Fascist times call for antifascist music.
So it’s probably no surprise that the past decade or so has birthed some of the best Oi! music we’ve heard in a long time. On the lengthy list of bands worth listening to, Fuerza Bruta from Chicago, stands high on top.
Fuerza Bruta, featuring vocalist Beto Villanueva, bassist Kyle Bawinkel, guitarist/vocalist Matheus Panizzi, drummer Felipe de Sousa and guitarist Lucas Sikorski, recently dropped a four-song EP this summer titled “Ecos De Chicago.” It’s their latest collection of riff-tastic, street fightin’ tunes packed with catchy, call-and-response choruses in what has become the group’s unique mix of Hardcore and Oi!
Villanueva took some time in between the end of the group’s two-week tour of Europe and their upcoming show in L.A. to talk briefly about the band’s history and identity, the punk scene in Chicago and how he’s been dealing with ICE’s invasion of Chicago, including his neighborhood in Little Village.
How was your recent European tour?
It was fun. Great turnouts in every city, so that was pretty awesome. People were amazing. Great response from people. People showed out, they bought merch, so all around it was pretty awesome. We were in Lisbao, then Ourense, Bilbao. We did Madrid, then we did Barcelona. We did Dresden and then Berlin.”
Did you get to be tourists?
A little bit, actually. So the guy from Mendeku, he lives in the Basque Country. One of the days we went out from Bilbao to his place, it was amazing. He did a paella for us. So we just chilled out by his place. It's pretty awesome.”
Is this your guys first time playing in L.A.?
No, we played with Mess and then Castillo as well. And then that was the return of Criminal.”
[L.A. Taco EIC Javier Cabral was at that show and said it "was one of the most incredible shows I've been to, low key.”]
So what’s the band’s story? Where you all just homies who started playing together?
Yeah, kind of. We all knew each other from the music scene and then there was different parts of it and then we just kind of all chit-chatted. At the time, most of the bands out were, like, American Oi, right? Which is fine, but I'm Mexican American.
There's two Brazilians that we chatted with. One of the guys was working at my brother's shop and just meeting all these people, talking about hardcore, like Japanese bands, Brazilian bands, just like our interest for music. We were just into a lot of different stuff where a lot of people were, at the time, into just the usual stuff.
So we just pretty much chit-chatted, and it's like, man, it'd be cool to start a band because we all have similar interests. I kind of led the way with that, just being drunk at the bar, like ‘we should start a band, we should start a band,’ and being the only person that's never been in a band. So they were like, ‘hey, we should. Let's get a practice in.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, shit, this is for real!’”
When we played our first show, we were a band for like a week and a half, two weeks. We played with Templars, Legion 76, Fear City. They had already two structures for songs when I got to practice. So it was like two or three songs that had the bare bones and our last practice before that show, they're like, ‘alright, well, we're going to practice and if it sounds good, we're gonna play the show.’ And I was like, ‘there's no way we're playing the show.’ And they're like, ‘alright, we sounded good. We're playing the show.’ I was like, ‘...oh…’”
Why did you decide to have all your song lyrics and song titles in Spanish, with like one exception?
Yeah, we did a cover. Basically, having two Brazilians, as well as myself, it was kind of like the same thing. We're into different bands from all over the world. I think it just touched more to home ... we've had people telling us, like, if all of you guys sang in English, 'We'd like you more' and what have you, but we just stay true. Because, I guess it's easier to try to just conform or make it easier for people to understand, but we felt like this is a little bit of our identity.”
What would you call that? Would you still consider it American Oi!? Maybe Chicano Oi!?
It's interesting because we are an American band in that sense, but our influences really don't come from any American bands. Our influences have been from the Japanese samurai spirit-era to Brazilian hardcore to Italian Oi! So our stuff has been kind of a little bit of melting pot, a lot of things and American Oi! hasn't been one of them.
An American band of international influences.
Yeah. We went—where were we at? Where we in Spain? We went to a restaurant and we walked in and two of the guys are from the states, two American guys, and they're speaking English. So the guy at the counter is talking to all of us in English and I'm responding in Spanish. I’m Mexican-American, I'm fluent.
Then here’s the other guys, the Brazilian guys kind of talking Spanish, but with a little like, Portuñol and the guy was confused. He's like, ‘You guys are American, but this guy's speaking Castellano perfectly. And I could kind of understand you guys. Like, what is going on?’ He couldn't really make it out, like, ‘Wait, what? This guy's Mexican-American. We're Brazilian, two Americans. Okay!’
In keeping in line with that, it’s not just the Oi! Sound, but also the mentality, the ideology, and antifascist politics behind it.
It has a little bit to do, I would say, with a lot of things because with Oi!, it's pretty crazy, because you do have where it started: anti-racist, antifascist. But then it's kind of gone all over ... because our drummer has always been more like of a punk and we all grew up, like me, in Chicago, going to neighborhood punk shows. But even there, you'd have skinheads, metalheads, punks, because it would be a lot of people, but we all, aside from the drummer, went towards the Oi!, the skinhead movement. But then it's interesting, because I feel like everybody adopts it to their own way.
There's no way of saying our band doesn't lean towards the antifascist, anti-racist. There's no way without our lyrics. A lot of it is daily life in the eyes of the immigrant ... there's no ands, ifs, or buts about our stance on that.”
Your latest EP from this past July has a song titled ‘Ecos De Chicago.’ Is that specifically about Chicago becoming a target for immigration raids or just a song about Chicago in general?
I think just in general, what's been going on with the immigrants in Chicago, because even our previous songs, we have songs that are against the president and they still hold true to this day. Basically, what's going on with kids getting killed in Chicago, mother's mourning, there's where you get the echoes of Chicago. It's basically what's been going on in Chicago with, I would say, Black and Brown youth or people just getting targeted.
On that note, what have you seen on the ground yourself?
I live in Little Village, which is a predominantly Mexican neighborhood, so yesterday and today, choppers were out, ICE were in full force. They were a lot stronger today than they were yesterday all over the neighborhood. So they're basically causing havoc all around the neighborhood, driving up and down, going opposite way of one-ways, you know, getting old people.
I think they're looking for a reason to agitate people. That way they could promote that Chicago is very violent, that it's the people [as opposed to] ICE coming and terrorizing the city right now. My neighborhood especially, well, a lot of different neighborhoods, but this one, we have so many street vendors. You don't see them out anymore. Some people are saying, at the moment, some businesses are going back to like when COVID was around. People are scared to go out.
We had a good response though, from neighborhood people coming out and being our voices, being heard, just being present. Even though they've wreaked havoc, they've gone around. I think knowing that there's people out there, there's people supporting, I think that deters them a little more. It's not as easy getting easy targets.
We don’t identify as SHARP. Are we anti-racist and antifascist? Our lyrics say so, although I wouldn’t say we’re SHARP. I would say we’re hugely on the anti-racist, antifascist side of things.
How have the punk and other music scenes responded?
I'm sure there's different factions because you got North Side punk, South Side punk, but I don't think I've been really connected to any of that thus far. We did a coffee called Condenado for one of our songs and proceeds would go out to help out immigrant lawyers and such.
I'm sure there's a lot of benefit [events], but not that I'm aware of at the moment on what. Chicago's kind of big and small at the same time. There's all different types of factions. I don't know how much involved they've been, but there's a lot of community organizations going on. There's a lot of businesses that have been making care packages for the community, so I want to get more involved in that.
Unfortunately, I was out in Europe, and then also I'm leaving to L.A. Saturday, and then I'm going back to Europe for a week and a half, so I'm kind of bummed because ... I wish I could still be more involved, at least just getting my voice heard, letting people know, because even some of the businesses, I talked to them and they're like, ‘hey man, you were born here, that's awesome that you're out here being vigilant, trying to keep [people] more safe, warning people.’
Sometimes, you want to do more. There's so much happening and there's only so much. When I come back certain days, there's a grammar school by me. I want to go to talk to the grammar school and hopefully on my off-days, maybe I could walk some kids home that their parents are scared to be out, like taking them to and from. It might be just one day because my shift changes at work, but one day is better than no days.”
There’s been a big resurgence of the Oi! subgenre in the last few years, primarily among young Latino men. Some people may still assume that if you’re a “skinhead,” you are racist. How do you deal with navigating that?
I think with the internet nowadays, a lot of people are more aware of what skinhead actually started as. It feels, right now, with the resurgence, it’s been more music-forward. It’s, honestly, popular right now with the whole Oi! scene where a lot of punks didn’t like Oi! because it was skinhead music. I don’t see it as much as how skinheads were viewed. Let’s suppose in the late 80s, early 90s, it was more about the subculture, about violence. I feel, right now, it’s more music-forward.
We had an incident here in Chicago recently where Rixe played one time, their first time in Chicago, and there were punks that were saying there were racist skinheads there. All of us knew each other, so there were no racist skinheads there. They said, basically, they wanted to go to skinheads shows but skinheads not to show up. That’s fucking dumb.
What he was told, to be honest, was that during the late 80s and early 90s, the reason why, there in Chicago, there’s no boneheads [term used to identify racist skinheads) attending shows is because of the skinheads. They are growing up in the era where they don’t really have to fight white power groups like the guys that came before us that did in the late 80s, early 90s. They cleaned that out of our scene. Even our first show that we did with Templars, Legion 76 and Fear City, some guys came in, they were trying to wear white power shirts and they got their asses fucking kicked.
I think even the skinhead fashion, you’d see it for a while at H&M, so it became very popular like how punk once was very underground and then, all of a sudden, it just became trendy. That’s how I feel about this skinhead scene at the moment. Once this dies down, who knows how many of these bands will actually remain.”
Do you identify as SHARP?
I feel that SHARP is something that started in New York. It is a great thing, right? Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, but I think it’s tough when you pigeonhole people into different groups because there’s all different factions and even different anti-racists and antifascists that handle things a little bit different and think a little bit different.
We don’t identify as SHARP. Are we anti-racist and antifascist? Our lyrics say so, although I wouldn’t say we’re SHARP. I would say we’re hugely on the anti-racist, antifascist side of things.
Fuerza Bruta play this Saturday, October 25 at First Street Billiards for Perry Templar's Halloween Birthday Bash featuring Templars, Castillo, Fuerza Bruta, Ultra Sect, Hand Pay and Traxx.
