Elegantly Superb

CHICOS Y CHICAS!
DANCE!
DANCE!
DANCE!



Today is the day. After seven long years of waiting and suffering in silence, Los Super Elegantes release their second full-length album, Nothing Really Matters. A band that has been thankfully evasive about describing what they do to whomever comes to their oeuvre proving that labels especially have never really mattered.

Check out the first video, filmed and photoshopped on location in Athens, Greece.



I have been pressing my nose against the digital window today since I have to wait until the 12th of this month for my emusic.com downloads to refresh. Hey man, I haven't seen a promo CD since my snot-nosed heyday working for industry tipsheet and pre-bubble bursting dot-com-landia so I have to be a monk sometimes in my musical consumption. But trust me when I say I have been jamming to those 30-second samples like nobody's business.

Anyway, I am really happy. This band, this duo of unequaled madness y sabor, one of my favorite Los Angeles bands ever, have delivered another set of gems for the queer undereducated masses in today’s fiercest threads to bump and grind to. Bump and grind in the drug use context, honey, not the sex acts.

This is what you listen to while you blow-dry your bangs for a night that will leave you wallowing in full-throttle chale! in lieu of regret the morning after. If you don’t drink, goody two-shoes, then turn to the wisdom of Martiniano y Milena for blatant social lubrication.

I first saw LSE at Saint Lucy’s, a girl punk-driven venue adjacent to Fais Do Do, and I think they were on the same bill as The Need. It was like all the cultural confusion of my interiority was catalyzed by these fresas and their punk rock pipiripau. My brown kid anguish of being invisible in a dirty white girl punk scene responded to the Super Elegante dog whistle and I haven’t let go of this bone yet.



Even as I got caught up in identity politics in college and being a better Latina that does everything for free, there was always Los Super Elegantes to turn to when the limitations of labels just became too much psychic burnout. The band tends to get a bad rap from small Chicana/o fundamentalist groups that deem the group apolitical. But the picture of Milena below tells me something different.


("EVERY HUMAN BEING IS SUPER ELEGANTE" - LSE)

LSE have been written about up the wazoo in every single imaginable publication. And they have consistently been described so clumsily, and if I read another gesture towards mariachi-hip-hop-punk I'm putting a fork to my eye. Yes, a band that does performance art—how…radical! But man, wasn’t it a thrill to see these cats at the Whitney Biennial the only year I ever lived in New York. It felt satisfying to no end to see the most provincially-attituded biggest center of the world acknowledge the amazingness of Los Angeles-based duo, M y M.

It was thrilling to see a couple of artists whose work I connected with enough to want to write about them early on in their careers do well and succeed in these fickle times. I wrote the cover story on LSE for the long defunct Frontera magazine back in 2001—my first and only cover story to date. It was in this feature that I called these two militant dilettantes, which I think is the best description ever for them.

Last summer I ran into Martiniano on the dancefloor of a downtown Los Angeles club called Shits N’Giggles where he remembered me and gave me a really sweet hug. I asked him how his abs were doing and he said he had gotten so flabby in typical super elegante fashion. He also mentioned how my article helped LSE reach new levels. Maybe there’s some journalistic ethical concern I’m missing here but hearing that made my night.