck closer to post-hardcore's noise rock roots. In the 2000s, post-hardcore achieved mainstream success with the popularity of bands like My Chemical Romance, AFI, Underoath, Hawthorne Heights, The Used, At the Drive-In and Senses Fail. In the 2010s, post-hardcore bands like Sleeping with Sirens and Pierce the Veil achieved success and bands like Title Fight and La Dispute experienced underground popularity.
Steady Diet of Nothing is the second studio album by American post-hardcore band Fugazi, released in July 1991 by Dischord Records. The title is an allusion to a quote by the late American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks.
The Nation of Ulysses was an American punk rock band from Washington, D.C., formed in spring 1988 with four members. Originally known as simply "Ulysses," the first mark of the group consisted of Ian Svenonius on vocals and trumpet, Steve Kroner on guitar, Steve Gamboa on bass guitar, and James Canty on drums. Tim Green joined the band late in 1989 as a guitarist and the band became "Nation of Ulysses." Nation of Ulysses disbanded in the autumn of 1992, having failed to complete their third album. After the breakup, Svenonius, Canty, and Gamboa went on to form the short-lived Cupid Car Club and The Make-Up. Tim Green went on to help create The Fucking Champs, a mostly-instrumental trio out of San Francisco, and later Concentrick, a solo project with a focus on ambient music.
Ian F Svenonius is an American musician and singer of various Washington, D.C.-based bands including Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War, XYZ, Escape-ism, and Chain and The Gang. Between his numerous projects, Svenonius has released more than 19 full-length albums and more than 20 singles, EPs, and splits. Svenonius is also a published author and an online talk show host.
Jerry Busher is an American drummer and multi-instrumentalist. He is known for his work with Fidelity Jones and Fugazi.
Weird War, briefly known as Scene Creamers, is an indie rock band based out of Washington, D.C.. The current lineup consists of Ian Svenonius on vocals, Michelle Mae on bass guitar, Alex Minoff on guitar, and Sebastian Thomson on drums.
Leeland is a Christian rock band from Baytown, Texas. The band was formed in 2004, although lead singer Leeland Mooring had been writing songs beforehand. Leeland is comprised of Leeland Mooring, and Casey Moore. The band's original line-up included Jeremiah Wood (guitar), who left the band in late 2006 and was replaced by guitarist Matt Campbell in late spring of 2007, Jack Mooring (piano), Mike Smith (drums) and Jake Holtz (bass).
Plays Pretty for Baby is the second album by the American punk rock band Nation of Ulysses.
Cupid Car Club, also known as Cupid Car Club M.P., was a short-lived American post-hardcore band consisting of Ian Svenonius on vocals, James Canty on drums, Steve Gamboa on guitar, and Kim Thompson on bass and vocals.
Nation of Ulysses was a Washington, D.C.-based band formed in 1988, consisting of Ian Svenonius, James Canty, Steve Gamboa, Steve Kroner, and Tim Green. During the Nation of Ulysses' four years of activity, they released only two full-length albums: 13-Point Program to Destroy America in 1991 and Plays Pretty for Baby in 1992, both released on Dischord Records. After releasing Plays Pretty for Baby, the band began recording a third full-length album, but Steve Kroner separated from the band before recording was completed. The remaining quartet continued to record, but the group eventually dissolved before the record's completion. In 2000, six songs from those sessions, in addition to four new tracks recorded live, were compiled and released posthumously as The Embassy Tapes.
The Make-Up was a Washington, D.C. based band formed in 1995, consisting of Ian Svenonius, James Canty, Steve Gamboa, Michelle Mae, and for a brief period Alex Minoff. During the Make-Up's five years of activity, they released four studio albums, two live albums, a compilation of singles and B-sides, and a number of singles and splits. A posthumous live album was also released in 2006. The band was also the subject of the short film Blue is Beautiful by James Schneider, later repackaged as part of In Film/On Video in 2006.
The discography of Fugazi, an American post-hardcore band, consists of six studio albums, four EPs, a compilation album, a soundtrack album, a demo and a series of hundreds of live recordings. All of the band's releases have been published by Dischord Records, the independent record label co-owned and operated by Fugazi singer and guitarist Ian MacKaye.
Half-cocked is a cult music road movie, made in 1994 in Louisville, Nashville and Chattanooga. The movie tells the story about a group of high school teens who steal a van full of music equipment and pretend to be a band, called "Truckstop" in order to stay on the road. When the band starts playing gigs, their sound is largely inconsistent and incoherent, however, over time, the band becomes increasingly competent in their musicianship. The film puts much emphasis on the indie/alternative rock subculture.
The Messthetics is an instrumental trio formed by former Fugazi members bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty with guitarist Anthony Pirog. Their music has been described as "jazz punk jam."
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
