Following their co-headlining tour of Canada, Fucked Up and The Halluci Nation have teamed up for a cover of M.D.C.’s “John Wayne Was a Nazi.” The song is a searing critique of conservative propaganda and hero worship.

While listening, the anthem is transformed by the chemistry of Fucked Up and The Halluci Nation who turns the music into a blast of aggressive, bass-rattling territory.

Other than the instrumentation, the vocal performances contributes to the insanity by how both singer’s scream and shout out the lyrics in pure rage. Fucked Up’s and The Halluci Nation’s version of “John Wayne Was a N*zi” can cause people to head bang while the music is blaring form the speakers.

For The Halluci Nation’s Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas and Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham, the decision to collaborate on this classic track was grounded in how the original flipped the mythmaking around John Wayne on its head.

“The song has been with me since high school,” explains Bear Witness. “The song and M.D.C. have stuck with me over the years. It’s got rage to it and that message, but I love that there’s a dark humor to it as well. It really fits in with the way we make music and visuals, with the message that we try to put forward about confronting one-dimensional misrepresentations of indigenous people in the media. John Wayne becomes a stand-in for the entire colonial project.”

“For me,” says Abraham, “it’s like this: you watch The Searchers in school, and John Wayne is presented very much as an iconic North American type of figure. As a young punk kid hearing this song for the first time, it did change the way I looked at him—it subverted it to where all of a sudden the hero is the villain, and you can see what’s going on in pop culture. As a young punk kid, this song was one of the first that showed the cracks in that veneer.”

The Halluci Nation reintroduced themselves to the world with their 2021 album One More Saturday Night. Composed of Bear Witness and Tim “2oolman” Hill, the Juno Award winning duo see themselves as contributors to the conversation around the representation of the contemporary indigenous experience, collaborating with artists across a range of musical genres and cultural groups.

Fucked Up’s latest album One Day was released back in January. BrooklynVegan hailed it as one of the best albums of the first quarter of 2023. Written and recorded over the span of one day, it is a full-bodied, immediate album that finds Fucked Up at their most brutal and passionate.

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat