Molotov: Mexico’s most dangerously offensive punk band?
Punk rock has a strange relationship with offense. Those with a fairly surface-level understanding of both concepts would say they go hand in unlovable hand; after all, “how can you be punk without pissing people off?” Sure, the easy option with punk is to just say and do stupid shit for the sake of it. The side of punk rock that still loves GG Allin and Sid Vicious is proof that there’ll always be enough smooth-brained failures who can always spot one of their own in pop culture.
Something that a lot of punks miss, though, is that there should always be a point to your provocation. The Sex Pistols didn’t write ‘God Save The Queen’ for the sake of attention-seeking; they wrote it because it was the year of Lizzie’s Silver Jubilee, and if we thought the “Platty Joobs” was fawning, we had it easy.
When the Dead Kennedys wrote ‘California Uber Alles’, they weren’t just dabbling in the Nazi imagery that early punks were infuriatingly fond of. It was specifically to sum up the “hippie-fascist” future that Jello Biafra thought California Governor Jerry Brown was going to lead the state into. Most of all, when the band Molotov named themselves after one of the weapons most associated with class war and civil unrest, you can bet that wasn’t a coincidence.
Formed in Mexico City, Mexico, by guitarist Tito Fuentes and bassist Micky Huidobro in 1995, Molotov was quite literally born to rage against the machine. Fuentes was born to Spanish parents who were exiled from Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, so politics and anti-fascist action, in particular, had shaped his entire life. After trying to recruit several peers of theirs in the Mexico City punk scene, Fuentes and Huidobro settled on Paco Ayala and Randy Ebright to finish the band’s classic lineup, one that still rocks to this day.
In true anarchist style, the roles within the band aren’t hugely defined. Every member switches between guitar, bass and lead vocals depending on who’s writing the song in question. Ebright, the band’s sole American member and, hilariously, the son of a Drug Enforcement Agency officer, is the only member with the concrete role of drummer, and he’s known to dabble in other instruments too.
Having settled on a lineup and made a name for themselves in their home country, the band put out their first record, ¿Dónde Jugarán las Niñas?, in 1997. I say “put out” in the most literal fashion. The record’s cover (a girl in a school uniform with her underwear around her knees, yikes) saw it blacklisted from most major retailers. The band responded by selling the record out in the streets, where they built up such a grassroots following the retailers had no use but to stock it, and it has since sold a million copies the world over.
The record tapped into the Mexican national consciousness of the time, one that was on the cusp of voting out a ruling political party that had been in office for six decades straight. One that felt the rage boiling out of every seam of the record right from the very first track, which calls out a politically biased newscaster by name. They didn’t bat a thousand, naming a song on their first record after a homophobic slur and then using the “it doesn’t mean gay” defence, with is some clown tactics, but this is alternative rock in the mid-1990s, everyone was at it.
More importantly, the song ‘Gimme Tha Power’ became one of their signature songs. After all, a song with lyrics like “We have to rip out the problem by the roots and change the government of our country” is never going to age badly, right? By the release of their second album in 1999, the band were one of the biggest in Mexico and making inroads internationally, particularly in the US and Europe.
They have remained at that level ever since, proudly speaking truth to power, even playing a landmark concert in their home city’s Constitution Square, or Zacala in 2010. Fine work for a band who made their name by pissing off so many people they became completely undeniable.
