We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Toño Lucero & Hunter Banes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Toño, Hunter, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the toughest things about progressing in your creative career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
We record our podcast weekly, so sometimes it’s a scramble to get that done every single week, by Wednesday on the dot. Because we live in present day, we do 90% of our marketing via social media, namely TikTok and Instagram. A recent pastime includes going live and being chaotic on TikTok- talking and joking about pop-culture and getting into how much we love or what we feel about the newest music of the week. Our podcast, unfortunately, isn’t really a “safe-for-work” podcast, and that can lead to some unexpected TikTok bans when one of co-hosts has too colorful of a vocabulary (Toño). This is especially frustrating when a lot of our livestreams have to do with being queer and how it affects us and may or may not include the reclaiming of some verbiage. Still, we’re doing our best to navigate the algorithm and it’s clutches on both Instagram and TikTok. It’s not easy, especially when bots or mods take our words out of context.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Bangerz! consists of two best friends from Portland, Oregon who met on Pride the summer before high school, ten years ago: Hunter (they/them), a photographer, graphic designer, and artist & Toño (they/he), a rapper, songwriter, singer and producer, In our early college years, we started a podcast on Soundcloud in Toño’s grandma’s- two stoners, two chairs, and the voice memos app… recording on Hunter’s iPhone 5s… with music from another phone being played on another device- think Mystery Science Theater 420. We listened to full albums, talked about them, and life… and had about 3 listeners an episode.
Cut to- a global pandemic. Hunter now lives in Sacramento. Toño is no longer recording from their grandma’s garage. Enter Zoom. This is not an ad (We record the podcast every week through Zoom). Now the podcast is a little different. You can go straight to bangerzpodcast.com to see the newest songs we’ve chosen, and stream our podcast essentially everywhere via that link. Because we live 600 miles apart, we don’t see each other IRL often, but that’s okay. We’ve always been really great at getting a sesh in and finding great music wherever we are. There’s no co-host duo like us– you can’t find a better pairing than Cancer and Scorpio besties getting into it. Try to find one. We’ll wait.
The best part about the podcast is being able to find new artists to Stan, small or big. Throughout our podcast history, we’ve been able to interview people like Aja (who starred on HBO’s Legendary and RuPaul’s Drag Race) and our 50th Episode Spectacular, we interviewed an array of smaller local artists from around the country. If you like comedy or music or gay people, hit us up.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
“Growing up I never saw a lot of me in media. I definitely had Latino-centered TV and movies I had access to, but the only queer, Latino character I ever saw was Antonio from the ‘High School Musical’ episode of ‘The Suite Life of Zack & Cody’. As I get older and discover more about myself like being non-binary, or discovering I’m on the autistic spectrum, it’s still as hard trying to find myself represented even with representation being higher in the media.
I know there’s more queer people like me out there, especially younger queer people, and at some point I decided that if I’m not getting the representation that I need then I have to be that for others. Through my music I’ve been able to connect and relate with other queerdos from across the country. That’s always gonna be driving me and my art.”
-Toño
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
“Self expression is a big one in this for me. Growing up, I don’t think I had a lot of ways to physically express my creativity. I took art classes and I sang in the shower, but I also got told that I was bad at it and that I should shut-up. My art was always seen as a mess, so I never thought it was important. Until it turned into a skill and my mom needed my help to fix her website or a family friend needed a logo made for a business. Today, my creative job makes me money and keeps me satisfied knowing I’m helping people and that there’s a need for my art out there.
But creating and being apart of Bangerz! Podcast is rewarding in more of a fun and healing way. Not only am I using all the skills that I’ve been learning forever to grow a lil’ business, I get to consume some really amazing music and talk to my childhood best friend about the things that everyone is tweeting about. It’s rewarding in terms of Anchor payouts, but it’s also very fun!”
-Hunter
Contact Info:
- Website: bangerzpodcast.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bangerzpodcast/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/bangerzpodcast
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCIz-AUWCr8RunDWap3pmNQ?sub_confirmation=1
- Other: Stream the New Banger Friday playlist we update weekly: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1B4o5HYvmwgPgsp4I1Kxn1?si=ZlGGS6pMTN6AkhMM5tWy3A&nd=1
Image Credits
@bangerzpodcast