If you aren’t going to watch the video, then you can read this little summary of how the lead singer of Fucked Up got to be on Fox News.

In an end-of-2008 wrap-up, Gutfeld [host of Fox News’ Red Eye] mentioned Abraham’s band’s album, The Chemistry of Common Life, as his favourite disc of the year.

Abraham got wind of this through the owner of his band’s label, Matador Records. “I thought it was a joke,” he notes, then emailed Gutfeld to thank him.

Soon after, Gutfeld invited Abraham onto the show. Abraham was reluctant, but Gutfeld persuaded him by naming some of the punk legends who had appeared previously, including Buzz Osborne of the Melvins and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols.

In introducing Abraham, Gutfeld gleefully uttered the band’s unprintable name on-air (it was bleeped by Fox), compared them to the Beatles “” “if the Beatles were any good,” he added “” and again called The Chemistry of Common Life the best album of 2008.

Abraham, wearing an Obama T-shirt, impressed in his five-minute appearance and was asked back.

In his subsequent appearance, Abraham shocked producers by presenting Gutfeld with a “Support Our Canadian Troops” T-shirt he’d bought at a Royal Canadian Legion hall in Calgary.

He said Gutfeld took the joke in stride, but the producers had a “look of terror on their faces.” [CBC.ca]

What this summary leaves out is that during the time between Abraham’s two interviews, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld had become more or less the most reviled man in Canada by mocking their military efforts in Afghanistan. After a massive public outcry Gutfeld “apologized” for his remarks (once in a backhanded way on Twitter, and once via a formal statement to the media), but at the time Abraham appeared for his second interview the military controversy was still “the elephant in the room.”

According to the Q TV interview, Abraham said that Fox News made him an offer to become a regular commentator on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, and he was still “wrestling” with the decision of whether not to accept it. However, the same CBC story I quoted from above makes it seem like he has in fact already accepted the job:

Abraham, who says Fox wants him to make at least one appearance per month and perhaps as many as three, says producers hoped to make him a gender expert because he majored in women’s studies in university.

“I pointed out that there’d probably be something problematic in having a white male be an expert on gender issues,” he said.

So the self-described moderate will instead be a general leftist pundit, his hulking physical presence providing a stark contrast to the usually meek commentators the network brings in to argue from the left. [CBC.ca]

Fucked Up is playing a free show at the East River State Park in Williamsburg on July 12, 2009