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The Troubadour
How Alynda Segarra, a former train-hopping punk from the Bronx, became one of America’s best songwriters.
That impulse sets them among music’s most consequential opposition artists today, with songs like their 2014 feminist murder-ballad critique “The Body Electric” and 2017’s anticolonial “Rican Beach.” On The Past Is Still Alive, “Snake Plant” enacts a mid-verse mutual-aid banner drop when Segarra suddenly proclaims, “Test your drugs, remember Narcan / There’s a war on the people, what don’t you understand?” At the sold-out Brooklyn stop of their The Past Is Still Alive tour, in March, Segarra closed with a blazing incarnation of “Pa’lante,” intercut not with “Puerto Rican Obituary” but with a recitation of Gazan poet Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die,” written days before his death in 2023 by an Israeli air strike. In front of a stage banner that put “HFTRR” inside the criss-crossed quadrants of the classic New York hardcore logo, Segarra stomped open the song’s rave-up final movement, channeling Patti Smith’s fire andoffering the lucidity that comes with confronting reality: “To the resistance in the streets / ¡Pa’lante!” they belted, with gritted-teeth resolve that punched out in every syllable.
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