Make-Up (American band)
[3] The Make-Up combined garage rock, soul, and a self-styled liberation theology to make a new genre they called "Gospel Yeh-Yeh".
[7] Svenonius has released a solo album under the pseudonym David Candy,[8] as well as records with the groups Chain & the Gang, Felt Letters, and Escape-Ism.
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.
[3] In 2000, after releasing their fifth studio album, the Make-Up dissolved, reportedly "due to the large number of counter-gang copy groups which had appropriated their look and sound and applied it to vacuous and counter-revolutionary forms".
[3] As the Make-Up's frontman and mouthpiece, Ian Svenonius often contextualized the band's music in terms of larger socio-political themes.
Svenonius typically described the band and its gospel attitude in Marxist and socialist terms, in opposition of what he saw as the capitalist, bourgeois, machismo paradigm of rock and roll.
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.
[19] 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 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.
[21] 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.
[22] 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.
[3] Appropriating gospel music's use of the congregate as a "fifth member", the Make-Up incorporated audience participation through call and response vocals, lyrical "discussion" techniques, and destruction of the fourth wall by physical transgression.
Svenonius explained that "the problem is that the high creatures are the server mechanisms of the technology and the system they have created, meaning that we're dictated to as much by cars.
[12] Due to the Make-Up's consideration of the audience and the special techniques they applied to performing, their live shows exhibited a convergence of soul, surf, and punk – an example of which is their single "I Want Some" from their 1999 album of the same name.
[4] The Make-Up's gospel attitude was related to utilization of the audience as a group member,[23] which Svenonius likened to the rise of the 90s dance music scene: "We're not interested in countering it.
[24] 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".
