The Linda Lindas, courtesy.

I’m used to being behind on pop culture, what with me living in a backyard hole the past year, cowering from germs and playing my 1999 version of “Tomb Raider” 20 hours a day. It’s still awesome, by the way, despite being the beginning of the end of my first marriage. Thankfully, I’m spending my twilight years around my daughters, who help me keep up. The  19-year-old daughter burst into my room this week–which was weird, because she only approaches when remembering she needs food to live–with a video of these girls in a library, making noise on music-making contraptions.

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF.

I looked up, annoyed. I was very busy (no I wasn’t), writing professional journalism things (I was watching raccoon videos). “Can’t you see I’m concentrating?” I asked, pushing aside the “Spider-Man” comic books and looking for a spot to set my strawberry almond mocha fruit basket coffee smoothie. She handed me her phone and I sighed the sigh of intellectuals, librarians and my cat when someone beneath us intrudes on important work.

Another video … except, hey, what’s this?  A band, and they sound pretty good. Wow, they’re pretty heavy and have really good presence for young girls, I thought. How cute …

AAAHHHNNNKKK.

That was my brain buzzer, alerting me I was about to virtually and patronizingly pat someone on the head for not being as grown-up and accomplished as the rest of us. I have three or four daughters, depending on the proximity to a holiday, and that buzzer comes from years of having multiple eyes violently rolled my way.

But this band, the Linda Lindas. How cute …

AAAAHHHHNNNKKK.

Right. Don’t call the Linda Lindas “cute.”

Putting typical old musician/music critic/dad baggage aside, I saw four Los Angeles girls, 10 to 16 years old, of Asian and Latinx heritage. They were playing tight punk rock and yelling about their experiences with stupid boys who spout racist and sexist bullshit.

Don’t call the Linda Lindas cute. How about “awesome?” Or “encouraging?”

The story of these four goes like this: Two sisters, their cousin and a friend, all budding musicians, started playing together. They did some school-related performing and, through the wonders of technology, got noticed by some people like Karen O. and Bikini Kill. They started playing around, opened for Bikini Kill at the Hollywood Palladium, and contributed a song to the Netflix documentary The Claudia Kishi Club.

That’s more than I ever did as a musician, though I did go to other people’s shows at the Palladium.

The library video went viral and I watched an interview. They’re bubbly. They’re excitable. They’re smart. They’re fearless. It’s refreshing in a we-remember-feeling-like-that-centuries-ago way.

I didn’t call them cute. I won’t call them cute. It’s patronizing and stupid and would make me look like a bigger oaf than I already am (which is saying something).

With so much awful crap happening to Asian American (and Latinx, and female, and on and on) people in the United States lately, it’s nice to hear someone put their face up to a microphone and yell about it. It makes you want to pump a fist or two and yell with them. We need more.

After I thought out the “don’t-call-them-cute thing, I heard the Linda Lindas actually say as much. They were laughing condescendingly at people who call them cute. That is so … great.

I’ve watched my daughters be called cute, when they’re trying hard not to be cute. It’s annoying. They just want to be taken seriously because they’re smart and still making their way in a white male-dominated world. They want to accomplish things, live as much life as possible, love who they want to love, and feel safe. It sucks that anyone has to even say that in 2021.

But they do. These girls just signed a record deal with Epitaph. I hope they keep telling other girls not to take the BS for years to come.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.