By Mike Sain't Louis ·
La Alcantarilla: a punk rat with a pink mohawk
The star of this cover isn't a person. It's a rat. Wet, with long whiskers and a punk mohawk dyed fuchsia pink, peeking out cautiously from a sewer pipe while the water shines on the ground.
I love it. It's endearing and disgusting at the same time, and that says a lot about what La Alcantarilla (The Sewer) suggests. The sewers are where everything the city doesn't want to see goes, what gets thrown away, what gets hidden. And out of there she comes, styled for the party.
For me the rat with the mohawk has something of a collective self-portrait. Many queer people have been treated as something to be sent underground, and some of us learned to come out of there with more style than anyone.
The pink lettering on a black background, minimalist, completes that air of an underground club at five in the morning.
Listen to it in the dark. Then tell me what you find down there.