LOSS

Hi, sometimes it's hard to do something about things that don't affect you, even though you care about them. The easiest way for people like us to help is by using our resources, our money. There is a huge catastrophe happening in Haiti, that most of us can't really do much about, not because we don't care, but because those problems always partially caused by the reasons that keep us from them - relative poverty, lack of infrastructure, lack of resources to deal with catastrophies when they occur, and the underdevelopment and marginalization of nations that keeps the places we live safe and warm, and everywhere else on the margins of survival.

We've said before that Fucked Up is not a political band - we're a band because we like travelling and making music - but just being a band gives us access to a lot of resources that don't just fall into the lap's of individuals, and makes it easier for people like us to make (small amounts of) change. We're putting another record out in a few weeks, and have some limited vinyl of it laying around, so we're gonna auction it off to benefit Doctors Without Borders efforts in Haiti right now. The auction is for a test press of the Couple Tracks 2xLP, and a copy of the already-limited Couple Tracks 7", which has a song about record collecting and a song about Damians baby. You can bid for it right HERE, which I would implore you to do vociferously and repeatedly. Don't forget that we've also got the David's Baby 7" coming out next month, another charity record, which we've already discussed here. We're pressing 2500 of them, they will cost $10 and 100% of the money is gonna be donated to the three organizations that we've gone over a few times. It will be available in the US first on our TOUR next month, and then on a few online distros.

Just wanted to say a few words about Jay. We were fortunate enough to play a bunch of shows with, and hang out with Jay Reatard, and we were all as shocked as you probably were when we heard the news, probably more so than we would have been able to guess. It hits a bit hard, because Jay and Fucked Up had somewhat of a parallel trajectory - same label, same punk-cum-indie sell-out career move. We played together all over the world, we saw his first show at sxsw 2006. Whereas Fucked Up has always played music, and punk culture in general for kind of a lark, Jay was that livewire that was too serious, too legitimate for this era. He was an archetypal musicial in the classic sense, moving fast, always playing and making music. He caught a lot of shit for the "antics" he'd get up to, the things you'd read about on the internet, but Jay represents that thing in music that everyone wants to deplore, precisely because he was that white hot thing you always wanted to be. It was people like Jay that first brought you to this world in the first place - those exciting and rarefied musicians who hurtled through their lives at a pace you could only keep up with vicariously, or in hindsight. It's easy to talk about our punk thing, like it's a museum piece, something that none of us could really be part of, because now we're too aware, or too well behaved, too beyond it all. Jay was that real piece, that too-bright fragment that was sometimes hard for us to consider, even though it was just as hard to look away.

Besides all that, he made a lot of great songs and we were lucky to have played with him. RIP.