Punk Band Fugazi's Straight Edge Rants Become East Village Opera

EAST VILLAGE, NY — The random on-stage rants of a cult punk band that preached veganism, "straight edge" living and anti-consumerism – and was famed for its hatred of stage-divers - have been set to music and will be performed as an opera.

What won't be featured in the East Village show? Fugazi's actual music.

"There’s nothing to be gained from rehashing that stuff," Travis Just, the opera's composer, told the Guardian about the music last year.

The show, put together by the performance group Object Collection, opens at La Mama, at 66 E. Fourth St., in February.

Just worked with writer and director Kara Feely to transcribe hours of Fugazi's recorded gigs, most of which were uploaded online by the band in their entirety. The pair listened to 891 of the band's shows — about 1,200 hours — and painstakingly documented the asides, jokes, instrument tunings and stories between songs.

"What if we actually took that joke to the most extreme level possible and really did something with it?," Just told the Guardian about using the band's chatter.

The opera, titled "It's All True," stunned the band, which has been on hiatus since 2003. Fugazi was led by singer Ian MacKaye and was known for its "straight edge" attitude against drink and drugs and its outright refusal to charge high prices for music and live shows.

"All of us were both blown away and disoriented by the work – it was well beyond anything we had anticipated when agreeing to Travis’ early request," said Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto in a statement.

The on-stage banter, according to Picciotto, was a way for Fugazi – which famously never used a set list – to make its shows feel unique.

"For us our between-song raps were a way to engage with the crowd as people in a shared space and precise moment, not just as consumers of a cookie-cutter event," he said.

"Basically it was a way to avoid feeling like a jukebox in the corner. Those raps were supposed to evaporate into the night air, but by taping them and making them available, we left a trail back and Object Collection took that trail and made it a script which solidified the ephemeral into something more concrete, a distillation of weird social history and politics as a residue that exists in even in the most seemingly random moments once they are boiled down."

"It's All True" premiered in Norway in 2016 and was performed in London last year. The run at La Mama will be the show's U.S. premiere. It is scheduled to continue through Feb. 25.

Image credit: Courtesy of La Mama