The Make Up: Американский пост-панк и "Евангельский Йе-йе"

American post punk band

The Make Up is an American post punk band from Washington, D. C. formed in 1995, consisting of ex Nation of Ulysses frontman Ian Svenonius on vocals, James Canty on guitar and organ, Steve Gamboa on drums, and Michelle Mae on bass guitar. The Make Up were joined in late 1999 by a fifth member, Alex Minoff (of the groups Golden and Extra Golden), who played guitar with the group until the band's dissolution in early 2000. The Make Up combined garage rock, soul, and a self styled liberation theology to make a new genre they called "Gospel Yeh Yeh". 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". The Make Up released four studio albums, two live albums, a compilation release collecting several singles and B sides, and a number of vinyl singles, all released on independent record labels such as Dischord Records, K Records, and Southern Records. Svenonius, Mae, and Minoff would go on to form Weird War, who released three albums on Drag City. Svenonius has released a solo album under the pseudonym David Candy, as well as records with the groups Chain & the Gang, Felt Letters, and Escape Ism. Canty would go on to play with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and French Toast. The Make Up reformed in 2012 to perform at All Tomorrow's Parties (music festival), and has continued to tour sporadically in the U. S. and Europe with drummer Mark Cisneros (Des Demonas, Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds) replacing Gamboa.

Before the formation of the Make Up, Svenonius, Canty, and Gamboa were members of The Nation of Ulysses and the short lived Cupid Car Club. Before joining the Make Up, Mae played with the Northwest group The Frumpies. In a post Nation of Ulysses interview, Svenonius explained the formation of the Make Up: "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". The Make Up released records through many independent record labels, most notably Dischord Records, K Records, Southern Records, and their own Black Gemini Records.

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. Also in 1997, the Make Up were the subject of James Schneider's fictionalized tour documentary Blue is Beautiful. 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. 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. 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". 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". 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. 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.

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. 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". 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". 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".