Pop Is the Move

Pop Pistol is Jorge Gonzales (drums, samples), George Garza (bass, synth, vocals), and Alex Scheel (guitar, synth, programming, lead vocals). All born (the same year coincidentally, 1985) and raised in San Antonio, they have become local heroes of stage and street in recent years. Here they describe how that success has been intertwined with organizing around social justice issues, beginning with an explanation of the name of their recently completed national tour, El Movimiento.

Why “El Movimiento”?

We’ve been a touring band for about a year and a half. Each tour has taken pretty much the same route: Texas to Arkansas and Missouri, occasionally up through Illinois, over to Michigan, and as far out as New York. For whatever reason, the Midwest has become our home away from home, and we are treated like family in places like Joplin, MO and Hot Springs, AR. So it makes sense to return to these towns, adding new cities each time, growing our tours from 4-day runs into longer multi-week trips. In October, we went on our longest tour to date; a 24-day string of 15 shows: Houston, Austin, San Antonio (twice), Kansas City, Minneapolis and Milwaukee (both for the first time), Chicago, Detroit, Brooklyn, Newburgh in upstate New York (another first), Louisville, St. Louis, Joplin, Hot Springs, and Helotes.

We planned this tour with the band Making Movies, who we met and played with on our first tour in their home-town of Kansas City, MO (they also have roots in Panama and Mexico). Planning involved many conversations about making the most out of the opportunity—being out on the road, away from our day jobs—by staying productive in some way. We all have similar experiences being involved in local organizations through music. Our work with Local 782 and Media Justice League has given us a background in grassroots organizing and social justice issues. Local 782 is a coalition of musicians and supporters that share resources and educate each other about DIY methods of establishing a career. Making Movies has experience with youth programs as mentors and educators. Our two worlds seamlessly intertwined around grassroots organizing for social justice education. We wanted to be able to draw from those backgrounds and bring them to the forefront of our life on the road as bands.

The work that we all do supports low income people of color mostly, and we understand the people serving that community across the country as part of one cohesive shift in humanity, a movement. And really it has been underway for a while (we continue to meet people who have been organizing for 40+ year). But with the advent of the internet, the momentum has picked up, and everyday the movement is growing. Not only are we meeting more and more people our age mostly new to this work (like ourselves), but we’re seeing a lot of youth staying excited to be a part of something that’s both socially involved and generally positive. In short, we wanted to document “The Movement.” We (Pop Pistol) identify as Chicanos, and Making Movies is a bilingual Spanish-English band, so “El Movimiento” was fitting.

Video Diaries

Through the world wide web, video’s capacity to make a lasting impact has only been amplified. Whereas print media and music dominate as sources for information and/or entertainment in some arenas, today’s fast paced world consumes video insatiably. Right away, the idea of maintaining video diaries throughout the tour was appealing; who doesn’t love watching behind the scenes footage from a tour, giving you first-person view into the lives of a band you like? Plus, just having these moments documented for our own personal memories is a priceless advantage of modern technology. And video is a highly effective form of communication that gives a lot of room in the editing process to really create an impacting narrative.

We’ve learned a lot about the power of storytelling through conferences we’ve attended as representatives of Local 782/ Media Justice League. The annual Allied Media Conference in Detroit and the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston this past April hosted workshops led by various organizations on everything from video blogging to the future of media as we know it, and one of the greatest lessons was that people are disenfranchised because their stories are not being told. Of course, we also learned that the reason for this was purely political and moreover, business driven. In any case, we wanted to focus on the people who are helping others learn to create their own media and tell their own stories.

The Organizations, The Stories

Over the past three years, we have met and collaborated with amazing individuals of all ages and backgrounds, most of whom we are connected to through the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAGNet). As the tour took shape, we saw that we would be in the hometown of both our (Pop Pistol’s) national partners and friends of Making Movies in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, as well as San Antonio and Kansas City, and, if we could make it work, in Philadelphia as well. Every one of the organizations we planned to meet was either offering services, educating people, or had their own unique youth programs (most organizations did more than one of these things), and they were all non-profit groups. We decided to visit these friends throughout our tour and produce a cohesive video piece compiling clips from the footage we recorded during these visits.

We called and emailed friends with hopes of being able to tour their offices and interview them about the work they do and why they do it. The plan was to produce one video every week of the tour and release them through our social networks, in addition to compiling a document on our websites specifically dedicated to ‘El Movimiento Tour’. This plan quickly changed, mostly to allow both bands room to work on their own video projects without hampering the goal to produce content. There were going to be strings of dates where we would be separated, but we felt that the more content we could produce, the better it would all be in the end.

Within days we realized that there could be no hard rules, but we committed to honoring the initial idea to get interviews and highlight specific organizations. Our projects began to take two different forms, splitting the original idea into both interviews and video diaries, independent of each other, so you could follow us on our journey every couple days or get a brief look into some unique and inspiring organizations. It was also a good feeling knowing that the organizations might be able to use these videos on their own sites because they didn’t really have anything to do with us. That’s part of the reason for the split, allowing us to connect with the world, and allowing our fans to connect with the orgs.

The project continued to evolve almost every day of the tour inspired by each new person we met. By the time we reached Minneapolis, still within the first week of the tour, we began to attract opportunities to connect with new friends and allies, from organizers to music enthusiasts. We began to seize every moment to work on the documenting project, where everyone was a candidate to share their story, and when we didn’t have a person or organization to connect with, we sought them out, searching online for local non-profits with unique missions and programming.

What made our mission to document El Movimiento an even more intense experience was the simultaneous spread of the Occupy Movement. Initially, we had no idea that people would be rallying around the country, taking to the streets in mass, and occupying public spaces, conducting forums to address grievances and ultimately echoing the cries of social justice orgs, creating a huge uproar and raising awareness to the simple fact that so much power is in the hands of so few people. That fact has been central to what we’ve learned about why things are the way they are, and given the circumstances, we were compelled to support and document the Occupy Movement where we could. The incorporation of those sites into our video diaries began before the tour had even begun, but well after we had our agenda set.

…and Pop Pistol?

We have been making music together since high school, but beyond that, we have grown together as a family, and over the last few years, re-dedicated to our initial dream, which is to travel far playing music and enjoying life. Because of our bond, our role in each others lives has molded our collective philosophy. In that sense, the journey we are on is a quest for self-discovery, and it runs like evolution: always new, always relevant, always necessary.

The latest chapter(s) was really spurred about the same time we became involved with Local 782. When we jumped in, we learned about establishing and maintaining relationships with the media as well as communicating with your fans/ support base through social networks. We realized the power of producing and mass distributing through the media.

Simultaneously, we learned about how media outlets and business work hand-in-hand molding how people think and what they think about. There’s a huge psychological operation always going on in our ad-based consumer culture. When you link all of this information together, the picture you see is an unbalanced world of private interests and an enormous range of people who have the odds stacked against them. All of this new knowledge has become a part of our core values as a unit.

It goes without saying that commercial music stars in the US are co-opted into upholding that ad-based consumer culture of materialism and glamor, but the image is so far from reality. We are looking for real people who contribute their time and energy towards creating a better world for all. Many of these people, ourselves included, do this all on a voluntary basis with no financial compensation, driven only by the work itself. The odd truth is that most people have heard for years about all of these problems, socially and environmentally, and they just accept them. It’s understandable to accept that you alone can’t solve the world’s problems, but that’s not the point. With this tour, we set out to show people that progressive action is already widespread, and it’s also diverse. There is a place for everyone and it’s the people who are contributing to their community for the sake of fostering a healthy habitat that are really making a difference in people’s lives on a human level.

We are a movement in our own, because of how we function and why we do what we do. Through our experiences we see our impact on these connections and how one single interaction can change your life. It’s a powerful realization. Then when you look at history, you see how art and music are central to society. As musicians and artists, your influence on the world around you is that much more influential. We feel like a small tribe, and we are on this journey looking for kindred spirits so we can share our stories and knowledge and make the tribe bigger and more connected. Music is the icebreaker for the conversations we can have on a level that isn’t about how we are different from the listener. We can connect on many levels because we are all human, and many of the people we meet tend to share a particular role in society, because in this country we all experience the effects and shift of classism. This is where the conversation opens up about issues we’ve come to see as core dilemmas in our society, and when we find these kindred spirits, the ones we consider a part of our tribe, the experience is as much about learning and growing ourselves as it is about sharing ideas with people. The inspiration leads us in el movimiento.