(2017)
Album: The Navigator



Hurray For The Riff Raff frontwoman Alynda Segarra spent much of her youth hopping trains in search of America. The band’s sixth album, The Navigator, follows the story of a similar young girl, Navita, as she does the same. ‘Be something!’ goes the rallying cry of the American by-your-bootstraps dream, of ‘Pa'lante,’ Segarra’s ode to the working class Puerto Rican community she grew up with in the Bronx. ‘Colonized and hypnotized / Be something,’ she sings in her piercing, wavering alto over a slightly out-of-tune piano — ‘Sterilized, dehumanized / Be something.’

After an interlude drawn from Pedro Pietri’s poem ‘Puerto Rican Obituary,’ first read in 1969, the same year the Young Lords of New York City adopted ‘pa'lante’ as their motto, Segarra’s ‘be something’ resolves into that familiar phrase pointing forward. She urges pa'lante the same ‘millions... (continua)

(2022)
Album: Life on Earth

Segarra non ha evitato completamente la politica. Lo spoken word Precious Cargo racconta la storia di un uomo in un centro di detenzione per migranti, una persona che Segarra ha incontrato lavorando per l’organizzazione Freedom for Immigrants.

La gioia radicale di Hurray for the Riff Raff

(2014)
Album: Small Town Heroes



NPR, The Political Folk Song Of The Year