The Personal Becomes Political for Hurray for the Riff Raff

Since President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, it feels like just about everything has a political connotation. For some artists, that might make 2017 a strange year to release an album. But for Hurray for the Riff Raff, it’s a natural fit.

The project of Alynda Segarra, HFTRR attracted a lot of attention in 2014 with the release of her fifth record, Small Town Heroes, a beautifully rendered collection of roots music that showed Segarra wasn’t afraid to make political statements. The song “The Body Electric” in particular showcased her social consciousness with its sly take on the traditional murder ballad.

Now Segarra & Co. have returned with The Navigator, a concept album inspired by myriad sources: David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri, Puerto Rican activist groups like the Young Lords and, of course, the 2016 presidential election. But what most influenced the album, which chronicles the soul-searching journey of a young girl named Navita, was Segarra’s own effort to reconcile her Puerto Rican roots with her American present, sparked by a trip she took to Puerto Rico to attend a feminist conference.

“I hadn’t been there since I was a child, and it really opened my mind,” Segarra tells the Scene. “I think I was really struck by how I felt being on the island, how I felt being around all of these other Puerto Rican feminists. It felt like this emptiness. I felt the void of where that was in my life. It really started me on this journey of thinking about it and being like, ‘Where do I fit into this history, and what do I even know about it, and am I proud, and what does that mean?’ ”

That trip planted the seed that would grow to become The Navigator, inspiring Segarra to research her heritage through music, poetry and activism, and to synthesize her findings through the eyes of Navita. The album features some overtly political songs, like “Rican Beach,” which grapples with the gentrification of the South Bronx. But the record as a whole is so personal that it becomes its own kind of political act, in which Segarra proclaims ownership of a culture that has been so appropriated and whitewashed as to be nearly unrecognizable.

“Navita is me when I was 17, and I just wanted to get out of this box that I grew up in,” Segarra explains. “For being so sure of herself, she also knows nothing about her people. She knows nothing about where she came from and what it means. That was me.”

But even as she explores uncharted territory, Segarra sounds more comfortable in her own skin on The Navigator than she has on any previous HFTRR release. Produced by Paul Butler, the album is a sonic departure that leans less toward Woody Guthrie and more toward Yva Las Vegass, an American musician who fuses punk rock and Venezuelan folk music and guests on The Navigator. It sounds like a dispatch from a woman who’s finally come home.

“Once you get that knowledge of where you come from,” Segarra says, “and when you really start to feel pride, or at least start to realize you can really heal the pain that your ancestors felt, that’s really where the magic starts happening.”

Some of that magic began during a year-and-a-half stint that Segarra spent in Nashville. 

“I felt very out of place,” Segarra says, “even though the city was very welcoming to me, and there are so many amazing musicians there. I felt like I really didn’t know where I fit in or could connect. It was a really good reflective time to decide what I was going to do with all of that.”

Segarra did most of her reflection during the 2016 election cycle, which also had a profound effect on the narrative of The Navigator. What began as a study of the personal became a timely reflection on immigration, identity and the privilege of owning one’s own story.

“I think something happened to me where, especially on election night, I just had this sinking feeling,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, Alynda, you always loved Woody Guthrie [laughs], and you always loved Joan Baez, and you always wondered what you’d do in these times of total crisis and moral uncertainty. And now here you are, and you gotta buckle up, and you’ve gotta do the work.’ It’s scary every day, but it was just this feeling of, ‘You’re not a little kid anymore. It’s time to really do the work now.’ ”

Segarra says she believes wholeheartedly that it’s the job of the artist to do that work, but she doesn’t think there is just one way for an artist to effect change. For her, sharing her heritage and her story became its own radical act, one she hopes reminds people of “the humanity of all of us.”

“The only thing I know how to do,” Segarra says, “is not to try to change people’s minds, but just to stay true to myself and what I believe, and to remember that there is nothing wrong with believing that all people deserve justice, and they deserve equal rights, and they deserve to be seen as human beings — whether they have paperwork or not, no matter what gender they identify as. I really hope that artists will feel like they need to put those ideas into their work. If we don’t, then I think things will get really scary.”

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