“They Can’t Take Away Our Music”
Freedom, to me, feels like movement. It’s hard to write about freedom and movement without romanticizing it, to instead actualize the movement that makes feeling free possible. The feeling of freedom matters just as much as the phenomenon, experience, or concept itself because it’s what drives people to find one another and do whatever it takes to strive for and maintain it. The feeling of freedom, or what we think it feels like, makes us want to have it all the time, and when there’s a threat of it going away, we will, ideally, do whatever it takes to keep it. Without the feeling of freedom, it’s hard to keep on going, keep on living, keep on moving.
But I also don’t want to make freedom sound like it’s only a feeling because freedom is also material. Freedom, in many ways, is concrete. Freedom is the ability to exist as you are, sure, but freedom is also being able to pay your bills, rent, and groceries without concern. Freedom is the ability to walk outside as you are without the fear of your life being taken away. That’s the thing: freedom isn’t really as romantic as we may think, but the feeling freedom provides is still a very powerful force.
Freedom feels like movement to me because there’s always been a feeling of risk when I move. Media makes it easy for those in power to racialize and criminalize people who don’t move in a way that’s easy to control. Look at how it represents immigrants versus ex-pats (don’t get me started). If you don’t have the supposed “permission” to move somewhere, people will treat you differently. I learned this at an early age. In middle school, we’d get in trouble if we didn’t walk silently in line from classroom to classroom. As an undocumented immigrant, the risk in movement was especially apparent outside of the school hallways. I knew my family and I couldn’t go back to Ecuador because we didn’t have “papers,” and every time I asked my mom about it, she’d give me that look immigrant moms are really good at making when they want you to shut up. But I got what she meant. Being undocumented put us in danger in a real way that made me feel anything but free.
So when I say freedom feels like movement, I mean that it’s a driving force of possibility with simultaneous risk. As media continue to tell us to fear undocumented people, immigrants, and refugees, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. And I’m saying that as a “naturalized alien” or whatever the hell label I’ve been given that says my movement has been rendered “permissible” now. As if that matters.
“Bop Gun (Endangered Species)”
I feel especially free when I move to live music. Something about being in a crowd, the reverberating echoes of speakers, and seeing the look of musicians’ faces as they play gives me a feeling of sadness that reminds me of the stakes that come with every moment I get to move as I please. Who knows when my last body roll will be? (I’m not trying to sentimentalize freedom, mom! Can you just be cool for once?) That feeling akin to sadness is the powerful force that comes with freedom. And when I’m dancing around at a show, I get that sense of possibility and risk that comes with freedom for a bit. Music is the condition whereby people transfer an energy through sound that we embody in movement.
One of the last times I felt free was when I saw the LA-based psychedelic rock band Chicano Batman live for the first time in 2021. Yeah, it’s been a while. No one else does (did…they went on hiatus in 2024) psychedelia, soul, and tropicalia better than those guys. Their most recent album, Invisible People, had dropped the summer of 2020, and it was their first time out on tour since. Imagine the brown boy joy I felt when singing along to “Freedom is Free” with other Latinos in the venue. (At the iconic Webster Hall of all places!) And yes, I’m going for the literal freedom connection here because the song encapsulates the very-not-sexy, sad-and-happy, cathartic feeling that comes with freedom. If you need a visual for what I’m describing, the music video captures it well. The camera sits at the bottom of a toilet pointing outward and upward, disrupted by the heads of each band member being pushed down by men dressed in law enforcement uniforms as they sing the song. As each member rotates, they appear bloodier and more bruised, but they continue to sing. Eventually, the uniformed men’s heads are pushed down, though they are not singing along, ending with the camera rising above the surface, showing the band rocking out as the bodies of the police lie on the ground.
This moment of freedom took place during the time following quarantine where it still felt reckless going out. Being in a packed space meant you’d likely get whatever new variant of the coronavirus was around. Even going to the supermarket with a mask still felt like a task I needed to time strategically to avoid crowds. The fact that people of Asian descent were still facing blatant discrimination for the pandemic didn’t really make me want to be outside either. The anger from the last deadly shooting of an unarmed Black person by the police had died down (yet again!) which made being outside once again a threat to some. It was too easy to be a witness to tragedy. Honestly, everything sucked. And I was in grad school trying to write a dissertation. So yeah, maybe the idea of going to see some live music with other Latinos would cheer me up.
What I needed to do was move. And I don’t mean taking my stupid daily little walk to get some sun and move my vitamin-D-deficient body around. I mean move. Move with what some would call reckless abandon. (Damn, y’all almost caught me slippin’, romanticizing freedom again!) I needed to dance. The dance breaks in my studio apartment weren’t doing the job anymore. Streaming live shows or old iconic performances from the past could only satisfy for so long before I yearned to walk out the door. It was also starting to piss my neighbors off. (Sorry, y’all, but I kept hearing you too, so let’s call it even.) So, I took the risk and went outside with all these thoughts rotating through my mind as I took the Q train downtown to Union Square. A dance would be good.
But ahhh, I was going to see Chicano Batman live for the first time! I’d been following them since college when my best friend put me on. We call each other Pickles, so I’ll refer to her as that to lighten the sad boy vibes I’m clearly giving. (Sorry not sorry.) Pickles is a second-generation Mexican American who loves her home of the northeast San Fernando Valley. She’s two years younger than me, but we quickly bonded over our shared disillusionment of the Ivy League and love of rock music. Thin Lizzy, The Smiths, Rush, The Cure, Modest Mouse, The Smashing Pumpkins, Springsteen. Pickles was one of the first Latinas I met who liked the same music I did.
Months after we met, I joined her in her spring break visit home in 2014. Sometime before getting off the 210 on Maclay, she played a song from what I’m pretty sure was her iPod touch. (God, that makes this sound even longer ago than I thought!) It was the title track to Chicano Batman’s most recent album of the time, Cycles of Existential Rhyme. I hadn’t heard anything like it in my life. The soft organ, the reverberating guitar chords, and Bardo Martinez’s vocals. “I’m driving in my car upon this crowded star. It’s been my longest night under this full moon light.” Whoa. It was the closest thing I had felt to being in a movie montage driving down the open road. Is this what freedom feels like? There was a sadness to it. We were driving so fast. Well, as fast as you could on the 210 at night.
Chicano Batman was my introduction to brown people my age making sick music. Music like the indie pop of Cuco and the electronic of Helado Negro among others. I’d been wanting to see them for so long. As a band whose following was largely concentrated on the West Coast, they didn’t come out to New York that often. There was also the fact that Chicano Batman made me recall the person I became in college. Not just the guy who was meeting cool Latinas with dope taste in music like Pickles, but the Physics major who was questioning all formalized knowledge paradigms after taking Intro to Latino Studies and Intro to Quantum Mechanics in the same semester. The guy who started working at the Latino Cultural Center to make some extra money only to end up planning symposia for seniors to present their research and supporting student organizing to ensure cultural centers were getting the money they deserved. (I’m sorry, you can’t brag about having the most diverse incoming cohort of students in the same semester where you’re taking away funds from the cultural centers that support them!)
For me, Chicano Batman was an extension of the sonic practices of Chicanos, people of Mexican descent who were questioning and critiquing their relationship to nation by embracing their indigenous roots and ancestral connections to the land in the Southwest United States. Chicanos joined forces as people who labored, as people with a racial consciousness, as people who were banding together to address discrimination and legality after centuries of colonial relationships between the United States and Mexico. Musicians don’t throw such a politicized term to their band’s name without some intent. Eduardo, Carlos, and Bardo made their politics pretty obvious through music. If their use of Nahuatl in their song titles wasn’t enough, their 2017 album Freedom is Free said it all, especially their powerful “The Taker Story,” a psychedelic critique of colonialism. The band’s groovy keyboards led me down a lineage of Chicano rock that extended to la onda and the soul-jazz of the 60s and 70s. Amidst the struggles of the Chicano Movement, bands like Los Lobos, Tierra, and The Blazers cultivated moments to feel and move freedom in collectivity. Next thing I knew, my first dissertation chapter became a theorization of the use of synthesized sound from the organ to the keyboard in Chicano soul music through an analysis of the work of El Chicano, another fantastic band from Los Angeles.
I finished drafting that chapter the same week I went to see Chicano Batman. In many ways, the show was a culminating experience that made me embody what I had written about moving in community, with others who understood our collective struggles and were going to feel that sadness that keeps us pushing through the next day together. Chicano soul music has been transferring that feeling that freedom provides for decades. Chicano Batman continues the legacy of providing moments of communal relief for people who know that the next day is never promised because of the color of our skin, our legal status, our language, and our movement.
Sometimes, I feel like I move too much. When I got off the train at Union Square, I thought back to most of the shows I attend. Let’s call it what it is: I like what many East Coast Latinos would describe as “white people music.” I’d describe it more as “late middle-aged white dad music,” given the demographic at live shows. That’s accurate of the classic rock, psychedelic, funk, and jam band shows I usually attend. When I play “Spot the People of Color in the Audience,” the end tally always requires one hand. I’m not doing a two-step at a Bruce Springsteen show. One of my first memories is from a party my tia threw that was literally shaking the house down. I’m what Courtney Cox would have looked like in the music video to “Dancing in the Dark” if she had grown up listening to Carlos Vives and Oro Solido. (You can bump and grind to “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”! Leave me alone.)
All I’m saying is that I move a little more than the strangers I meet at the Brooklyn Bowl or the Capitol Theatre. My dancing creates a lot of space for me, even in the GA section. That’s nice and all, but it always feels like I’m inadvertently pushing people away from me when I’m at these shows. Okay, sometimes, it happens with a bit of intent, but it’s hard not to when I catch people taking videos of me dancing. Or when they strangely compliment my moves at the set break. It’s not bad or mean, it’s just that I can’t not be aware of how I’m dancing when I see these live acts. I end up meeting more people if I’m bouncing around the room (that time then and once again I’m bouncing around the room…any Phish heads here?) on the balls of my feet. But why would I do that when I can shake my ass to a Grateful Dead cover band? Maybe it’ll be different at Chicano Batman. I mean, it’s 2021, and these guys are literally singing, “The concept of race was implanted inside your brain,” in the title track of their new album. Even the Brooklyn liberals wouldn’t travel that far for that.
I got in line, and I quickly noticed almost everyone waiting was Latino. The Yankee fitted hats, the black puffer jackets, and the smell of burning backwoods lingering in the air eased my worries. I was alone, which was my favorite way to do live music. It’s much more fun meeting people that way. But I didn’t feel the need to be too friendly. We’re in New York City after all. Given everything that was running through my mind, I was just happy to be there. Once I entered the venue, I settled in the back away from the crowd with a few others who were masked. That was nice too. No one was really questioning me or making comments about it. It only took two songs before I gravitated closer to everyone else. I mean, they started playing “Cycles,” bro. How could I not?
“Bitch, I fucking love this one,” someone next to me said to their friend.
“Same, sis,” I said as I started to sway my hips.
“My present situation is this song,” I heard them singing along a few seconds later.
Same, sis.
When “Moment of Joy” led into “Freedom is Free,” I lost it. You try hearing Eduardo Arenas start playing that bass line without screaming a little bit. “Nobody likes you, nobody cares, nobody wants you, nobody dares to extend a greeting a connecting glance. Life is just a jaded game to them. They won’t give it a chance.” Those lyrics hit different when everyone is singing along with the commonality of feeling like a problem, the person that nobody wants or cares to connect with. And I feel much more connected to others when we’re all dancing together with our hips. We don’t need to be synchronized or anything like that. Bumping into each other helps. That’s how I make friends. “But you know what I know…” It just brought me back to the many shows I’ve been to where I felt like I wasn’t really connecting with those around me, even though we liked the same band, even though we had seen each other at shows. When it felt like I was moving too much. It also made me think of the look my mom gave me when I asked about our papers. And of the parties they shut down because we were blasting music. And of the student that used a US flag to block the students of color and queer students from marching to the dean’s office with their demands. And of the streets. And of right outside.
“…that the galaxies are all around us and life will flow on as long as the grass grows and the water runs,” the cute guy to my left sang along, getting me out of my thoughts. Maybe it was those hits I took in the rotation that formed as I waited to get inside. Or maybe it was the cheap Scotch I drank a little too quickly. Or maybe it was my desperate need to dance around with other Latinos who were feeling sad and happy at the same time. But I really felt it. Not that it was all possible but that it was important I was there, that I was being reckless. It was moments like these that I had been missing and yearning for and believed in.
“Freedom is free,” everyone started to sing along. “And you can’t take that away from me.” Body roll. This was not the most liberating experience of my life or the start of a revolution. But we were doing it together. We were so close to one another, many of us were wearing masks, (which, let’s be honest, was probably losing its purpose in the crowd) and singing along to the song. It was seeing all the pretty girls with their neatly brushed baby hairs and the well-dressed cute boys. And the moving. The moving felt so good.
“You got your guns up on display, but you can’t control how I feel, no way.”
I knew I’d get home safe. I knew I was probably not going to die in the next few months. I had the privilege of doing what I was doing. I knew the risk. I’m always aware of the risk. Of the risk of “moving funny,” as we say at home. The risk of moving in a way that might make someone too scared, too threatened, too uncomfortable. And I thought of those Chicanos in East LA during the Movement and how afraid they may have been going to work. Who knew they were being exploited but were fighting to make their work conditions better. Who were working long hours and working with their neighbors to get through the next day. And how they still went to the dance halls to listen to music and dance. And go at it again the next day. Because they weren’t going to take that feeling away from us. The feeling that it’s still worthwhile to keep going. To “keep on moving,” as El Chicano sang in the song of the same name from their 1972 album, Revolución.
“Freedom is free,” Bardo sang sweetly in repetition. The audience followed and kept going. Bardo pointed his mic to the audience. We all kept singing until all I could heard was us. No instruments. Tears falling from my closed eyes, my hips still gyrating. I opened my eyes to peep sis, a little farther up now, leaning against her friend, resting her head on her shoulder. I kept dancing.
Freedom is free…freedom is free…freedom is free…
For my birthday this year, I decided to party in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. Hell’s Kitchen is always reliable, but I knew the music was going to be poppin’ in Jackson Heights. Queens is one of the most diverse areas in New York and, I would argue, the world. My grandparents and some of my tios and tias lived in the nearby Elmhurst neighborhood, and I knew that the Latinos would be outside on Labor Day weekend. I linked with my best friends from growing up. We met in our Bronx middle school, all of us immigrants or children of immigrants, and some of the best people I know. We’ve all made music together, and they’ve seen me dance for a while. (You bet your ass all of us were moving around when Sean Paul was playing at those fifth grade “parties” that were in dire need of deodorant.) And there was something about just dancing with them, losing one another as we’d get drinks or went on a side quest. And in the bumping, dancing, occasionally hyping someone up (ayeee! ayeee! ayeee!) as I made my way around the packed club.
And it just felt so comfortable and dire. The stakes were high. It was important we went out. People die from being a Black or brown queer at the club! It’s not that I think I will get shot or detained the whole time I’m out, but I definitely think about it every time. In those moments, I have another drink and keep dancing. But I felt free the night of my birthday. I felt it when dancing to Bad Bunny and Romeo Santos paired us off in different combinations. It matters to me that I can move. It’s not just moving. The stakes are high. It keeps me going. But I promise that it’s not as pretty as they make it sound. Freedom is felt in shared struggle, collective vision, and consistent action.
Freedom feels like movement. Not because I’m moving like no one is watching. I’m not lying to myself. Everybody’s watching. Freedom feels like dancing at a Chicano Batman show in New York City because of my awareness that one wrong move can take away my life in another context. I’m not exaggerating when I say that. It makes moving feel a lot more loaded. The professor in me tends to frame the relationship between freedom and movement through the legacies of colonialism. This matters because it demonstrates the ways that people become legible through the construction of nations and controlled within the compressions of their borders. But that also matters because of how marginalized people are consequently made to feel like the way they feel, the way they move, the way they are is too much for others. Everyone is watching. At the Rolling Stones show, at the Chance the Rapper show, at the Ricardo Arjona show. They’re watching. That’s why it matters to me. Because the movement is what keeps that energy moving. The movement builds the world we want to live in.
I refuse to stay still. I can’t. The stakes are too high. They were high in 2021. They were high when my mom gave me that look in 1999. Freedom feels like moving however I want, wherever I am, with the peace of knowing that everyone I’m with gets it and will move with me because of and through the difficulties that life presents. It’s not a big deal when I see Bruce. But it was big deal when I saw Chicano Batman. Because of what we were singing together. Because of what those before us were doing together. Thinking together. Organizing together. Celebrating together. Trying again together the next day. Moving together. Maybe freedom is moving like you know everyone is watching and your life depends on it. It’s certainly free. But it’s not as a romantic as I’m making it sound.
George N. Ramirez
George N. Ramírez is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He teaches courses in visual culture and media studies. Ramírez's research broadly focuses on questions of materiality, mediation, and racialization in Latinx cultural production. His in-progress monograph, Brown Physics of Media: Sensing Race and Moving Matter in Rarefactions, analyzes forms of material and physical motion in the making and sharing of soul music, comic books, digital video, and video games.