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Linda Lindas’ “Racist, Sexist Boy” went viral after the LA Public Library tweeted a rendition of the song. LA Public Library / YouTube hide caption
toggle caption LA Public Library / YouTube
Linda Lindas’ “Racist, Sexist Boy” went viral after the LA Public Library tweeted a rendition of the song.
LA Public Library / YouTube
Few things fill a heart with hope like a group of young girls playing punk rock in a public library. In a space where books and information open minds, here too our minds should be blown away by cries punctuated by powerful chords of “Poser! Blockhead! Riff raff! Jerk face!”
According to their Bandcamp profile, the Linda Lindas group, a half-Asian / half-Latin group with “two sisters, a cousin and their close friend,” opened the Los Angeles Public Library’s AAPI Heritage Month celebration on the 4th may. Amid stacks of books and a small, masked audience, the band tore up a 40-minute set of originals before ending with covers of Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” and The Muffs’ “Big Mouth.” But it wasn’t until yesterday, when the library tweeted “Don’t mess with the Linda Lindas” with a clip from her new song, that our new queens took their throne.
“Shortly before the confinement, a boy came to me in my classroom and told me that his father had told him to stay away from the Chinese,” Mila, the thresher, said at the start of the video. “After I told him I was Chinese, he walked away from me. Eloise and I wrote this song based on that experience.”
“Racist, Sexist Boy” rushes in with muddy fury and a choking bass sound, turning on a penny to the fast power-pop chorus; it is a vicious elimination of closed-minded boys, but channels anger into renewal: “We are rebuilding what you destroy.” But the song also extends a cross line of punk’s early provocateurs: women who spoke out against misogyny and racism long before the distinctively white male scene realized it had to come forward already. Of these key voices, Kathleen Hanna and Alice Bag are fans, and have already had The Linda Lindas open for them while at LA Paramore Hayley Williams tweeted that the Linda Lindas have been “one of my new favorite punk bands. since about the time they came out of the womb. “
The Linda Lindas take their name from Linda Linda Linda, a 2005 Japanese film about young girls who form a band (to use the Blue Hearts song “Linda Linda”) for their high school cultural festival. They recently appeared in two films: in Amy Poehler’s MOXIE, performing covers of Bikini Kill and The Muffs for One Night; and performing an original song in The Claudia Kishi Club, a short documentary on the Japanese-American character of the Baby-Sitters Club.
Watch the full set from The Linda Lindas LA Public Library below.
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