roma music and resistance…

I was actually hoping to get my hands on the documentary film, by Pavla Fleischer The Pied Piper of Hützovina, but no such luck yet. But the website tells an interesting story in itself, of the making of the film, which emerged from one woman’s fascination with a man, and a man’s journey back to his cultural and musical roots. It is a film filled with movement as the story line delineates the path of a road trip along a past journey’s route. All of the details though are still to be discovered, once I watch the movie myself. So for now there is the clip, a music video for Wonderlust King with footage from the film, and the website itself.

“The Pied Piper of Hutzovina.” 11 Dec. 2007 <http://www.thepiedpiperofhutzovina.com/>

Inherent in Gogol Bordello’s music is the mixing of two musical discourses, one whose very core is dissenting, the punk genre, challenging social and political norms, and the gypsy music which Eugene Hütz has come to rediscover and integrate into his music as a part of his cultural heritage. The discourse of displacement is ineluctably present in his music, since his own life was permeated with the experience as his family moved from the Ukraine as a result of Chernobyl and spent a several years journeying through Europe before coming to North America. As his cultural background is one of Ukrainian, Russian, Romany descent, so his music is infused with the dialogue of past and present.

In an interview on Bmore Tunes with Greg Szeto, he responds to the question of how this musical fusion came about:

“Haha I have told this story many times. The truth is I never really thought about it. It was very natural for me. The musical mind, it comes from an instinct. This is what came out for me.

The intellectual side comes in the lyrics, where I write about my life and what I know. I was almost afraid of an educational force on them. Until I started the band, I thought everyone knew about gypsies. But then I found out no one knew anything about them! So I started to write songs about the social, political and other aspects of gypsy life.”

Here he addresses two issues that have become apparent to me, as essential components to analysing this discourse: the visceral, intuitive element of this music, and on the other hand the extreme lack of exposure to actual Roma culture, to the history which has been so misrepresented in Western literature and general discourse as it was formed from the outside, rather than by the Romani themselves.

The tension of identity within a group as diverse as the Romani, due to the history of migration, forced and voluntary, and the artistic expression that emerges out of this mobility, where national boundaries are no longer distinguishing factors, and yet their very existence shapes the frames of expression and the movement of sound is a tension that I hope to understand. The influence of national boundaries crossed mingling with a longer history of being as derived through the experience of otherness and wandering. These all seem to be key elements brought together in a form of expression that in Eugene Hütz’s artistic endeavours exceeds the traditional boundaries of a Roma/ Gypsy music style, and yet seems to speak with a voice uniquely adapted to the present situation of a people as diversified as they are.

“Bmore Tunes » Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello.” 11 Dec. 2007 <http://www.bmoretunes.com/?page_id=33>

“The Beaver – The Newspaper of the London School of Economics Students’ Union.” 11 Dec. 2007 <http://thebeaveronline.co.uk/PartB/huetz-attacks>

here is an interview with Eugene Hütz on npr, including some life music…

“NPR Music: Gogol Bordello: Music from ‘Gypsy Punks’.” 11 Dec. 2007 <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5371385>

and another one of Gogol Bordello’s music videos: Not A Crime