On my Soundcloud and Mixcloud accounts, you might have noticed my own bastardized Spanish translation of a line from a Jawbreaker song: “You’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone.”
My punk rock era was never that serious or intense compared to most of the people I know. I had started getting into it in high school when I bought a Clash boxset at Wal-Mart that had the self-titled, London Calling, and Combat Rock albums all packaged together. From there, I later adopted many of the seminal punk groups of my college city: Washington DC. I had a short Hardcore phase where I could do nothing but listen to Minor Threat. My friends back home in Pennsylvania would introduce me to every band that would play a pivotal role in my life and help me make sense of the world. Fugazi, Black Flag, Descendents, Rites of Spring, The Proletariat…
Despite how important punk was to me (and continues to be, to be honest), I wasn’t in the trenches like many of my friends were. They had tattoos and made their own music and partied hard. I didn’t have any tattoos. I couldn’t play in a punk band because my best friend and I both played bass guitar, and he was a hell of a lot better at it than me. The only thing I knew how to do was drink and go to shows.
I promise I’m going somewhere with this!
I think one of the key elements that made punk so influential in my teens and twenties was the sense of rebellion against an unjust world. I thought that by yelling loud enough or turning the amps up high enough, we could make sense of what the world was, and continues to be. It is an unjust mess – it was back in the early 2010s when Occupy Wall Street came to the public consciousness to protest income inequality, it was after Trump I, and it continues to be today under Trump II.
Today, I think that the biggest hallmark of the injustice of American society is the callous, inhuman treatment of immigrants by the Trump administration. And I think that is the exact reason why Latin music has become the modern-day Punk rock music. It protests against the barbarism of the political spectacle of ICE raids, the Republican party, and even the inability of the Democratic party to do anything more than offer a token of resistance.
I think of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show as the moment where this idea started to form in my brain. The overt messaging of pan-Americanism, the unabashed celebration of Latin culture and its heritage… all of it repudiates the current state of American political discourse and puts forward a vision of what we could be. It showed me a glimmer of hope, of what America could be if we could just come together and kick out the worst of us that currently hold political office.
The biggest advantage that Latin music has right now that punk rock never did is that it has a pretty strong grip on popular culture in the Americas right now. Punk had its moments, to be sure, in its late ‘70s heyday and then again as a tangential part of the grunge movement in the ‘90s. But I don’t think punk ever had the kind of cultural cachet that someone like Bad Bunny or Karol G has right now.
And sure, there’s a lot about Latin music that doesn’t link up to the punk ethos in any way. Just listen for more than a few songs and you’ll come up against lyrics about owning Lambos or having tons of money or whatever. And, because it’s so popular, there’s no way around talking about the corporate labels and the millions of dollars that are involved in the production, sales, and marketing of the artists. You can’t really make a case that any of these artists have “sold out” – it would be more remarkable if some of these artists didn’t have a major label deal.
(Though I am still learning and listening to a lot of varied stuff in the genre, and I do get the sense that there are a lot of gems either just waiting to be discovered or that are so left-field that there’s no possible way they could be on Latin radio – I’m thinking primarily of artists like AKRIILA or Meth Math.)
But I do believe that the popularity of Latin music in America will have a positive effect on the way Americans treat other Americans, or the way they’ll even just think about Latinx immigrants. Perhaps it causes someone to do some research on the reasons why an immigrant might be scared to be deported back to their home country – which in most cases is tied directly to decisions and interventions by US imperialism.
Maybe someday in the hopefully near future, Bad Bunny’s message of pan-American unity will become a reality.
Until then, I’ll just keep on sharing, spreading the vibes, and hopefully doing my part for the cause.
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