Originally posted at Ongoing History of Protest Music

Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up recently released their sixth full-length album “One Day.” As denoted by the album’s title, each band member committed to a self-imposed time frame of 24 hours to write and record their contributions.

Compared to their previous ambitious standards, the album is more straightforward but still carries considerable weight. It also features a few poignant social commentaries.

“Broken Little Boys” explores the generational cycle of toxic masculinity. Another song, “Found,” which is Shadowproof’s protest song of the week, chronicles how Indigenous people have been displaced and
murdered to build highways and “temples of police and landlords.” All for the worship of money.

The track was inspired by guitarist Mike Haliechuk’s experiences living on one of the oldest streets in
North America and his observations of the tragic consequences of colonization and gentrification.

“I used to live on Davenport Road, which is one of the oldest streets in North America and has been a
First Nations trail for thousands of years, running along the north shore of Lake Iroquois, which receded
after the last ice age,” Haliechuk recalled. “Just to the east was Taddle Creek, which was
buried underground during the 19th century to build the streets I walk on. I thought about gentrification
a lot, watching little stores get swallowed up by big buildings until I realized I am one of those big
buildings.”

Haliechuk continued, “The name of the song comes from the Shadi Bartsch translation of The Aeneid,
where she points out that the words ‘found’ and ‘stab’ open and close the book, which are two
meanings for the same Greek verb. That discovery is actually conquest, and that settlement is always
violence. And that any story I try to tell myself about the place I found to live can only be a story to
justify the expansion of one people across the world of another.”

The lyrics, “There I stood on the shore. Of a story we don’t tell anymore. All the names were erased.
Buried under a land that my people stole,” connect to repeated talks of a reconciliation taking place within Canada.

An essential part of the process is an acknowledgment that Canada is “a country found on a genocide”. It is time to discontinue the whitewashing of history.

Listen to Fucked Up’s “Found” off their album “One Day.”