Fat Mike and NOFX Take on Big Pharma in New Song
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On October 7, seminal punk rock band NOFX will release a new album First Ditch Effort on Fat Wreck Chords, the legendary label run by singer/songwriter Fat Mike. Last week, the band dropped the music video for "Oxy Moronic," a song that takes on Big Pharma, as one of the first singles off the release.
Fat Mike, who has spoken freely about his struggles with drugs—even going so far as to document himself detoxing from painkillers on Instagram—is very direct in expressing what he thinks about Big Pharma in the song.
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Here's a sample of Fat Mike's lyrics in "Oxy Moronic":
"I've been called an Oxy Moron/Because I question which drugs our war's on/Why are there more drug stores than liquor stores you can score on/The healers have become the harmers/They're just pharmaceutical farmers/What we used to call dealers/We now call doctors/I might be a CD Cynic/Cause that crack house is now a clinic/It’s time they change the name of the oath to/The hypocritic or the parasitic...”
The music video, produced by the Funny or Die crew, resembles an infomercial that mocks drugs like OxyContin and Viagra, which have addicted and harmed tons of Americans.
As our country grapples with the continuing drug wars and Big Pharma pushes pills for mass human consumption—getting rich in the process, just like any drug dealer—no one wants to get to the point which Fat Mike has so eloquently illustrated in "Oxy Moronic."
“This album is more personal than anything I’ve ever done before because once we put everything out there in the book it opened all of these doors are far as what I want to sing about,” Fat Mike told Alternative Press in July. "A lot of people are going to look at me differently after hearing this album."
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The book, NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, which came out this past spring, is a memoir detailing the adventures the band has had in the music industry over their 20-plus year career.
“I used to live so much of my life in private but I’ve slowly started going to parties and out in public without being embarrassed of my true identity, and that confidence just transferred over to my entire life,” Fat Mike told the A.V. Club in 2012.
“I tried drugs in my 30s ... People expect rock stars to be wasted, and if you’re not it’s a disappointment. If you’re an actor you can’t show up at work wasted, or any kind of the arts. You’re not supposed to show up at work wasted. Maybe Jackson Pollock or something."
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After landing on the US Marshals Top-15 Most Wanted list and being sentenced to a 25 year sentence in federal prison for a first-time, nonviolent LSD offense, Seth built a writing and journalism career from his cell block. His raw portrayals of prison life and crack era gangsters graced the pages of Don Diva, Hoopshype and VICE. From prison he established Gorilla Convict, a true-crime publisher and website that documents the stories that the mainstream media can’t get with books like Prison Stories and Street Legends. His story has been covered by The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and Rolling Stone.
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