Emigration etc.

They became famous after a show in "Pizdetz" (the most accurate translation of this Russian expression would be "cunt kaput") - an after-hours club on Ridge Street in New York. The members of the band are from Ukraine, Sachalin, Israel, Moscow and California. I heard them for the first time when a colleague of mine had brought their CD to work and I was overjoyed - for the first time ever I could understand the lyrics better than he (English) did. From the background of thundering drums, banging fire buckets, violins and accordions stories emerged - uttered with a distinctive Slavic accent and interwoven with Russian jokes and exclamations. Thus my encounter with "Gogol Bordello" began.

The front man of the group (or phenomenon if you like), its founder and and soul Eugene Hütz (Євгени Худз) as "Guardian" says has called his band "an orchestra of fucking immigrants, jamming in A minor".Their lyrics are obscene, they give out to everyone - homo sovieticus, West, Europe, pop culture, the system, immigration officers. E. Hütz looks like a an outlaw himself - franticly spinning on the stage half naked and with a distinctive mustache. Their music is everything but easy-listening and E. Hütz roars with a creaking voice every single song as if it was a confession born in the darkest corner of the soul in the middle of the night while sitting besides a campfire and cracking a couple of bottles of vodka. Their music, the so called "gypsy punk", has won admirers all over the United States and recently thousands of music fans were madly jumping with their wellies in the mud of Glastonbury to its rythm.




To get the lyrics

"aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiget down here as a cheap labor force but i beat the system everywhere i goes"

is tough and I have my reservations - I doubt that because of them thousands are going crazy - it is the image of "Gogol Bordello" that puts a spell on you first. Yet behind it remarkably accurate and intense words are concealed - emerging from personal experiences - firstly those of E. Hütz, who had left Ukraine with his parents following the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and those of other members of the band who are now partying together on the other side of the Atlantic after achieving their "American dream" .

There you go critics of emigration - another example of immigrants not only wiping Westerners' asses as you like to stress so often, but kicking them too.

PS
Apparently Madona is known to be a huge fan of "Gogol Bordello", she even invited the guys to join her on stage on 07 07 07 for "Live Earth" gig in London, where she was stamping to their fiddle (or so a similar Russian saying goes).