An openly misogynistic, KKK-endorsed serial abuser and circulator of anti-Semitic imagery is now president-elect. Peter Thiel, a Lex Luthor-esque Bay Area billionaire who waged a unilateral war on the First Amendment, tried to dissuade youth from attending college, and is planning on infusing himself with the blood of adolescents so that he can live forever—for real, look it up—has been tapped as part of the transition team. Welcome to dystopia.
If this has you angry, you can at least take some solace in the fact that Fea is coming to The Ritz. If you don’t recognize that name, you should. The fiercely feminist, queer Latina punk band from San Antonio, Texas, is about as much the antithesis of Donald Trump as possible.
As with every person I’ve spoken to since election night, I offered my condolences to Phanie Diaz, the band’s drummer, when I reached out to her recently.
“It’s gonna be a fight,” says Diaz, who formed Fea with her Girl in a Coma bandmate, Jenn Alva.
Donald Trump, that Lovecraftian fever dream of a presidential candidate, has bolstered his political career by making people like the members of Fea invisible, villainizing them, or promising to simply kick them out of the country.
As the saying goes, history repeats itself. Many of the injustices Fea sing about in 2016, have been covered before—by The Bags, a late-’70s Los Angeles chicana punk band, for instance. It’s fitting, then, that Alice Bag (the singer of The Bags) produced Fea’s self-titled record.
Many are predicting that a lot of great music is coming in the wake of this election. On the one hand, that is probably true, and Fea are living, breathing examples. But on the other, that logic is a way of quietly telling musicians that they don’t matter until a moment of utter cultural vulnerability. But that doesn’t seem to bother Diaz.
“Keep spreading the word of love and understanding and stick together,” she says, before uttering an alarmingly concise summation of both the history of fascism, as well as our country’s current moment: “One man cannot define us.”
Fea
Nov 17, 8pm, $10-$12
The Ritz, San Jose
