Gogol Bordello Takes it to “the Next Level”?
This Billboard piece from last week on the latest iteration of Gogol Bordello: based in Rio and not New York, working with the tour management company that manages Phish and the Dave Matthews Band and also with Rick Rubin/American Recordings/Sony is a must-read, especially for anyone who still doesn’t understand that popular music is still mostly a business venture, and an incredibly risky, serious, and demanding one at that. (As an aside it made me wonder how many other recording artists have worked with both Steve Albini and Rick Rubin. Are there any others?)
Music in the 90s mostly left me cold as it was surrounded by endless tiresome arguments over such spectral, meaningless concepts as “selling out”, “cred” etc. Since the total collapse of the music industry over the last decade, such concepts have become even more completely irrelevant as there’s so little money to be made in either the “indie” (whatever that means) or “mainstream” (whatever that means) worlds, a state of affairs which Eugene Hutz references in his remarks on signing with American Recordings/Sony.
The topsy-turvy nature of the contemporary music business has basically forced every act that isn’t Justin Bieber to treat studio recordings as loss leaders or promotional materials for the non-stop touring by which they (and Ticketmaster) grind out a living, a business model presaged simultaneously by both punk bands and the hippie jam bands which are supposedly their enemy/opposite. GB has long been at the forefront of this. They’ve been on a backbreaking 200-250 date a year schedule for basically as long as I can remember, while simultaneously recording a ton of great new material. I don’t think anyone could dispute giving them some sort of “hardest working band in show business” tag.
So now here they are at the precipice of …something or other. The exec they quote wants to compare them to System of a Down, I guess because System of a Down are Armenian? This is odd because as far as I know (which is admittedly not much) System of a Down’s music isn’t in any way informed by the folk music of Armenia or Eastern Europe in the way that Gogol Bordello is influenced by Ukranian folk music. What he means of course (and quite rightly so) is that he’d like Gogol Bordello to have a similar level of popularity, which I suppose could happen. They’ve already been through a lot of weird permutations, such as Eugene and a couple others appearing live in front of a billion or whatever people at that Earth Day concert singing “La Isla Bonita” of all things (which I actually kind of liked), as well as Eugene doing that movie that Madonna directed which is generally reported to have been the worst film in the history of cinema. The fact that I saw them in 2000 at the original “Bulgarian Bar” at Broadway and Canal in a cramped scrum of people with no real delineation between performer and audience and was all “This is the future of rock n’ roll” along with probably a hundred other guys is of no moment. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in Fortress of Solitude, like knowing that such and such hip restaurant or boutique or hotel used to be a crack house or whatever, it’s merely interesting.
