Fucked Up / $100

“It’s nice to be here in the Toronto Reference Library,” said Simone Schmidt, the lead singer of $100, “one of the only public institutions left in the city with any dignity” (paraphrased). Throughout the night the various people behind the microphone commented on the fact that, yes, this was a concert in a library. It was loud in a place where noise is forbidden. In Toronto’s flagship library, and more than that one of its most beautiful buildings, we can say “fuck.” This is the genius of the Make Some Noise/Take Some Noise series, a bunch of concerts and events inside the library to promote the collection of Canadian music in the Toronto Public Library system that focuses on the Toronto area. Everyone, yours truly included, was delighted with the novelty of the setting, but it was more than just a schtick.

$100 brought their brand of urban country, breezy and knarled, and played highlights from their debut album and their ingenius, inspiring Regional 7” series. The band is releasing several 7”s on regional Canadian labels with A-sides about that region. They played “Fourteenth Floor,” from their Blocks Recording Club 7”, about workers at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, and they tore through “Black Gold” a set highlight about the tar sands in Alberta. Schmidt’s creaky alto and detailed phrasing brought lines like “I never come but it don’t matter / I could be any other girl” from “Careless Love” to vivid relief. Paul Mortimer’s ripping lead guitar reminded the audience what ripping lead guitar is good for, and the band left little to be desired from the impromptu library stage and sound system.

In between sets there was a palpable sense of anticipation. I thought perhaps it was because there was a critical mass of people in the lobby of a library with nothing to do and lots of stuff to break. $100 and Fucked Up are allies in Toronto. They are both outspoken, politically-oriented bands that have exchanged covers and commissions and they’ve played together in the past. Yet, even though they both share a similar kind of crossover indie cool, they nevertheless tend to appeal to different audiences: $100 draws an older, gender-mixed crowd of yupsters and Fucked Up attracts a more scraggly-looking hardcore audience. What I was experiencing, then, was a sort of changing of the guard. Also I’d never been to a Fucked Up show before, and so I wasn’t entirely prepared for what came next.

When Fucked Up took the stage, the real mayhem began—the crowd immediately pressed forward, hollowed out a good portion of its centre, and began to mosh like it was 1994. Though the whole mosh things seems terribly retro to me, I gather it isn’t all that rare in certain circles. But context is everything, and what is everyday in clubs like the Kathedral seems like a tear-down-the-walls shitstorm in the Toronto Reference Library. With few security types (maybe a few cops outside), a flimsy sound setup, and a bunch of mousy librarians with their fingers on the button, it looked like everyone had made a big mistake.

Within about three minutes I’m thinking “oh this is definitely gonna get shut down.” To my surprise, however, everyone was cool about it. The library staff looked unconcerned, so much so that they may have been expecting as much. The cops stayed mostly outside. A little ad hoc “Let’s All Pur Our Hands Here to Keep the Speakers From Falling Over” committee was formed and though the lights swayed precariously back and forth nothing got smashed. It slowly dawned on me how awesome all of this was, and how much of a priss I’d been for worrying that people were gonna be worried. An honest-to-goodness collective spirit arose in which moshers and non-moshers alike came together to celebrate an awful lot of noise being made in an awfully quiet space.

As Fucked Up stormed through highlights from The Chemistry of Common Life (2008) I wandered to their merch table and realized that they have an absolute shit-ton of wax out. $100’s neat little spread had their album and two singles (with maybe some shirts and things) while Fucked Up’s space was rammed with all kinds of 7”s and 12”s, LPs, and CDs. Lead singer Damian Abraham represented, as is his wont, for all the fat dudes out there. Their set was bruising as usual, delivered as it was with the band’s three-guitar crush, and when the band did a lengthy “Year of the Ox” Abraham brought a mic’d lecturn up on stage for what he told us was a “dramatic reading.” He mentioned they’d just released the “David’s Plan” single with proceeds going to organizations working to end what Fucked Up’s blog calls “the epidemic of missing and murdered native women in Canada.” “So if you’re going to buy one piece of Fucked Up merch tonight,” he said, “make it that one.” Having brought out his young son previously, Abraham added, “I mean, if you wanna download our album, that’s fine, I mean you’re only stealing food out of my baby’s mouth.”

Abraham’s irony, so playful and full of goodwill, is hard to capture, but what was most elusive about the night was the feeling that something extraordinary had happened. Not only had we crowd surfed in our city’s prestigious research library (though I defy other cities to produce similar examples) but we’d been there the night the city invited its critics into its belly. One of Toronto’s most prestigious institutions hosted two of the city’s most forthright and most explicitly oppositional bands in an evening we all instinctively understood to be transgressive. We were standing in a space you usually pass through, loitering at night when it’s normally closed, blaring at unseemly decibel levels, hearing things about our cities and ourselves that weren’t at all kind to the bureaucracy hosting us. We were angry and loud, and yet the city welcomed us. Sure, it makes you feel kind of toothless, but would that all cities were so kind.