An Interview with Downtown Boys
Ironically, popular punk bands today look like the people within the systems they aim, or at least think they are fighting against. In the United States, in this state of constant fear and mourning, punk music made not by those people is a easy salvation. People write this music because they are tired of feeling they way they feel. People write to take away, for a while, the power from the people who will continuously have the power, as much as we wouldn’t like them to.
The band, Downtown Boys are described by Rolling Stone as “America’s Most Exciting Punk Band” but that’s been quoted in every interview with them since that’s been published. I see them as radical, and indeed they are, speaking out about the police state, being brown and oppressed, being a bilingual band, even doing interviews with media giant, Vice and speaking out about the immorality of the company whilst talking to Vice themselves.
Similar to protests in the street, it’s hard to get the feeling of the atmosphere in the room when Downtown Boys perform, through words or images posted on Twitter or Tumblr, until you experience it yourself. Black and brown people carry in their skin the historical destruction of themselves and their cities; Downtown Boys hold this knowledge too, and transfer it cathartically in their inherent urgency of their songs and their chants.
When lead singer, Victoria Ruiz, on the song “Monstro” yells “She’s brown/ She’s smart!”, she is saying “Don’t underestimate me”. Later on that night, after this interview took place at Bent Fest in London, on stage she calls the United Kingdom and the United States of America, “colonial cousins” which many other bands in the genre of punk would struggle to do.
A key player in the overflowing fascism in Europe and a place where “punk” in it’s modern day forms, feels overwhelmingly white. It would be lazy for me to say that their visit felt like a warm wave of water in an ice cold pool or a call to action but it was in fact the former, as me and so many others who wouldn’t usually feel safe. So I must ask is the safety of marginalised seen as radical to you?
Do you find that the audiences in Europe are different in any way in comparison to America so far?
Victoria Ruiz: Yeah, definitely. I think since it’s our first time over here, it’s a lot of people’s first time seeing us live so it’s definitely a lot of, just people who love music, it feels like, and who maybe read about us, or heard us online. And now in the US, we’ve been touring for so long that we kinda have these like, small communities now. So it’s like a lot of people of colour, a lot of people who thought we were one band but we’re actually something else. It definitely feels new and different. Today in Manchester, there were a ton of women in the front, shouting lyrics and that was kind of a first time that’s happened in the past 4 days.
Joey DeFrancesco: Today, this festival feels more like what we’re used to. It’s great.
One of the first times I’d heard of you guys was of the video of Joey quitting his job, how did you come up with the big resignation idea?
Joey: So me and Victoria actually worked at the hotel, that’s where we met. I was there for 3 and a half years and they, like a lot of service jobs were treating us really awfully, were stealing our tip money which is like — I don’t know how tips work in the UK, but in the US it’s like you get paid very little money and a lot of service jobs you depend on tips. I get housekeeping and they’re making these people clean 18 rooms in 8 hours, working with these really dangerous chemicals, so really nasty conditions so we’re trying to organise to form a union there. And so we were always just fighting back and forth with our managers, and that’s one manager in the video, Jared. A bunch of stuff happened with that, I could go on forever about the fight there but I eventually decided it was time for me to leave so me and Norlan [Olivo] played in another band called What Cheer? Brigade which is the brass band in the video, and we had joked for a while about playing these big life events, like quitting a job, or a proposal, or I could come out to your parents and the band comes out, these sorts of things. We were going to a show one day and I was like, “fuck it, I’m done here, let’s just go do this right now” and kind of offhand filmed it and then put the video up and over time it became this wild, viral thing and now it has like 5 million views.
Did you get any press around the video that wasn’t related to the band?
Joey: The Downtown Boys started around the time that video came out. So a lot of the press was focused around the video and the cool part was like getting to talk about conditions at the hotel in the press and going down to these mainstream news shows in the United States and getting to talk about stuff that not normally on these shows. Now, it’ll get inserted into an article about the Downtown Boys as a fun past life factoid or something. I think it fits within this whole idea of using art and video and music and bridging it with politics, I think it could be a part of the same sort of narrative.
Where did everyone’s activism start?
Norlan Olivo: The band that me and Joey played in, What Cheer? Brigade, there were parades, or marches that we played, that were I guess, activism, or in solidarity with a lot of bands or different causes. For me, this was a more direct way to do that, like as an extension of that.
Adrienne Berry: I’m a newer member to the band, it’ll be like 2 years in July. I’ve worked a lot with the homeless and the special needs community. Even when I was really really little I used to cry all the time about trees being cut down and had clean ups, and things like that. I think that people being tender and compassionate from my previous experience is really important. Being in this band is very much an extension of all those things.
Victoria: I think that being a person of colour and being in a single parent household, I was raised by just my mom, and my grandma and my aunts helped, but we were always incredibly poor like we would eat at my grandma’s house every day even though my mom worked a full time job and everything like that. I think really seeing her doing what she did, the pure existence of having to do that with her for 18 years was definitely how. I was like, “oh, there’s this thing called resistance,” and it actually is the most powerful when you’re working with the issues directly that are directly affecting you and then I think since that being really involved in gentrification fights, and immigration struggles and trying to find anything to do in order to push back against hegemony and against current power structures. We have people in this band who have dads who don’t even know who we are, who have parents who are undocumented, who really have nothing in terms of capital so really trying to determine how to take capital back from white supremacy and how to build something outside of those status norms.
A lot of punk bands are afraid of being seen as too preachy, what makes you want to say the speeches you do every night?
Victoria: First, this is the very first band I’ve been in so I’m not an actual singer, or an actual musician so the speeches were the thing I could add, because I can’t sing notes and stuff like that. Now I’m getting better. At first we were playing on sound systems, there was one speaker in basement venues and people couldn’t hear us sing the lyrics and the one thing we always got was like “Oh, I wish I knew what you were saying in the lyrics!” and “You guys have so much energy!” So, it was like okay, well, we’ll just say it in between the songs when the other instruments aren’t as loud, so a lot of it is just logistical and then people liked it. The other part of it is that the lyrics are really political — I am also not an original member, and from it’s inception Joey was writing very political lyrics which is why I became such a big fan of the band, so just getting those out there is important in a clear way to people. I also think a lot of our heroes have used stage banter in order to get their message across.
Who are some of your heroes?
Victoria: That use the banter?
Yeah.
Joey: Bruce [Springsteen].
Victoria: Bruce, Selena, and like I wouldn’t say they’re my heroes but I’ve definitely learned from Chain and the Gang. I mean, rap uses that rhetoric.
Have you had any difficulties with audiences or people because of your outspokenness?
Victoria: Oh, yeah. On the internet, in real life, it’s constant.
Joey: Like we go on tour and go to these places, and you know, we can stir things up a little bit but, in our own home town it’s like, we mean the shit that we’re talking about, and do things to act on it. And some people can like this aesthetic of a punk rebelliousness but when it comes down to actually trying to shift these power structures, they turn around go hell no, I’m not going to give up this thing that I get or I’m not going to move your seat, or put my neck out there and so you see that — yeah, there’s an incredible tension that gets directed at our band because of these things. It’s talking about these things or in a lot of cases, doing these things in a certain way that some people are very threatened by.
How do you guys stick true to your morals even whilst being interviewed by publications such as VICE and Billboard? Is it a decision to talk to these publications based on more accessibility?
Norlan: I think that we’ll talk to just about any publication as long as they’re not like, terrible or their politics lie in a place that we don’t agree with, but I think that any chance for us to sort of spread our message or talk to people and let people know that we exist, that people of colour exist, that people of colour who play music exist and all of those things exist, I think it’s a good opportunity. We don’t usually seek out, most times people just come to us, which is really cool that people are interested and want to have us on their show or whatever.
Victoria: The other thing is that we need it because we can’t reach — some bands I think have a lot of white privilege in the United States to not have to need those publications to reach out to a niche. Or people who fulfil a specific genre, don’t need the publications because they’re gonna have a base but like this band is hard to put into a genre, and we have a fat person in the front and you have people of colour in the band. It’s the things we’re saying are threatening to a lot of people so it kind of does allow us to build a fanbase and community and it sounds weird but more people of colour know about us because we are in Vice and Rolling Stone, that’s just true. More queer people know about us because we’re in Vice and Rolling Stone, it just is.
You guys also run Spark Mag, what made you want to start the website?
Joey: Spark Mag came about via a relationship with a guy named David Segal, who used to be a politician, very left wing guy, state representative in Rhode Island which is the state that we live in and after doing that, Victoria worked on his campaign for national congress. He eventually formed a group called Demand Progress that does all this important work fighting the police state and surveillance state in the United States, and internationally in a lot of cases. He was a big fan of our band and a big supporter of our group and could see the importance of this cultural side affecting politics and vice versa, and so wanted to integrate that somehow into the work that he’s doing. So he approached us about trying to work on launching something and of course we were interested because it’s the intersection that we’re interested in, but it was direct out of experiences like working with the media as artists, you can just see very well who gets covered, why they get covered, how they’re written about, etcetera, and so having a group like Demand Progress who can actually fund something like this website where we can pay writers and create this alternative thing where we have a lot of cool people, a lot of radical people, a lot of musicians writing these articles and getting that funding out there and getting those articles out there, I think is a really important cultural piece.
Do you have any long term goals for the website?
Joey: We’re trying to keep it going as a long as we can, we’re trying to figure out ways to make is sustainable through donations through like selling tracks on the website, playing a little bit with some ads on the website or we could hire more people as staff, just to keep it going. Cause like a lot more DIY things, in the early stages it’s so dependent on the exhausting work of a few people, not necessarily getting fully compensated for it. But I think the site does so a better job at a lot of things since we are paying writers and stuff but yeah, making it so it can be it’s own thing on it’s own…
How are you guys feeling about the US elections at the moment?
Adrienne: The existence of someone like Donald Trump in the political system really exemplifies the crazy circus the political elections have become in the United States in some ways. I mean, he’s a hate mongerer and a supporter of violence and unboundless capitalism and he’s hateful towards all sorts of people. It’s bringing to a lot of people’s attention how hateful some people really are as well, in all of our different communities, and I think it’s bringing up a lot of issues that people aren’t necessarily talking about, they’re like wow, someone who is running for president is so overtly racist, and classist and sexist. I think and I hope that it is pushing people to really check themselves and to think about where they stand and the importance of not completely selling everything that the US government outs.
Victoria: It’s sad that Bernie is probably not going to be the president this time around. But incredible that he lasted as long as he did; I think he broke a lot of the shells of people who like didn’t ever — including myself — care about the presidential election, and then I think after having two terms of a black president where mass incarceration numbers either stayed where they were or grew in some states, where more people were deported than ever before in the United States of America and where there was a bigger militarisation of our army and our police forces so like we saw Holocaust-like moves after moves in Palestine and so on and so forth against Palestinians, under a black president does show something very real and very scary about our country and is a huge call to action. So with the elections right now, in a way we’re there and we all know that that one office isn’t actually what holds the power of the status quo, and seeing that is actually really hopeful to be honest because people did go tooth and nail for Bernie, even knowing that he wasn’t going to get there. It was more about the process and then Hillary Clinton is just very scary. Her husband started the drug war, she was very supportive, she’s always supported things like the death penalty, she was on the Walton family’s board of directors for Walmart, which is the most evil corporation in the United States besides the US police force itself, so she’s also a fascist and she’s not anything to be excited about.
I totally agree. What’s the difference between when you’re a Malportado Kids song and a Downtown Boys song? Do you have specific sections where you finish writing a song and you go “hm, this is a Downtown Boys song?”
Joey: I don’t think for me when I’m doing the music part of it for the DB ones I’m writing the music for, it’s just like setting out to make music that sounds that way, it’s just fun making that kind of electronic music, you’re going into the computer and like doing this set of things. Getting out the guitar is something else to do it. I don’t know, I don’t have a good answer to that question.
Victoria: I think about it a little bit because the Spanish, like if I sense more Spanish in Downtown Boys, it’s like, “Okay, let’s write some English lyrics” and English lyrics for Downtown Boys are really different to Malportado Kids. Malportado Kids for me is more interpersonal stuff and it’s about the body and stuff like that, Downtown Boys is too, but it’s more macro so in terms of lyrical ideas I think of them as separate platforms, kinda like siblings from the same parents.
So, what have you guys been listening to recently?
Mary Regalado: I’m listening to Coneheads, I’m listening to Devo, listening to the Fog, Iistening to Sheer Mag, listening to Sneaks, listening to Yoko Ono-
I love Yoko Ono.
Mary: Me too! I just got a Yoko Ono record in Antwerp, that I’ve been looking for for ages, so I’m stoked to go home and listen to it and hang up my Yoko Ono poster on the wall. I’m listening to Rihanna, I’m listening to Erykah Badu.
Adrienne: I really like this Chubby Checkers record right now that’s like psychedelic record, it’s really awesome. A lot of Curtis Mayfield, Sly and the Family Stone.
Joey: We listen to a lot of Hothead, Laurie Spector, in the band.
Victoria: Kendrick Lamar!
Norlan: All I listen to these days is rap, some jazz and a lot of Nina Simone.
What are your plans for the next year?
Mary: We’re playing DC, Adrienne and I are in another band called Gauche and we’re gonna tour with SHOPPING in the States.
Victoria: We’re trying to see if we can write another record.
Joey: Slowly, slowly writing…
Mary: We’re gonna be recording this fall.
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