Gogol Bordello, New York City's celebrated Ukrainian gypsy punk band, is on a mission to unite the international community of punks, roots rockers, gypsy revolutionaries, techno troublemakers and other disgruntled youth into a global force for change. The band's supercharged music blends a brutal gypsy two-step rhythm that sounds like an Eastern European cousin of ska, with flamenco, punk, metal, rap, roots reggae, and dub. The lyrics, delivered in English, Spanish, Italian, and Ukrainian make it clear where Gogol stand in the battle between rich and poor, the privileged and the working class. Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, their latest 15-track sonic salvo, captures some of the band's fierce live power, thanks to the analogue production work of Steve Albini. Gogol founder and front man Eugene Hutz has nothing but kind words for Albini's ability to showcase the band's ferocious presence.
"It's good to work with somebody who has no bullshit involved in what he does," Hutz said. "He's a massive workaholic mastermind. No I'm-a-legend vibe around it. [Our band] likes to get our hands dirty and roll up the sleeves, so to work with someone with the same ethic is a great match. All the material was crystallized from live gigs. His method is documentation. He makes sure your vision gets captured. He rejects the notion of producer. He says you wrote the material, play it the best you can and don't think about changing it in the mix with ProTools. Give it to yourself as a gift."
Gypsy Punks is also a gift to people who like raw, unadulterated energy, dark, ironic humor, and music without borders. "Think Globally, Fuck Locally" tips its hat to Django's jazzy French gypsy swing with breathless fiddling by Sergey Rjabtzev, an almost metallic back beat, grinding rock guitar and a flurry of odd percussion effects. "60 Revolutions (per minute)" is a blazingly fast punk tango with brilliant accordion work by Yuri Lemeshev and a tongue-twisting rap in Spanish. "Immigrant Punk" is built on a foundation of gypsy stomp seasoned by punk roots reggae and twangy spaghetti Western guitar. Its account of gypsies, punks and immigrants dealing with suspicious police and disparaging townsfolk is true to Hutz's own experience of fleeing the Chernobyl meltdown.
"It's an interesting story," Hutz agrees, "but maybe not so interesting when it was happening. I was listening to rock music on BBC radio with my dad when the DJ said: 'For the citizens of Ukraine; I'd like to make a Public Service announcement. There was just a disaster in Chernobyl and it's not likely your government will tell you about it.' It was only people like us listening to forbidden stations who got our shit together and fled. I was 13 or 14 and really into punk rock and didn't want to leave [Kiev.] I was active in the punk scene and starting to write music. I was going to music school for drums. I was familiar with the black market and I knew exactly where to go to get everything I wanted. It took a lot of money to get, but I was able to make money by making bootleg mix tapes and bootleg porn, Xeroxes of Hustler magazine photos. I sold 'em for five bucks a pop at my school. Selling is how I made money on the side to buy the awesome records that were my world—Dead Kennedys, Nick Cave, any anti-commercial music I could find. I wanted to bring all my records with me, but I couldn't.
"Luckily, the evacuation turned into another discovery. We visited the village my family came from; my relatives introduced me to the essential foods and music of our gypsy culture. My parents hid [their gypsy roots] in the city; in the countryside I was face to face with it. That was one of my biggest influences, to be face to face with an ancient culture. That gypsy two-step rhythm is the core of Gogol Bordello's music. It's an extreme rhythm and that's what gypsies do, they appropriate sounds from the surrounding culture and extreme-ize them. The heart of gypsy music is appropriation and hyperbolization, making the sound harder, faster, better. You can see it in flamenco and Russian gypsy music. "
Hutz and his family wanted to come to America, but wandered through refugee camps in Poland, Hungary, and Italy for six years. "I sat on suitcases for a long time," said Hutz, who is now an American citizen. "I had to give up my Ukrainian citizenship before I left. I was without any citizenship for seven years, not a good feeling, I tell you. In an idealistic sense, it sounds cool, but when you have a bunch of strange papers with you, every time you try to cross a border they look at you like you came from Antarctica."
The Hutz family settled in Vermont, but Eugene left for New York as soon as possible. In New York's melting pot he found other refugees who shared his vision of an international punk rock sound. "Our gypsy fiddler, Sergey Rjabtzev, was a theater director in Moscow for 10 years. Yuri Lemeshev, our 50-year-old accordion player, is from Sakhalin in Russia. Guitarist Oren Kaplan is from Israel, so is Rea Mochiach, the bass player, who did a lot of the dub effects on Gypsy Punks. The drummer is Al Furgerson, an American, the only sane person in the band.
Hutz already had a following from his DJ gig at Mehanata, where he cued up Ukrainian, Gypsy, rai, flamenco and other music from the global underground for an exuberant crowd of artists, models, scene-makers and local Ukrainians, Russians, Gypsies, and Bulgarians. Gogol took off immediately with a high-voltage show that demonstrates the extreme nature of gypsy music and those that sing and play it. "People after the show say, 'I'm exhausted just watching the show. How do you do it, how is it possible night after night?' I say if you're putting your soul into it, and pursuing your dream, it's more than music and behavior; it's a lifestyle, it's a mission. It's about pursuing the world for yourself, rejecting the fake convenience of the modern world. It's the difference between fashion and lifestyle. The economy wants to keep you happy with brand name shit, but people need to remember we're all a bit supernatural. You just have do some work to get to it.
"What we're doing isn't so unusual in the rest of the world. Manu Chao and Rachid Taha are rock stars in Europe; they've been mixing rock, rai, folk music, reggae, and punk for decades. People need to open their ears and go out of their way to find music that speaks to them. Avoid what's pounded into your head through the radio and media. Every time I DJ, people want to know what I'm playing. It's nothing on the radio, but something I scouted out and found, so I work like a madman making compilations for friends and fans. Once they hear it, they like it, but they don't venture out on their own to find it. There's a whole musical world that's better than the garbage they're being fed. Don't be afraid of the word abroad. In the old days a man had to travel the world and the seven seas to be a man, these days they sit in front of the TV and talk about globalization."
Visit Gogol Bordello on the Web at www.gogolbordello.com.
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