#110, “Pa’lante,” Hurray for the Riff Raff (2017)

150 Favorite Songs: #110, “Pa’lante,” Hurray for the Riff Raff (2017)

From the moment I heard the first piano chords at the start of “Pa’lante,” I was hooked. There’s something about those minor-key chords, drenched in reverb, that just catch my ear every time. I hadn’t heard Hurray for the Riff Raff before, but it found me in the right moment, one of those when my ears were hungry and I was ready for something that felt like a statement song.

“Pa’lante” is very much that. You don’t build the kind of drama that Alynda Segarra, the group’s frontperson, builds on this song, if you don’t have something to say. What I didn’t expect on that first listen is just how much they’d be saying.

The song starts simply enough: that piano, combined with Segarra’s voice, resonant and strong, singing a mission statement about what they want out of the world. It’s all a bit non-specific, built around easy but satisfying rhymes, the dramatic piano and strident vocals conjuring a mood. Then, suddenly, the fifth verse comes around, and all that’s out the window—now, out of nowhere, we’re in a Beatles song.

It’s a thrilling moment, as the first movement of the song ends and the second one begins. There’s a key change and Segarra goes into a bridge inspired by “I Shall Be Released” and you could dance to this. But don’t get too attached, because we’re entering the next movement: All the music drops out, and we get Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and some feedback starts building over the recording of him reading the poem, before the piano comes back, and now all of that drama pays off.

The song, in its third movement, goes from dramatic to epic. Segarra brings the song into a Nuyorican anthem as a choir lifts its voices behind them—“from el barrio to Arecibo, ¡Pa’lante!,” Segarra sings, “from Marble Hill to the ghost of Emmett Till, ¡Pa’lante!” It continues like that for four more couplets, Segarra issuing the affirmation “Pa’lante”—“onward,” more or less—to their forebears, their parents, the activists who fought to be themselves, the ones who couldn’t, the ones who struggled to survive, the ones just like Segarra themself. It’s a huge moment, as this song grows into a sort of secular prayer for the dispossession that comes with colonization and migration and resettlement, the way a simple cry of “Pa’lante,” the simple idea of living on in circumstances that have not historically cared if people like you live in, can be an act of defiance. When Billboard wrote about the song in 2020, Segarra talked about the song, explained why they wrote it. “I wanted to communicate with my ancestors and to let them know that I’m trying to continue their work, and to just embrace who I am,” they said.

I think about that idea—that continuing to exist, that being part of an unbroken chain of people whom the world had considered disposable, that you can speak up when silence was the safest choice for those who came before—a lot sometimes. “Pa’lante” isn’t my song, but my grandfather was a Jew who left Europe for the U.S. in the 1920’s, which was not a great time to be a European Jew; his father had emigrated to England from Russia at the turn of the century, a time and place when being a Jew was really rough. I’ve been enormously privileged in my life, but still—you have to think about it sometimes, what might have happened if they’d stayed, and what they lost by leaving. And so hearing Segarra sing to their ancestors resonates with me nonetheless. It’s a beautiful expression of something potent, that would be grandiose except that all of the drama Segarra utilizes—the piano, the movements, the spoken bridge, the call-and-response finale—is earned, is a piece of something bigger than those parts. When those things are invoked to the right effect, you can really feel their power. I don’t know how a person writes a song like “Pa’lante,” but I’m glad Segarra did.