GOGOL BORDELLO
Very Much Hammering
New York's notorious Gogol Bordello takes its smashing Gypsy-punk rebellion nationwide.
BY ZACH DUNDAS
Eugene Hutz--born in Soviet Kiev, shuffled through refugee camps across Europe, chief provocateur of New York's notorious Gogol Bordello--is no stranger to the strange.
His band is a mongrel beast, a sextet featuring Russians and Israelis on violins, accordions, guitars and horns, a maniacal Ukrainian singer (that's Hutz), an American drummer whipping it all into sweaty chaos. Hutz has called Gogol Bordello's music "Balkan Gypsy punk rock" and "rural Transylvanian avant-hard." Many have tried, but no one's devised more apt descriptions.
Gogol Bordello shows are wooly New York legend, a mix of surrealist cabaret theatrics and anarchic rock antics. Crazy stories abound--about the drunken Latvian prime minister slumped on stage, about late-night, plate-smashing, table-dancing debauchery, about hot candle wax guzzled along with copious vodka rations. The Gotham hype surrounding Gogol Bordello's stage show has reached such a fever pitch, Hutz won't discuss it anymore.
"I'm not gonna tell you anything about it," the singer says in pungent Slavic English. "All I tell you is that it will be approximately like circumcision, baptizing and a wedding at same time. It's a Gypsy secret."
If most bands washed up on rock's shores are yachting slicks with neat hair and easily identified target demographics, Gogol Bordello is the sleazy gang off a rust-hulked tramp freighter flying a Third World flag. Where do they come from? Where are they bound? Can the crew be trusted? Are they here for our women, or just our souls? Will they share their rum?
This fall, the band released the album Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony, and prepared for its first national tour. For all his personal experience with weirdness, Hutz says he's never ventured deep into America--and the prospect of doing so keeps him up all night.
"I am so wired I can't sleep," he says. "This will be my actual first trip through America. And I like that this time my music takes me on the road and not refugee program. That's a fuckin' nice improvement, too."
Whether America is ready for Gogol Bordello is an open question. The band has carved a unique notch in New York's music scene. Its approach--fanatically unironic and risky, prone to "trial and error," as Hutz puts it--rebukes the calculated retro-styles of many hot indie-rock poseurs du jour. The mayhem inspired by the band reportedly makes mainstream rock clubs nervous.
So in a few rock dives and many ethnic bars (and at this year's high-art Whitney Biennial), Gogol Bordello nurtures its public.
"We are definitely a very New York type of combination of characters," Hutz says. "Definitely more New York than motherfuckin' Strokes or some shit like that. We seem to appeal to all kinds of guys and girls doing strange hats. Lots of strange hats. It seems to be lots of Brazilian and Eastern European and all kind of drunk Italians and Mediterranean immigration transplants, as well as what you call fuckin' hipsters here. Which is not necessarily a bad word. From the stage you can address crowd in different languages. I speak four, so I can."
Gogol Bordello seems to be the sum of Hutz's obsessions: love for illicit rock and roll developed as a Soviet kid, consummated after his family's exodus to Europe and then the States; a fixation with East Euro peasant culture's ancient juju; a habitual urge to raise hell.
Hutz's dad played in a rock band at a time when Soviet authorities took a dim view of such capitalist decadence, introducing young Eugene to a variety of underground influences.
"I was probably first skateboarder in Ukraine," he says. "My dad brought me this thing from Yugoslavia in, like, 1980. And it wasn't bending, y'know? I don't know if the wheels were really turning. It was just a fucking thing. And nobody knew what it is. I just kind of liked freaking people out, kind of maneuvering for a while before I end up in the bushes. I just think, because of people's reaction, I grew to be attached to this provocative situation."
In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor popped, and Hutz's family evacuated big-city Kiev for the deep Ukrainian countryside. There, he steeped in the mossy musical traditions and mythology of a land then innocent of Coca-Cola and satellite TV, where violins were hand-carved only from trees struck by lightning.
Finally, atop this hybrid upbringing, set Hutz's love for authors like Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born genius whose absurdist tragedies previewed Kafka and remain some of the knottiest puzzles in Russian literature. In Gogol's world, overcoats come alive, noses go missing and dogs write gossipy letters. This aesthetic clearly influences some of Hutz's lyrics, wherein horny invisible men accost housewives and savage border guards stand watch over nonexistent countries.
"It's relevant in the sense of outsider's melancholic vision," says Hutz of the Gogol name-check. "It's also relevant for the grotesque."
All these influences are at play on Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony, a goulash of hilarity, sadness and riot. But what are these immigrant wanderers saying? Hard to put a fine point on it. But it seems Gogol Bordello's saying, "Look, the world is out to get us. You can retreat into self-conscious cool. Or you can fight back with every last weapon at your disposal."
"We combine music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Western music, particularly New York underground," says Hutz. "These kind of energies are the most interesting layers of culture. It's definitely not something that comes from magazines or from galleries. It's some kind of nasty thing, that make you go, 'What the fuck?'"
For all this high-minded/low-brow theorizing, Hutz stresses that Gogol Bordello is not a cultural exercise.
"We work in genre of a super-song," the mad Ukrainian says. "If you wanna think about it, and instigate all the hidden parts, you can do that. It's there for you. If you want to swing from a chandelier, and go fucking nuts, you can do that too. It's called super-music."
A fine-print liner note to Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony warns: "PS--It was your last summer before cultural revolution."Gogol Bordello has played in Europe, but never in Russia or Ukraine. Hutz once discovered bootlegged Gogol Bordello albums at a Kiev market, but not everyone back home is a fan. "The academic Ukrainian press has big problem with us, because we 'misrepresent the Diaspora,'" he says. "We apparently are bastardizing the heritage. So I guess we're doing something right."
Another good interview:http://www.skratchmagazine.com/interviews/interviews.php?id=102
New York's notorious Gogol Bordello takes its smashing Gypsy-punk rebellion nationwide.
BY ZACH DUNDAS
Eugene Hutz--born in Soviet Kiev, shuffled through refugee camps across Europe, chief provocateur of New York's notorious Gogol Bordello--is no stranger to the strange.
His band is a mongrel beast, a sextet featuring Russians and Israelis on violins, accordions, guitars and horns, a maniacal Ukrainian singer (that's Hutz), an American drummer whipping it all into sweaty chaos. Hutz has called Gogol Bordello's music "Balkan Gypsy punk rock" and "rural Transylvanian avant-hard." Many have tried, but no one's devised more apt descriptions.
Gogol Bordello shows are wooly New York legend, a mix of surrealist cabaret theatrics and anarchic rock antics. Crazy stories abound--about the drunken Latvian prime minister slumped on stage, about late-night, plate-smashing, table-dancing debauchery, about hot candle wax guzzled along with copious vodka rations. The Gotham hype surrounding Gogol Bordello's stage show has reached such a fever pitch, Hutz won't discuss it anymore.
"I'm not gonna tell you anything about it," the singer says in pungent Slavic English. "All I tell you is that it will be approximately like circumcision, baptizing and a wedding at same time. It's a Gypsy secret."
If most bands washed up on rock's shores are yachting slicks with neat hair and easily identified target demographics, Gogol Bordello is the sleazy gang off a rust-hulked tramp freighter flying a Third World flag. Where do they come from? Where are they bound? Can the crew be trusted? Are they here for our women, or just our souls? Will they share their rum?
This fall, the band released the album Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony, and prepared for its first national tour. For all his personal experience with weirdness, Hutz says he's never ventured deep into America--and the prospect of doing so keeps him up all night.
"I am so wired I can't sleep," he says. "This will be my actual first trip through America. And I like that this time my music takes me on the road and not refugee program. That's a fuckin' nice improvement, too."
Whether America is ready for Gogol Bordello is an open question. The band has carved a unique notch in New York's music scene. Its approach--fanatically unironic and risky, prone to "trial and error," as Hutz puts it--rebukes the calculated retro-styles of many hot indie-rock poseurs du jour. The mayhem inspired by the band reportedly makes mainstream rock clubs nervous.
So in a few rock dives and many ethnic bars (and at this year's high-art Whitney Biennial), Gogol Bordello nurtures its public.
"We are definitely a very New York type of combination of characters," Hutz says. "Definitely more New York than motherfuckin' Strokes or some shit like that. We seem to appeal to all kinds of guys and girls doing strange hats. Lots of strange hats. It seems to be lots of Brazilian and Eastern European and all kind of drunk Italians and Mediterranean immigration transplants, as well as what you call fuckin' hipsters here. Which is not necessarily a bad word. From the stage you can address crowd in different languages. I speak four, so I can."
Gogol Bordello seems to be the sum of Hutz's obsessions: love for illicit rock and roll developed as a Soviet kid, consummated after his family's exodus to Europe and then the States; a fixation with East Euro peasant culture's ancient juju; a habitual urge to raise hell.
Hutz's dad played in a rock band at a time when Soviet authorities took a dim view of such capitalist decadence, introducing young Eugene to a variety of underground influences.
"I was probably first skateboarder in Ukraine," he says. "My dad brought me this thing from Yugoslavia in, like, 1980. And it wasn't bending, y'know? I don't know if the wheels were really turning. It was just a fucking thing. And nobody knew what it is. I just kind of liked freaking people out, kind of maneuvering for a while before I end up in the bushes. I just think, because of people's reaction, I grew to be attached to this provocative situation."
In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor popped, and Hutz's family evacuated big-city Kiev for the deep Ukrainian countryside. There, he steeped in the mossy musical traditions and mythology of a land then innocent of Coca-Cola and satellite TV, where violins were hand-carved only from trees struck by lightning.
Finally, atop this hybrid upbringing, set Hutz's love for authors like Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian-born genius whose absurdist tragedies previewed Kafka and remain some of the knottiest puzzles in Russian literature. In Gogol's world, overcoats come alive, noses go missing and dogs write gossipy letters. This aesthetic clearly influences some of Hutz's lyrics, wherein horny invisible men accost housewives and savage border guards stand watch over nonexistent countries.
"It's relevant in the sense of outsider's melancholic vision," says Hutz of the Gogol name-check. "It's also relevant for the grotesque."
All these influences are at play on Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony, a goulash of hilarity, sadness and riot. But what are these immigrant wanderers saying? Hard to put a fine point on it. But it seems Gogol Bordello's saying, "Look, the world is out to get us. You can retreat into self-conscious cool. Or you can fight back with every last weapon at your disposal."
"We combine music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Western music, particularly New York underground," says Hutz. "These kind of energies are the most interesting layers of culture. It's definitely not something that comes from magazines or from galleries. It's some kind of nasty thing, that make you go, 'What the fuck?'"
For all this high-minded/low-brow theorizing, Hutz stresses that Gogol Bordello is not a cultural exercise.
"We work in genre of a super-song," the mad Ukrainian says. "If you wanna think about it, and instigate all the hidden parts, you can do that. It's there for you. If you want to swing from a chandelier, and go fucking nuts, you can do that too. It's called super-music."
A fine-print liner note to Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony warns: "PS--It was your last summer before cultural revolution."Gogol Bordello has played in Europe, but never in Russia or Ukraine. Hutz once discovered bootlegged Gogol Bordello albums at a Kiev market, but not everyone back home is a fan. "The academic Ukrainian press has big problem with us, because we 'misrepresent the Diaspora,'" he says. "We apparently are bastardizing the heritage. So I guess we're doing something right."
Another good interview:http://www.skratchmagazine.com/interviews/interviews.php?id=102
posted by bazooka radio at 9:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home