Not4Prophet: Ricanstruction’s creation was pretty organic. Brothers in the barrio, banging on garbage cans, throwing bricks, writing on walls and shouting in the streets, became musicians who realized that we could be heard (and listened to) if we (dis)organized ourselves as a kind of collective of counter cultural chaos. We always had something to say and we always overstood that as ghetto dwellers and members of the colonized nation known as Puerto Ricans, we were part of the struggle, part of a history of resistance, so it has always been the natural state of things for us to make music and make trouble.

AWOL: Why did you title your new album "Love and Revolution?" What does love have to do with revolution?

N4P: Che Guevara said the true revolutionary is guided by the greatest feelings of love. Love has everything to do with revolution. The true revolutionary loves life more than herself, and is willing to give her life to help make a world based on equality, justice and  humanity; create a world of love for the earth, for humanity (and other animals), nature and nurturing. There is no better way to show love than to struggle to put an end to injustce. Love is revolution. Otherwise, why bother?

AWOL: Do you get scared to use words like revolution in these days and times?

N4P: It’s especially during times like these that we need revolution. Revolution comes when there is no other way out. Yes, we are living in a time of war, but there has been a war declared on us since day one.  So these times are only somewhat different because war has come out of the closet, so to speak. The (un)elected U.S. government has at least partially taken off its mask and is stating clearly that we must make wanton war on other nations and remove as many freedoms from U.S. citizens as possible in order to ensure "freedom." So, yes, there’s certainly no better time to battle back with a revolutionary attack. No better time to dissent and resist. Malcolm said, "It’s time to stop singing and start swinging." Our music does both. But we always have to remember, while we dance in the streets, others are dying in the dirt.

AWOL: The highest recruited group in the country by the u.s. military right now is Latinos. How does that affect your work, musically and politically?

N4P: With our music and our other actions, we try to talk about the reality of our surroundings. Yeah, there are many reasons for joining the U.S. military, none of which have anything to do with being a patriot or going off to kill and die for oil or any government. A lot of young Latinos (like a lot of other young people in amerika) see their lives as a dead end. A stylish commercial and a fast talking recruiter can make travel to far off lands, learning a trade, making a career, and being a hero when you return to your sound damn enticing when you’re desperate for anything different, anything new. Of course, it never really comes up that one day you may be traveling to those far off lands to kill people (who in most cases are brown , like you), and your trade is death, and your career is war, and that if you’re really lucky, you may return to the hood as a hero in a pine box draped in an Amerikan flag. So unless we can start creating (and letting it be known) that there are alternatives to the military and murder, there will continue to be plenty of people willing to be cannon fodder for a bunch of old white capitalist men pushing buttons in clean offices far away from the trenches and the stench of death.

AWOL: How does the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and all that impact the work yall do, as artists, as strugglahs, as Puerto Punx?

N4P: Well, it just means we gotta try that much harder to get our music to the masses, through the concertina and barbed wire of the mind, and the roadblocks and police lines of the soul. Some people who normally would have known better are now wrapping themselves in amerikan flags and hiding in apartments-turned-bomb shelters with masking tape on their mouth sand alarms on their windows, believing all the fast food for thought that the mainstream media is force-feeding them on a daily bases. As strugglas, we still think about Mumia and the many other New Afrikan and Puerto Rican prisoners of war who are still in U.S. prisons. We still think about Vieques and the colonial condition of Puerto Rico. We still think about the liberation struggles throughout the "third world." And as artists and "Puerto Punx," we still think about freeing the land, squatting, sabotaging and subverting mainstream media, and making music that is the 
next shit.

AWOL: What's the track you submitted to AWOL, "Prison Psalms," about?

It’s a love song about a brother in the belly of the beast and a sister on the outside who sustains him by continuing la lucha hasta la victoria. Just another aspect of the internal war that is raging in amerika.

AWOL: A lot of people are feeling depression right now about the future of  the world: how do you get through a day?

N4P: A companera of mine once reminded me that "depression is collaboration with the enemy." So we get through the day by staying, as the rastas say, "upful," and finding ways to make mini subversions and create semi-seditions, and straight up sabotage of this shitstem. This always puts a smile on our faces.