Hello again, I’m Jim. I write The Avocado’s Couch Avocados TV column. My recent subjects have included the TV version of Interior Chinatown, the complicated legacy of Generations (the first daytime soap with a predominantly Black cast), the mischievous side of Netflix’s Dear White People, the anti-fascist energy of Andor’s first season, and the comedic brilliance of Ravi Patel during the recently renewed Animal Control. Because Stars (they come & go) is Asian British instead of Asian American (while I’m the latter), they asked me to take over Color Outside the Lines, a discussion place for BIPOC, for one more week as part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
The Linda Lindas are an all-teen Asian American and Latinx punk and power pop band that took their name from the 2005 Japanese high-school flick Linda Linda Linda, which stars Bae Doona as the Korean lead singer of an otherwise Japanese band that does covers of songs by the ’80s Japanese punk band the Blue Hearts. In 2020, The Linda Lindas received attention for recording an ode to Claudia Kishi, the Japanese American vice president of the Baby-Sitters Club in the YA novel series of the same name, for the Netflix documentary short The Claudia Kishi Club. The band released their second album, No Obligation, late last year and had the honor of teaming up with “Weird Al” Yankovic, who simply played the accordion, for the album’s Spanish track, “Yo Me Estreso.”
If you have 41 minutes or you like to work to the sounds of POC punk, revisit the entertaining 2021 L.A. Public Library AANHPI Heritage Month livestream that made a viral sensation out of The Linda Lindas.
The highlight of the livestream begins when then-10-year-old drummer Mila de la Garza, who’s half-Mexican and half-Chinese, says, “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. After I told him that I was Chinese, he backed away from me. Eloise [Wong] and I wrote a song based on that experience.” Wong—the musician daughter of Martin Wong, the co-founder of Giant Robot, an offbeat Asian American pop-culture magazine I preferred in the late ’90s over bland magazines for Asian American readers like A. Magazine and Filipinas—and de la Garza, her cousin, proceed to rip apart that kid, his coward of a parent, and other fuckwads like them in “Racist, Sexist Boy.”
But if you don’t have 41 minutes, Epitaph Records took the livestream and whittled it down to just “Racist, Sexist Boy.”
Apparently, the words “Quiet, this is a library” have no meaning in an L.A. library.
Today’s prompt: If you have a favorite anti-racist anthem, mention it (or a couple of other ones).