Violence Girl

Bags : Survive

[Purchase]

In December of 1978 the pioneering L.A. punk band Bags released their single "Survive" on Dangerhouse Records. Chicana front woman Alice Bags would write about her experiences in a memoir entitled Violence girl : East L.A. rage to Hollywood stage :

I'm bouncing on stilettos like a fighter in the ring, I charge out onto the edge of the stage, full of adrenaline and fire. I sing into the faces of the front rows. They are my current, my source of energy. I urge them to engage. I know there's something in them, some inner carbonation lying still, waiting to be shaken. It's fizzing in them as I shake them up. Shake, motherfucker, shake! I want you to explode with me.

Alice Bag's newest album is called Blueprint. Here's what NPR said about the album which made the Top 50 records of 2018:

On the eve of the second iteration of the white supremacist Unite the Right march, in Washington, D.C., Alice Bag filled the back room of a conspiratorially maligned pizza place across town with movement. "This march feels like a parade," she sang of very different demonstration, one where agua fresca abounded and storm trooper cops evoked a memory of "gray skies in '70," half a decade before The Bags rehearsed in Alice's parents' East Los Angeles living room.

 A November New York Times article titled "The New Punks of Los Angeles" infantilized a rising generation of Chicano punks as adopters of a scene too crucial to have been theirs by birthright. But the first punks of Los Angeles, Alice Bag among them, were brown. This revisionism, too, is a kind of "White Justice." Blueprint is an album that holds even the best intentions accountable. It strips away all the dressery of "we must do better" and "this isn't us" that sits upon a fundamentally fractured foundation. For all the weight of this truth on Blueprint, Bag still finds room to dig her nails into old soil, begin a reconstruction, and hope. —Stefanie Fernández