Monday Music: Hurray for the Riffraff
The Bronx Native Sings for the Refugees
This week we add another song to the #ageofTrump #Resist play list.
Alynda Segarra’s Hurray for the Riff Raff is one of the most dynamic bands active today. The Bronx native — who uses they/them pronounces — formed the band in New Orleans in 2007 and much of its early music can best be described as, in the words of AllMusic.com, “an idiosyncratic, all-encompassing Americana.”
In 2022, the band released what I think of as their finest record, the more experimental and atmosphere Life on Earth. The record is full of gems — especially the title song — but I want to focus on a composition that feels plucked from today’s headlines
.“Precious Cargo” tells the story of a migrant escaping into the United States. “Over a cool trip-hop beat,” Jenn Pelly writes on Pitchfork, “the song shares the story of a man swimming across a river with his children, of a border crossed, a family torn apart; of shivering on a cold jail floor with a foil blanket and calling out to Allah.”
We start in closeup, in the present, with the crossing and the trek across land, with the horror of seeing others who have failed, the dead in the jungle and the threats. The narrator tells the story in the past tense but keeps the feel in the present, shifting from trip to capture.
We made it to the border I jumped and I was detained They split me from my family Now the light begins to fade They took me to the cold room Where I slept down on the floor Just a foil for a blanket For sеventeen days or more.
What follows is surreal and painful, the speaker shifting from present to memory of the past, before the lens of the song pulls back, before we go from particular to something broader.
Segarra plays journalist here, moving from particular to something more universal. “In 2019,” Pelly writes, “Segarra personally visited ICE facilities in Louisiana with Freedom for Immigrants, and worked to free two men from these inhumane jails. At the end of the song, as Segarra calls out the names of Southern towns with ICE centers:
Mississippi, Louisiana River, Pine Prairie, Jena, Lasalle Mississippi, Louisiana Richwood, Adams, Catahoula Mississippi, Louisiana River, Pine Prairie, Jena, Lasalle Mississippi, Louisiana Richwood, Adams, Catahoula
This was before Southern detention centers were in the news, before the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and permanent resident, who was targeted because of his politics. Before we knew that these facilities were — in the words of advocates I’ve talked with — “hell holes.”
The song closes with a detainee in his own words, asking for aid, asking for prayers. “Immigrants are suffering.”
It’s a powerful piece of music and storytelling, one in the tradition of the great protest singers. Its power is in its clarity and reality, but I have no illusions. As Bruce Springsteen said recently, “There is no art in this White House,” in this administration. No humanity. They are not listening, but the rest of us should be.