Visualizing the History of Fugazi

https://www.carniklirs.com/project/fugazi

by damontal • 8 years ago

99 25 8 years ago

evasote• 8 years ago

This is awesome!

jaxn• 8 years ago

When I was in high school (early 1990s), I had one of those "this is not a fugazi t-shirt" t-shirts. My biology teacher was one of the more out-of-touch teachers in the school. When he saw the shirt he said "fug-uh-zee. What's a fug-uh-zee." And from that day forward he was nicknamed Mr Fugazi.

yantrams• 8 years ago

Great piece this. The Ex is a Dutch band I'd recommend to anyone who is into Fugazi. They have a similar philosophy towards music production with a more noise/post-punk aesthetic.

spooneybarger2• 8 years ago

Love them.

I saw them once at Trip or Treat at Hampshire college. Sadly their set was only 2 or 3 songs as the guitarist's foot went through the plywood stage and it ended up broken.

astronautjones2• 8 years ago

incredible band

CPLX• 8 years ago

This is amazing, thanks for sharing!

(I too grew up in DC and smoked a lot of adolescent cigarettes while trying to look cool on the Fort Reno lawn)

ilamont2• 8 years ago

Pretty cool.

Fugazi often played non-traditional venues in thier home town of Washington, D.C.

And in other locales, too. I saw them at a church in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. in 1989. At the time there were a dozen clubs in the Boston area that could have gladly hosted the band (TT the Bears, the Channel, the Rat, Bunratties, etc) but at the time Fugazi had this thing -- I think dating from MacKaye's Minor Threat days -- about only doing shows where kids could see them for $5, without age restrictions. No clubs could go that low, or insisted on 21+, so Fugazi did the show at the church.

It was an awesome show.

my_username_is_• 8 years ago

Was Fugazi the only band doing this at the time?

When I was tuned in to the local music scene in the greater Boston area (say 15 years later), it seemed like most shows were at 'non-traditonal venues' like VFW halls, churches, and basements. It's funny to think of a time when DIY bands played mostly 'real' venues

spooneybarger2• 8 years ago

No but there were very few bands of their stature that did it.

ilamont2• 8 years ago

I think the local club/audience dynamics changed. These clubs in the late 80s/early 90s could fill up a small venue with an out-of-state headliner and a few local supporting acts which gave an incentive to regularly do these shows. 10 or 15 years later I think that became far more difficult as fewer people wanted to see loud bands in a small club, which drove the DIY bands back into DIY spaces. I remember the last time I went to TTs in the early 2010s and very few young people were there to see the rock bands.

There were always DIY shows percolating at the edges in the 80s, sometimes with well-known names participating. I saw F.O.D. in wide hallway on the 2nd floor of a beat-up Allston commercial building that was sometimes used for art shows and poetry readings.

grtaylor2• 8 years ago

Also, their staff had envelopes with $5 bills in them. If you acted a fool or caused trouble they would escort you to the door and give you an envelope with your money back.

efrafa• 8 years ago

Thanks for sharing, Fugazi have a special place in my heart :)

vondur• 8 years ago

I’ve seen Fugazi many times in the late 80s and 90s. Great band who held the line on ticket prices. They were truly punk rock.

2_ghosts• 8 years ago

Great work, I really like this.

mychael• 8 years ago

Great post!

If you haven't listened to Fugazi before check out End Hits! Good intro record.

ablation• 8 years ago

Superb, thank you for sharing. Love the visualisation style too.

jacobush• 8 years ago

I had a desperate hope it was about the album Fugazi by Marillion!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqqkR2vqUZ8&list=PL9AEF437A7...

rbrtdrmpc-• 8 years ago

I'm so thrilled.

Almost as the time as a young punk rock kid in Italy (15yo in early 2000) after sending an email to them asking why on Instrument documentary Joe Lally was writing sentences in Italian on an exercise book, I received an answer directly from Guy Picciotto telling me that Joe was planning to live in Rome with his Italian fiance (and he did it). That was so direct and so simple I felt overwhelmed by how they cared to answer just a basic question from a random kid living on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.

Best band ever

p.s. Minor Threat, Teen Idles, Rites of Spring and One Last Wish were FUCKING AMAZING too

damontal• 8 years ago

I saw them in Philadelphia in the 90s. After the show, Ian came outside at the back of the club and sat on a stoop next to a dumpster and just answered questions.

I said ‘Mr. McKaye, can I have your autograph?’ He said call me Ian, please. And he signed the autograph ‘Ian please’

khazhou• 8 years ago

How strange to see a night I remember well as a teen in 1988, and I left the show half-way because me and Jason were talking about something, and we went back in and the smoke didn't bother us and the pit was great and it was aggressive but welcoming, and I can't even remember what girl I liked. But there it is... that night, a single dated entry on a web page.

andrewgleave• 8 years ago

Check out "The D-I-Y Data of Fugazi" by Matthew Conlen author of Idyll: https://idyll-lang.org/gallery/the-d-i-y-data-of-fugazi

It has a great interactive map as part of the experience.

amelius• 8 years ago

My comments:

Use of unsaturated colors can become boring.

No use of photographic material in visualizations.

Don't try to create structure where there is none, as this can be confusing. For example, in the local activism graph, colors have little meaning, e.g. "abortion rights" and "peace/anti-war" have almost the same color, while they are semantically far apart.

Use icons to depict meaning. For example, in the fundraising graph, instead of using circles of various sizes, one could use stacks of money of different sizes, which would make the meaning immediately apparent.

mikewhy• 8 years ago

I've never had the chance to see Fugazi, but my friend did bring in The Evens (Ian and his wife Amy) a while ago and I got the chance to play his guitar afterwards. Definitely a special moment in this old punks life, and what sparked my interest in baritone guitars.

rurban• 8 years ago

I was astonished that the article didn't mention "Instrument", the famous documentary about Fugazi and the Washington DC scene, the best visualization about them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_(film)

Visualizing the History of Fugazi

Related Stories