Up Yours: For Surly Characters That Just Don’t Give A Puck

Shameless is one of my favorite televisions shows. I’ll admit it. It’s a guilty pleasure, seeing all of these crazy antics. Maybe it reminds me a bit of my own childhood and family? Maybe? I grew up in a household with 7 children, 5 of whom were boys born back-to-back. It seemed like there was never enough money to go around and we were always dreaming up crazy ideas to entertain ourselves. Some of those ideas were pretty dangerous. Part of me is still amazed that we all lived to see adulthood.

But the thing I love about Shameless is the attitude. Yes. These people are poor and they struggle and some might even call them white trash. But they have a certain undeniable dignity. No one will tell them that they are “less than” anyone else. Anybody who tries that will get a middle finger in their face. It reminds me of moments when my mom used to give me and my brothers spit-baths (yes that’s a real thing) in the car on our way to someone’s house.

We were boys so we really didn’t care all that much if there was dirt on our chin or dried ketchup behind our ears…. Because our brother stomped on a ketchup packet and it went squirting everywhere to our gleeful delight. But our mother used to say (as she was applying the spit): “we might be poor, but we’re clean.” Nice try mom.

Attitude is what makes Shameless and it’s what makes so many characters we love to watch. When down-on-their-luck characters make poor decisions and everything still manages to turn out okay, it’s a reminder to us all of what’s really important in life. You don’t need a lot of money to still be a full human being, someone with dignity and even a chip on their shoulder. You can be a member of a dysfunctional family that will still fight for you and have your back when the chips are down. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that.

This is the attitude that Up Yours was born from.

The Backstory Of Up Yours

It isn’t just Shameless that inspired Up Yours. It’s also films like 1979’s The Warriors and the TV series Sons of Anarchy. Throw Breaking Bad in that mix. You can also add Malcolm In The Middle, Better Call Saul, Weeds and even The Wire.

Bad decisions make for great stories and that’s why we can’t resist these characters.

All of these narratives have a few things in common:

• Urban. Most of the settings for these stories are cities or towns where the main characters come from the wrong side of the tracks. Sometimes literally train tracks.
• Unafraid. These characters don’t run from or fear circumstances and situations that most people would avoid.
• Plucky. As the Lynard Skynard song says: “come to a fix not afraid to fight, you got that right.” These characters will throw down in about a heartbeat.
• Family oriented. For all of their toughness toward outsiders, these characters are deeply loyal to those on their inner circle.
• Bad decisions. The old saying is that bad decisions make for great stories. These characters have perfected the art of surviving bad decisions.
• Punk music. Punk-rock, post-punk and pop-punk seem to give these characters and plots the edge that makes them really come to life.

To give these kinds of stories that biting edge, we paid careful attention to several details in the composition process:

• Tempos. Most of these tempos are upbeat, north of 150 BPM.
• Intros. This music starts big. This is one of the hallmarks of this genre of music. The intros punch you right in the mouth.
• Gritty. This is not pretty music. It’s hard-driving and gritty, like road rash.
• Effects. One of the tropes of pop-punk in particular is the use of audio filters to remove, for instance, a full drum sound for a few bars. The drums sound rather hollow and empty until the guitars kick-in. This creates energy where everything really seems to punch all at once.
• Breakdowns. Most of these tracks include one or more types of breakdowns. Sometimes they are guitar-only breaks while other times they’re just drums.
• Band. This is a rock-band sound, so there’s not a piano, organ, violin, horn or any other kind of instrument in sight.

Who’s In The Band?

Up Yours is instrumental music that supports scenes, often in urban settings, where characters you probably wouldn’t want as neighbors do things they shouldn’t. The arrangements are guitar and drum driven, with rhythms that don’t let up… ever. There are only three types of instruments on the album.

• Electric guitar. There are typically 3-4 different types of guitars on each track. The guitar tones bite, cuss and snarl, like the music itself.
• Electric bass. Bass drives these tracks. The bass tone is bright, punchy and in your face. It often tempo-locks with the guitars.
• Drums. These drums are punchy. The drummer did not hold back and the result is a sound that makes you want to jump to your feet and rock out with the band.

If you listen to the music, you’ll feel the energy, the grit, the passion and the indifference to authority figures that makes punk music what it is.

How To Get The Most From Up Yours

If you are telling a story about characters from urban settings, particularly characters from dysfunctional families with a lot of tension, this music works. If you’re telling a story about disaffected teenagers, this music is totally at home. If you’re telling stories about characters just trying to survive and making desperate (even inadvisable) decisions, this is your music. If you need to show fight scenes or anything set in a bar with people doing a lot of drinking and cussing, yup, you guessed it. What about people breaking the law and somehow being totally shocked when the police arrest them? Perfect fit. How about family members dreaming up stupid ways to entertain themselves, most of them being dangerous or embarrassing? Once again, this is your music.

Wrap Up

Thank you again for your interest in Supernatural Sounds, our music and the stories we love to enhance through our little ditties. Your stories matter to us and we couldn’t do what we do without the showrunners, producers, directors game developers and other creative types who trust and support us. We’d love to hear what you think of this music, so please drop us a line, unless you’re too busy stomping on ketchup packets. That should totally take priority over everything else.