"Sometimes there is a necessity to fight back. If that's scary to people, that's understandable, but we've got to get ourselves free."
 

Never discuss politics at a party. It hasn’t been cool since the ‘60s, and in NYC we must be cool. Weel, the rock band Ricanstruction us coming to the party. Not only will they talk politics, they’ll blow your ear-bone out with it. In true New York style, they’ve lifted from wildly different sources like Bad Brains, El Barrio and battling DJs, but their message is clear: we need a revolution.
 But does the word "revolution" mean anything much anymore? Tech-heads proclaim the "silicon revolution." Victoria’s Secret recently a new bra that delivers "revolutionary cleavage." Even that fascist bully from junior high jams to Bob Marley’s song "revolution" today. Ricanstruction’s vocalist, Not4Prophet, formerly Alano Baez, spoke with Shout about punk rock, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and what needs to happen to bring about el dia de la liberacion.
 

What does revolution mean to you?

Malcolm X said "revolution is bloody," and it is, but for us it’s more the idea of awakening. We need a revolution that’s physical, cultural, economic and spiritual in order to get us out of the position we’re in now. For us as artists, the idea is to be a kind of soundtrack for this awakening which we know to be revolution. It goes hand in hand with what’s going on in America, with people in the trenches in the inner city of New York trying to liberate themselves, to create something better than what we’ve got. We’ve got elections going on right now which mean really very little. It’s about more than that. It’s about dismantling the shitstem that exist today, and creating something from the ruins. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about revolution. Change. It’s a personal thing, and it’s also a part of the massive.

The recent referendum in Puerto Rico indicated that a majority of Puerto Ricans favor continued commonwealth status. So why should we care about Puerto Rican independence?

At the beginning of the Puerto Rican nationalist (Puerto Rican independence) party, the "independentistas" would nor participate in what the colonizer was telling the colonized to do. They would not legitimize the colonizers idea of what our status should be. The idea was, and is, don’t negotiate, don’t get involved in the "referendums" that the master is telling you to get involved in. So when they tell you that only a small minority voted for independence, you have to understand that a majority of "independentistas" don’t participate in the masters scheme. Puerto Rico is free only when it frees itself. If the US was truly so magnanimous, they would free Puerto Rico and then say, "Hey, if you still want to be a part of the U.S., then you guys vote amongst yourselves, and if you want to come back, you come back." But you can’t ask a slave "what do you want to do? We’re not gonna cut the chains off you, but would you rather sleep in the yard or would you rather sleep in the field?"
 Right now, we’re a conquered people, we’re a colonized people. Everything is controlled by the United States government. Nothing is controlled by Puerto Ricans. You cannot ask a people in that condition to vote in an illegal election which, incidentally, was not binding. Even if you voted for independence, the U.S. Congress would still have to decide if they wanted to give it to you. It was a joke. It was a farce.

How can you reach a large audience with such a controversial message?

For us it’s been mainly grass roots. We can’t get the message out through the mainstream media. Ricanstructions part of it is creating art, but we’re also involved in demonstrations, rallys, whatever’s going on in the street. We also just try to talk to people. It’s been cool for us because we do a lot of punk shows where there will be a 15-year-old kid who olnly knew Puerto Rico because his parents vacationed their one year. We’ll sit down and talk about things, and a conscious punk kid who wants to get involved, gets involved. It doesn’t matter if your a Puerto Rican kid or an Irish kid. We, for our part, just try to create a sense that it is our duty to resist, it is our duty to free all those who are not yet free. But the main thing is that Puerto Rican’s have to realize that they can free themselves, and that there is a way to do it. We may have to be the fly on the elephant’s ass to harrass the United States long and hard enough to make it impossible for them to continue to control Puerto Rico.

The lyrics in your songs are so dense it makes the listener want to go back and read them off the cover.

If there seems to be a density there, it’s probably from the sense of overwhelming claustrophobia within the inner city. A lot of times it feels like it’s gonna break free, it’s gotta burst free. I think we try to reflect that within what we write, how we write, and how we explode.

What influenced you to make this kind of music?

Growing up, my parents listened to musica folklorico, bomba y plena. My sisters would get dressed to the nines to go to the salsa club. At the same time I was listening to hip hop and writing on walls, and Arturo and Joseph (Rodriguez, the rhythm section) were DJ-ing, doing the battles and stuff. But also there was a strength to hardcore punk that we all felt, if harnessed properly and channeled correctly, could actually be another part of our experience.

What do you mean by harnessing punk correctly?

I came to punk as a kid, essentially by accident, being in a certain neighborhood at a certain time, and saying  "wow, there’s a sonic strength in that." I wasn’t necessarily hearing the same vibe that I heard when I was in my own ‘hood. So for me it was like, "OK, there’s a strength here, and there could be a revolutionary strength here, but it’s not necessarily the revolutionary strength that I need as a Puerto Rican kid who wants to free himself." The power of punk has to be harnessed and fused with the power of the Latino experience, with the power of the ghetto experience, and then you will have a real tool for revolution.

You’ve also got a spiritual element in some of your songs. How does that play into the Puerto Rican independence movement, and your own work?

When I was growing up, spirituality was always there, whether you were walking into a botanica and there were people speaking about Santeria, or whether you were up in Marcus Garvey park and there were Rastas who overstand that Jesus was in their image. African art was not art for arts sake. It went hand in hand with the spiritual, because all things were spiritual. I always overstood this naturally. It’s fully, because when I got a little older and was trying to find "my way", I started reading about communism and  I thought "oh, wait a minute, the opiate of the masses! I’m not supposed to be a spiritual person." But somewhere along the line, we come to overstand that it is our nature to be a spiritual people, and that sometimes spirituality can be a synonym for revolution.

Your first single, "AbuJamal", is about a hot-button issue with a lot of politically aware people right now. Did you set out to write the song about Mumia deliberately?

The music itself tells us what the song will be about. When we wrote that song back in 1996, we weren’t attempting to write a song about Mumia Abu-Jamal. I overstood that struggle, I overstood the issue, but I wasn’t walking around saying "I must write a song about this." But the music itself felt like it was about Mumia. Everything we’ve ever written, we just go with it, let it ride, and it ends up wherever it ends up. Somebody once told me that musically, the Mumia song was one of the most accessible songs we had, and I thought "Oh, that’s cool, because it’s about a subject that is not accessible." So I like the fact that if we ever have a hit record, it’ll be about Mumia Abu-Jamal (laughs).

A lot of your songs describe politically motivated violence. Inevitably, the question is going to come up about where you stand on that.

There is a difference between violence and revolutionary violence, and in many cases, revolutionary violence is just self-defense. If we look at Puerto Rico we overstand that violence has been perpetrated against us by the United States for over 100 years. The only way your going to stop it is through revolutionary violence. If a soldier has a boot on your head and you say "hey, get it off my head," the odds are he won’t. But if you knock his foot off and you knock him down, then maybe he’ll never do it again. That’s revolutionary violence. We don’t necessarily say "there must be violence," but at times there is a necessity to fight back. If that’s scary to some people, that’s understandable, but we’ve got to get ourselves free. What’s happening in Vieques (where independentistas and others are squatting on a U.S. military bombing range in protest) is an example of where we are not using revolutionary violence to attempt to remove a situation where violence is being used against us. It may work, but it probably won’t. The question remains how will we free Puerto Rico? Will we ever free Puerto Rico using the tactics we’ve been using? Perhaps we do need to use revolutionary violence, but that’s a question we have to ask ourselves. Malcolm said, as I said before, that revolution is bloody, and if many people understood what the word revolution truly means, they would not use it. The fact is, when violence is being used against, when you are being slaughtered, and imprisoned and crucified daily, you’ve got to do something. We’ve got to look at thing honestly and realistically and ask ourselves what is it we need to do to finally get free. Ricanstruction does believe that revolutionary violence is a realistic part of any revolution.

There’s a heavy White supremacist vibe in some corners of punk. Have you run into any of that?

We played a hardcore punk show in Pennsylvainia. There were mostly White kids there, checking out the band. They had a half pipe, so there were people skateboarding in the back. It was very cool. Then suddenly all these White-power skinheads came storming in. What was odd was that white-power skinheads started beating up "regular" white kids. I guess they thought they were cooler because they were white-power as opposed to just regular white kids. We thought the whole scene was ridiculous. That was one of the few experiences we’ve had of that kind. Essentially, people who come to our shows overstand where our heads are at, and what we’re trying to do, so it tends to be more of a community. Also, folks know we’re straight out the ghetto, so we ain’t got time for that.

Are you trying to create a community with this band?

To some degree we’ve done that.  The people who come to our shows tend to be conscious people who have their particular cause. Some folks are into free Mumia, others into environmental issues. It’s always cool to sit down with different people and talk about the many different issues. I’m always learning things. We’ve tried to stay DIY and we try to stay grounded, and we’ve made it a point to stay grassroots. We’ve tried to do our part to change things musically, culturally, politically, and people that have been coming to our gatherings have had that same sense of "we gotta do things, we gotta be radical, we gotta resits, we gotta create a new and better society that doesn’t think that it’s Okay for Donald Trump to be hanging out in the Trump tower while a homeless guy is sleeping out on the street. We know we’ve got to change, got to create a community that wants change. We know it’s not Okay for people to be starving while others are spending billions of dollars on shit.