Turn on the news.  Look out the window, or perhaps, in the mirror.  It’s all the same, everywhere.  Every morning, I wake up and go to a job that I don’t like so I can pay for an apartment I’m too broke to move out of.  And, last night, in the middle of the night, a woman I don’t know was shot right across the street.  I heard her screaming, screaming for someone to please help her, but before I could even get out of bed, half a dozen shots went off.  Then, silence.

I suppose it is extremely fucking ironic that a couple of weeks before all of this went down, I interviewed Brad Logan, whose band F-Minus, just released a record named WAKE UP SCREAMING on Hellcat Records.  Irony aside, WAKE UP SCREAMING both brutally and relevantly reflects exactly what is going on in the world today.  Society and reality may be nearly impossible to understand and accept, Logan and WAKE UP SCREAMING seem to be saying, but at least, you are not alone in feeling confused and frustrated.

“We very much write for the here-and-now, as I think most punk bands do,” Logan told me, shortly before the start of the second US-Iraq conflict.  “This is a really weird time in world history.  It’s fucking scary.  The lyrics on the title track [which refer to bombs and chemical weapons] are pretty self-explanatory.“All of us come from the same background.  And we’ve all done the nine-to-five, mind-killing slave shifts.  You just start to question your life, and it murders your soul.  That’s what [the song, ‘You’re Out of Reach’] is about.  It’s about the things you have to do at work, and the things you have to exploit in yourself as well as whatever product you’re having to sell.  When we recorded [‘You’re Out of Reach’], we kept the first take.  I just went for it.”

(F-Minus photos are courtesy of Simon.  Please check out Simon’s site at: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~simonp/.  Thanks, Simon!)