A lot of us have had it with the explosion of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States that was driven by the 44th U.S. president, but The Linda Lindas have channeled their anger and frustration into a powerful earworm.
The “half Asian and half Latinx” teen quartet, featuring Mila (10), Eloise (13), Lucia (14), and Bela (16), delivered an eight-song set during a recent appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library. In a clip that has since gone viral, the band intro’ed a new song inspired by a classmate who carried his dad’s racism into the classroom.
“A little while before we went into lockdown, a boy in my class came up to me and said that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people,” Mila, wearing a Bikini Kill(!) tee, explained from her perch behind the drum kit.
She continued: “After I told him I was Chinese he backed away from me. Eloise and I wrote this song based on that experience.” Then Eloise chimed in: “So this is about him and all the other racist, sexist boys in the world.”
In the two minutes that follow, the teens blast through their punk anthem, “Racist, Sexist Boy,” bellowing the song’s anti-hate lyrics with a kind of energy that speaks to the personal place the song comes from. The library’s tweet, which posted on Thursday afternoon, quickly went viral, amassing more than 100,000 “Likes” and more than 40,000 retweets as of Saturday morning.
To their credit, the band has kept it chill while the library’s video of their performance made the internet rounds. Their last Facebook and Instagram posts were on May 12, which was apparently just after the library show happened. But the praise has been pouring in from all quarters, including Rage Against the Machine’s own Tom Morello, who dubbed “Racist, Sexist Boy” his “song of the day!”