Material Support, a Filipino hardcore band from Queens, understands this concept very well. They recently released “Balikbayan Box Demo,” a four-track pack of charged-up anarchist screeds that bounce between English and Tagalog. On the demo’s centerpiece, “Manarchist, Brocialist,” the lead singer, Jackie, shrieks through a list of sociology buzzwords and hyper-leftist caricatures before speed-screaming the chorus: “Smash the patriarchy, transmisogyny, hetero, and homonormativity.” (The band claims more than one law-school grad.) The aesthetics surrounding the lyrics ground the message: fast-fisted snowy guitar, drums that build up to double and triple time, and six sneering deployments of the word “fuck.” It’s a bratty, brilliant vision of deep disaffection, from the song’s title to its taunting of “token inclusivity” and “cis dudes wearing flannel”—ultimately, an assertion that the left isn’t left enough.
The New Yorker, “Polarized Punks”
