2008 Woodie Awards
Tuesday is made for gypsy punks: Gogol Bordello comes to town
Bursten, Julia
Issue date: 3/14/08 Section: Entertainment
Imagine taking the Grandmaster Flash out of Gnarls Barkley and replacing it with a Weird Al vs. Borat bar brawl: Presto, you would have Gogol Bordello, the self-described gypsy punk band that is slated to confuse, enthrall and energize audiences at the Meridian on Tuesday. The eight-piece set of rockers from New York City, by way of custom, furiously blends metallic core rhythms with instrumentation that is decidedly out of the mainstream. Accordions and fire buckets, as well as percussive dancing, are common fare for Gogol stages.
This is not your mama's world music. It is no goodwill musical mission, no sweet-voiced cultural petit four. It is impossible to walk away from Gogol feeling like you have witnessed a quaint foreign concert, a Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The gypsy punks do not allow audiences to just listen to the snarling, heavily accented songs and lyrics: Listeners have to meet Gogol head-on and immerse themselves in the bizarre culmination of five continents' worth of musicians, or they will end up running away screaming.
Example: Take the band's, um, idiosyncratic, lyrics and vocals. Lead vocalist Eugene Hütz drops articles like a freshman pre-med dropping honors orgo: with a reckless abandon full of exuberance and the thrill of crossing new boundaries. But unlike the pre-med, who follows in the steps of countless Rice first-years before her, Hütz's foreclosure of "a"s and "the"s produces a wildly original lyric effect: The unexpected patterns of diction make listeners pay attention to the content of the lyric narratives. Audiences actually hear what Hütz has to say, despite his vocal caricaturization of the gravelly, screaming punk front-man.
And Hütz and his cohorts have a lot to say. Their lyrics stray afield of the standard punk fare, at least in part. Sure, they tout adolescent rebellion in songs like "Sally," where Hütz describes "a fifteen-year-old girl from Nebraska / Gypsies were passing through her little town / They dropped something on the road, she picked it up / And cultural revolution right away begun."
This is not your mama's world music. It is no goodwill musical mission, no sweet-voiced cultural petit four. It is impossible to walk away from Gogol feeling like you have witnessed a quaint foreign concert, a Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The gypsy punks do not allow audiences to just listen to the snarling, heavily accented songs and lyrics: Listeners have to meet Gogol head-on and immerse themselves in the bizarre culmination of five continents' worth of musicians, or they will end up running away screaming.
Example: Take the band's, um, idiosyncratic, lyrics and vocals. Lead vocalist Eugene Hütz drops articles like a freshman pre-med dropping honors orgo: with a reckless abandon full of exuberance and the thrill of crossing new boundaries. But unlike the pre-med, who follows in the steps of countless Rice first-years before her, Hütz's foreclosure of "a"s and "the"s produces a wildly original lyric effect: The unexpected patterns of diction make listeners pay attention to the content of the lyric narratives. Audiences actually hear what Hütz has to say, despite his vocal caricaturization of the gravelly, screaming punk front-man.
And Hütz and his cohorts have a lot to say. Their lyrics stray afield of the standard punk fare, at least in part. Sure, they tout adolescent rebellion in songs like "Sally," where Hütz describes "a fifteen-year-old girl from Nebraska / Gypsies were passing through her little town / They dropped something on the road, she picked it up / And cultural revolution right away begun."
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