We here at LA MISSION like to whip out our politics in public. We kinda get off on it. And so we’re especially excited to slip you BEANER’s first solo outing on the label . From track titles to sound samples to magazine articles to packaging, this record / magazine / performance package highlights im/migration, the brown experience, and stripped identity. La Mission knows from brown. The collective is run by a crew of devastatingly handsome deviants whose racial identity is, well…it’s complicated. We’ve lived our lives being neither white enough nor brown enough to fit neatly into racial categories. And so we took some time out from our usual exploits (like our “Multi-Directional Playground Tire Swinging” orgies and Elected Candidate/Dead Pig/HungerGames slash-fic) to focus on brownness. People started talking about “cultural appropriation” when Miley Cyrus started twerking. We couldn’t throw shade fast enough. But co-optation and exotification runs rampant in all genres of music—including dance music. We here at La Mission feel pretty fucking awkward about it. We’ve seen queer-of-color culture turned into white-dudebro business ventures. And as brown folks with stripped and fragmented identities, we’re never sure of what culture is ours to use and abuse, anyway. Can we honor our own roots if they’re messy and broken? When we’re “inspired” by the music of other cultural groups, is that solidarity or stealing? Nothing we have is whole. We can only work with the fragments we have at hand, well aware that there’s unfinished business… BLACKMOUTH is the live version of the classic soul/disco sampling house tune. Take the work of others who came before you and turn it into a danceable jam. GOT BLUES? uses the work of a blind 1930s blues bongo player to form a weirdo repetitive rhythm tool: another example of using a forgotten artist for one’s own gain. The titular song, CO-OPTED & EXOTICIZED plays on the classic preacher vocal track. All these sure to get get get you up and get down, without thinking about the origins of these mostly pastiche grooves.