RING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH GOGOL BORDELLO

As I keep saying, Becky and I are spending three nights in the French Quarter, so I'm leaving Real Art alone until I get back. Consequently, I won't be able to wish you a happy New Year on the 31st. So I'll do it now: happy New Year!!!! This is also an opportunity to push my latest musicial favorite oddity, New York hipster band Gogol Bordello.

Discovering them was very weird. I was flipping channels around late one night a few weeks ago when I happened on a very odd band performing on Conan O'Brien. I'm so jaded these days: ordinarily, I would have flipped right on by, but I lingered for a few seconds because I wasn't able to immediately categorize what these guys were doing. The longer I watched the more they sucked me in. For the first couple of moments, due to gratuitous use of accordion, a two-beat feel, and the lead singer's big huge mustache, I figured they were some sort of Tejano/hip-hop fusion. But that didn't pan out. They just didn't look like Latinos--the old hippy dude playing the fiddle completely blew the curve. And the wild Iggy Pop-like gyrations of the front man clearly had no African-American or Hispanic precedent. "What the hell is this?" I thought. Then they got weirder. The singing became more frenetic, the singer more frenzied. "Fun," I thought, but still wasn't sold. That's when two women, who appeared to be dressed in something of a cross between Lotte Lenya and Victoria's Secret, no really, came out playing a big bass marching drum and hand-held cymbals to flank the singer. I was totally blown away. It was over the top nuts.

Anyway, I looked them up on the Internet machine, my computer, and found that their performance was no fluke. Here, check out some of this interview with their Ukranian-born lead singer, Eugene Hutz:

Irony poisoned almost the whole world, and it's only going to keep spreading. That's why a wave of authenticity is going to definitely arise against it. Because you can't really experience life; you can't really live in an ironic way. I mean, what the fuck is this guy Beck doing? I can't even watch him on stage. It's ridiculous. I don't understand. What is this kind of, "Yeah, I'm into it but not really. I'm just kind of checking it out. I'm kind of break dancing, but not really because I am too cool to really break dance." What the fuck are these people breeding? The whole aesthetic premise of irony is just rotten to the core. When I got to New York and I went to concerts, I realized nobody really fucking dances because they are too cool. But really they just don't know how to feel because the people on stage don't fucking know how to feel. Our music is against being desensitized.

Click here for the rest.

Not only do these guys give a fantastic show, but they're also working in an extremely subversive way at the artistic level. When I first read that excerpt above, I was blown away: he's absolutely right; irony, as an aesthetic concept, is a sort of spiritual death. Fuck it, and all that post-modern bullshit used to justify it. I think that maybe an ironic stage was necessary in the 90s once everybody had fully figured out that bigtime music, bigtime anything, is full of shit, but, okay, we've done that. What's next? Gogol Bordello is drunkenly leading the way toward the next zeitgeist.

And I'm going to follow.

Check out their website here.

Check out a weird and frenzied video for their song "Start Wearing Purple" from their latest album Gypsy Punk here.


Gogol Bordello lead singer Eugene Hutz

Happy New Year!

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