The Bad Penny (beta)

Imagine your dream is to be a rock star – an aspiration that’s probably occurred to many readers of this website. Now imagine that you work as hard as you possibly can, exhausting all your drive and motivation, squeezing every drop of your creativity and spending every moment at your disposal to make your dream come true.

And it does, because there is still some justice in this world, and because perseverance and the human spirit can lead to extraordinary outcomes. You’ve established your heavy-psych/garage-rock band in your homeland of Venezuela, you’re continuing to put in the hard work, you’re gaining traction, you’re building a fanbase. And then – without any time to prepare or redraw the plan for your future that you’ve had all along – you’re upended by external factors that are totally out of your control, and threaten your life, the lives of those you love, and your lifelong ambitions. Marauding gangs of drug dealers and thugs with no regard for human life are willing, ready and able to extinguish yours without a second thought and the simple pull of a trigger or slice of a blade.

On a wing and a prayer, you relocate to another country out of sheer desperation to survive. Once you establish yourself there, legally, you start to rebuild your life – miraculously, and probably by compartmentalizing most of the trauma you’ve endured. Eventually, you resume your lifelong aspiration to make music and pursue your artistic ambitions. Except now, the country where you sought and found refuge – a place purportedly built on the foundations of self-determinism, and the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness – begins to very much resemble the hellscape from which you fled.

Roving gangs of masked men, bearing more than a little resemblance to the Venezuelan vigilantes, are kidnapping people in broad daylight on the streets of towns and cities without asking for documentation or giving people the chance to tell their friends and families where they are being taken – or why. Once again, you are living in a constant state of fear, even though you have come to the United States properly, through the asylum process. And yet you are still a target, because the highest court in the land recently ruled that it is now legal for authorities to scrutinize and even arrest you because of the color of the skin or the spelling of your name.

This is part of the story of Joudy, a trio of hard-rock enthusiasts who came from Venezuela and now live in Brooklyn. They are putting out their new album, Permanent Maintenance, July 24 on Trash Casual. Yesterday, The Bad Penny extensively interviewed the frontman of the three-piece, Diego Ramirez. Listen to his story in the above video as part of this, one of the most essential installments of our ongoing series On Tyranny.

For more on Joudy, go to:

https://joudyjoudyjoudy.com/
https://www.instagram.com/joudy.joudy.joudy/?hl=en
https://www.trashcasual.com/joudy
https://joudyjoudyjoudy.bandcamp.com/music

For other installments of On Tyranny, check out:

• Diles Que No Me Maten Frontman Says U.S. Is Rapidly Becoming Too Costly – and Scary – to Tour Through

•  Scotland Grindcore Artist Chairmaker Channels Anger Over Fascism Toward Helping Immigrants

• Deaf Club Guitarist Denounces Trumpists for Taking ‘Pride’ in Racism, Sexism

This entry was posted on 06/29/2026 at 8:16 am and is filed under Features, Interviews, On Tyranny, On Tyranny, Videos with tags authoritarianism, fascism, immigration, Joudy, On Tyranny, trump, tyranny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.