Puerto Rican group around since forever probably inspires an Assange-related shitshow in the comments…
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Katherine St Asaph: The story here’s more interesting than the music: a Puerto Rican group with a small battalion of Latin Grammys and a political bent to match the metaphor leaves their label, recruits a Bacon number integer overflow of guests (Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Julian Assange, both with about as much self-awareness as usual, and Palestinian singer Kamilya Jubran, in the Mary Lambert role of female voice as mere symbol), solicits fan tweets (a gimmick shared, hilariously, with American Idol and Coca-Cola), and gets largely ignored by the handwringers, whether their handwringing is over the lack of protest songs or the lack of bitcoin adoption. Everything here is bound to turn off every other demographic; me, I’d prefer less atonality, more done with the “viral” pun.
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Andrew Casillas: It’s not that Calle 13 went overtly political (“Pal Norte” is still one of the great immigration politics tracks of any genre), but this is like taking the most insufferable parts of sophomore political science essays and setting them to music. I’d forgive them for the cliches and trite statements if the music were any catchy, but this is just bad.
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Will Adams: With so much going on — tempo shifts, a glitched-out rock track, multiple languages, crowdsourced lyrics, Julian Fucking Assange — it’s not surprising that “Multi_Viral” is so hamfisted. Blame the translation, maybe, but lines about taking the pills “they” give you would have garnered eye-rolls twenty years ago. Assange’s speech in the third act takes the proceedings from trite to embarrassing.
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Alfred Soto: The lyrics are as leaden in Spanish as they would be in English and without compensatory licks.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: How can you stage a call to revolution and sound behind the times? Tom Morello does his Tom Morello thing, skirting a fine line between being the ultimate jittery Page worshipper and a self-parodic Page worshipper. Residente raps pull-up-the-people lyrics that veer between overly simplistic and overly didactic. Special guest Julian Assange drops a mid-song lecture that makes you wish he’d gone Full Weiner (“BO BO BO BO BO!”). Meanwhile, Kamilya Jubran gets royalties.
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Crystal Leww: I was really hoping that Julian Assange would go away in 2013, but alas, here we are and he’s still influencing angry dudes to continue being self-righteous.
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Jonathan Bradley: Julian Assange has found the one place his noisome presence is less welcome than in the Australian Senate: amidst sluggish Tom Morello guitar riffing.
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Brad Shoup: Ten years ago, the lack of big-release protest songs drove people batty. It was, to put a fine point on it, a fucking idiotic concern. All apologies to Sam Cooke and a couple to Bob Dylan, but popular movements take wing on hard work, practical resistance, and the pursuit of specific redresses. Manning and Snowden: they’re greater revolutionaries than Morello and a mansion of inscribed guitars will ever — could ever — be. And that’s fine! His contributions to a lean, generalized portrait of dissatisfaction are welcome: we get squalls, yeah, but also a turned-over blues riff that ends with finality. Calle 13 are measured yet stern to start, then declamatory in a familiar way. It’s broad, but it’s not dumb, not until Assange shows up to be all “We do not forget. Expect us.” It may not set more than stereos on fire, but that’s pretty great.
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