Remembering My Forgettable Music Career #2: "F Plus"

F Plus (April 1994)

Music by Tim Gober and Liquid Diet
Lyrics by Josh Tinley
First performed by Liquid Diet, July 1994
Released on Drywall's No Mustard, April 1995

Liquid Diet was:

Josh Tinley: Vocals, bass
Brian Fuzzell: Drums
Tim Gober: Guitar

Free download: F Plus (MP3)

"Advanced Unified Math" (AUM) was Perry Meridian High School's name for trigonometry and pre-Calculus; Tim Gober and I took AUM our junior year, the year we started Liquid Diet. "F Plus" was my anti-AUM protest anthem.

Central to the AUM curriculum at Perry Meridian was the "homework quizzes." The day a homework assignment was due, we would go over as a class the solutions to any difficult problems. The following day, we would have a homework quiz, a quiz made up of problems taken directly from our homework assignment. The teacher allowed us to copy the solutions to the problems directly from our homework papers, the idea being that anyone who kept up on homework and paid attention in class should get an easy "A." I neither did my homework nor paid attention in class, and on several occasions I earned the curious F+ grade (not really failing, but not exactly passing, either).

Tim came up with the riff for "F Plus"; it was his first song. Unfortunately, Tim's perfectly good riff was tainted by my lyrics and horrid non-pitch singing. The verses of "F Plus" consist of a series of autonomous phrases relating to the AUM subject matter or the class itself ("chapter 10; who was 'Venn'?" and so forth), culminating in a declaration of apathy ("my blank stare, I don't care"). The chorus is the repetitive chant, "You can't teach me, you don't own me; you can't teach me, you don't own me."

It wasn't a good song, but it was short and it was punk and it fit in nicely on our debut EP No Mustard (April 1995).