I have the good fortune to be family friends with The Linda Lindas, and I was thrilled to see them play Lollapalooza yesterday, after having seen them play Pitchfork and Riot Fest the summer before in my hometown of Chicago.
There was a moderate, steady rain during their set and for several hours during the afternoon, so my spouse and I created DIY rain ponchos out of garbage bags. They look a little like black leather 1970s clothes, right? 🙂 We ran into our friend, children’s musician Little Miss Ann, so it was a great synergy of Asian American youth music. Check out Little Miss Ann’s music; I especially love her recent EP Dim Sum for Everyone, and let’s just say that someone’s daughter may’ve helped sing on the title track.
Each member of The Linda Lindas has her own voice and style that contributes to the multifaceted whole. Lucia de la Garza’s lyric melodies on songs like Growing Up and I Remember; Eloise Wong’s full-throated roar on Racist, Sexist Boy and Vote!; Mila de la Garza’s power-pop anthems Talking to Myself and Too Many Things; and Bela Salazar’s tributes to cats and moving Spanish-language lyrics on Cuantas Veces, about loving our real and diverse selves (Todos somos perfectos/ En todas formas y hechos).
I came of age being really into punk and post-punk music in the 1980s and 90s. I searched for the few female punk singers and musicians I could find. Penelope Houston of The Avengers was one of my favorites; I wrote an essay for my ninth-grade English class about the lyrics to The American in Me, for which I received an A :). I wrote another essay for tenth-grade English class on The Replacements’ Achin’ To Be, and my teacher commented that it’d be better to write more of my own ideas rather than quote someone else’s so much (I did type most of the lyrics to the song into the essay, admittedly).
I went to college at UCLA (and met some of the parents of The Linda Lindas there) and helped put on indie band concerts, including several that featured female-dominant bands coming especially out of the Pacific Northwest, like Mary Lou Lord, Team Dresch, and Excuse 17 (Carrie Brownstein’s band before Sleater-Kinney). After a little while, people started calling these bands part of the riot grrl movement. The Linda Lindas recently did “summer camp” in Olympia, where many of their favorite bands started, as they write about in a Facebook post.
Like I said, I didn’t find many (white) female punk musicians when I was growing up, never mind ones who were also Asian American (and Latina). As many have stated, The Linda Lindas give us hope, resistance, joy, fierce intelligence, and fun in their damn good music and songwriting. May the circles continue to evolve.
Jane Hseu 