A specific legacy of Canadian campus radio was given its due at the annual ceremony for the Polaris Music Prize. Traditionally, all effete freshman broadcasters would feel obligated to throw the painfully strident likes of Dayglo Abortions, NoMeansNo or SNFU on the turntables during their show because, somebody must have genuinely liked this stuff, right? The real alternative! CBC Radio 3, now carrying the national torch for the indie rock aesthetic — entirely political, as if there aren’t more vital genres for a public broadcaster to focus on — has long found comic relief in the antics of Fucked Up. Now, by virtue of a giant novelty cheque, a few more across the nation know their name.

But the months leading up to the release of their victorious album, The Chemistry of Common Life, suggested that there was more appeal to the act than the “Pop-Core” disparaged by the prize-losing tall foreheads from Metric. Taking a legal stand against Camel cigarettes in late 2007 for using the name Fucked Up in an apparent advertorial spread touting the merits of the “Indie Rock Universe” — for which only one related wrist-slap for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has come down so far — could theoretically pay them billions more than the Polaris Prize did, although precipitating the death of Joe Camel might have been victory enough. Sadly, the ascent of Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham to the punk rock A-list has resulted in fewer notorious stories, or ability to make them up: like reports of a riot at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, where a mosh pit on a pedestrian bridge sent fans plunging en masse into the river. Getting unplugged by authorities during a college show in the suburbs of New York, for fear that Abraham would end up harming the audience — and not the other way around —  was entirely real, however. The morning after their passage to legitimacy, with plans to spend the $20,000 winnings on a charity record to benefit the cause of missing aboriginal women, blogger Mike Boon took stock of how the F-word was played in mainstream Canadian headlines. The New York Times were way ahead of that curve: from fall 2007 through spring 2008, they went from being called ******** to a “brisk punk band from Toronto, with an unpublishable name” to the particularly ominous “[unprintable in this newspaper]“. By the year-end wrap-up in 2008, though, the Paper of Record settled on one for the stylebook: ********.