A Look Back: Family Force 5

I find it truly amazing what dancing and a mosh pit will do to a dress that seems indestructible. Anyone who knows me would tell you that I have an unhealthy love to dance like a maniac and mosh. While my moshing days are coming to a close after a few too many softball size bruises and passing out, my dancing days are far from over. 2009 was the year of Family Force 5. I could not get enough and I think I attended 4 of their shows within a year. This dress is one of my later dresses where I learned the beauty of garbage bags and had constructed this dress within the 24 hours before the show.

The dress is based off of Family Force 5's song "Rip it up" which you can listen to below:





The song itself is about essentially dancing crazy and "ripping up" and "tearing up" the dance floor so I thought why not make that literal and take a dance floor (like the one below) and rip it up.

I created a bunch of brightly colored squares of duct tape and pieced them together. On the top of the dress, I cut out with a craft blade the words "Rip It Up" with the "p" mimicking the lightning bolt in the logo. After the concert, I hung around to get it signed by the band. Promptly after having it signed, I covered the signatures with clear packaging tape to preserve them. As you can tell from the picture, I was dancing so much I looked pretty rough though being front row and dancing like crazy in that small club was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Now after 4 different FF5 outfits, they remembered me as "Duct Tape Girl" when I saw them at Cedar Point/.


Rip It Up Lyrics:
I saw you strut
Into the room
My heart started pumpin'
When you broke out them moves

Your heels dug in
Straight through the floor
You're a machine, baby
Seek and destroy

[Pre Chorus 1:]
She must be crazy
She's got that feeling
Look out now she's a psycho killer

[Chorus 1:]
The dance floor is shredded to pieces
The way you rip it up has got my heart rate increasin'
The dance floor is obliterated
The way you tear it up has got my soul liberated

[Chorus 2:]
Rip it up

Rip it up
Don't stop until it's torn up
Tear it up
Tear it up
It's just the fate of the dance floor

[Verse 2:]
She cuts a rug
Just like a razor
Then burns it down
Like an incinerator

She's a slayer
And it don't phase her
She's from the future
She's a terminator

[Pre Chorus 2:]
Just like a chainsaw
Her teeth cut in
Watch out now here she goes again