Animal Man - Do You Feed?
This totally rad Fucked Up song is from their album David’s Town, which is a fake various artists compilation that purports to collect late 70s/early 80s punk gems from the town of Byrdesdale, where David Comes To Life takes place. I heard it because I bought Fucked Up’s Mixtape IV when it came out, which features a couple of songs from David Comes To Life and a shitload of singles, comp tracks, interviews, and total oddities from Fucked Up’s recent discography. I bought David Comes To Life around the same time, but my dirty little secret is that I’ve listened to and enjoyed Mixtape IV a lot more over the last few months.
Anyway, “Do You Feed?”, the song from David’s Town that made it onto Mixtape IV, is one of the best songs on the mixtape, and has become somewhat of a sleeper hit amongst Fucked Up superfans, so I think it’s appropriate that, at the same time as they are still releasing singles and videos from David Comes To Life, they also released this excellent clip for “Do You Feed?” I wasn’t sure if it was an official video at first, but before long I realized that the two main characters in the video are being played by Ben Cook and Sandy Miranda of Fucked Up. So yeah, this is a real video, for a stealth single of sorts, which is only available on a limited edition Record Store Day LP and an actual cassette mixtape, both of which may have sold out by now.
Regardless, one listen to “Do You Feed?” should make clear exactly why it deserves to be a single; recorded mostly by Fucked Up lead guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco during some extra studio time, the songs on David’s Town do a great job of capturing the casual, tossed-off brilliance of many of those early punk singles. Most of them were written over the course of an afternoon by musicians who could barely play their instruments, who just used the first chord progressions that they could play that sounded halfway decent. “Do You Feed?”, which was also casually tossed off over the course of a weekend that yielded a dozen-song LP, proves that this sort of spontaneous compositional style always has the potential to result in pure pop brilliance.And its equally spontaneous lyrics, which are basically about making a curry, are pretty fun too. So yeah, enjoy this reminder that you can’t really underthink a pop song. And if you’re half as enamored of it as I am, expect to find yourself still singing its chorus in random moments six months from now.
