Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. Friends, I am so excited to bring you this episode with Ian Mackay,

frontman of Fagazi, the Evens, and now Kariki.

He's the founder of Discord Records. He's an archivist, and he's someone whose art,

an approach to it has, I think, made room for so many artists to feel the strength that they

have to live in their integrity. That includes me for sure. You know, Fagazi's name was

really present for me, starting way back when I was in high school. I love their music, but I also

always thought of them as a kind of standard bearer for how to make music and let it have its

life ethically in the world.

Ian calls punk the free space.

It's a place where new ideas can emerge and grow without being tethered to expected and

distorting economic conditions.

And that was certainly part of what was conjured up when you would talk about or think

about or listen to Fagazi. Back then also, I knew Fagazi as a band that was rumored to have said on

stage, don't beat up gay people. And for me, growing up in small town Pennsylvania, that was a defense of my life,

even though it was the life I was hiding away, that was so important to me just to know that this

loud, intense band was saying this to the kinds of communities that I was in, that I knew,

did have some homophobia, did feel sometimes

threatening, even though that's where I also felt the safest. So knowing that that was out there

was so important to me. And you can see that exact moment, in fact, chronicled in Jim Cohen's film about

the band, which is called Instrument. It is, I think, one of the best documentaries by far about the

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