GOGOL BORDELLO: Immigrant Rebels
This is an excerpt from a paper I am writing now about immigration in American media. I chose to focus on the kickass gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello.
A Scene Witnessed by the Author
December 21, 2006, at the Irving Plaza in Manhattan, the lights flash and the music swells. A guitar lets out machine-gun riffs, a bearded fiddler summons screams from his strings. An acrobatic woman bangs on a giant drum, and an accordianist squelches belching notes from his squeezebox. The crowd is a pulsing mass that shakes the floor, bulging the ceiling of the lower level in. A skinny man takes the drum from the woman and gingerly places it on top of the crowd. He climbs onto it and kneels, and the crowd pushes the drum along, slowly, as if he were riding on a gentle sea. He reaches down and pulls a young woman up from the teeming masses, and holds her steadily on top of the drum. Her face is rapturous, and she is panting, exhilarated, riding with the man across the crowd and back onto the stage.
“Party!” the man screams into the microphone, with a thick Ukrainian accent.
What does this intense scene have to do with the experience of immigration? Everything, when it's created by the New York punk rock band Gogol Bordello, self-described “multi-kontra-culti” immigrant punks.
An example of the incredible stage presence and crowd reactions:
A Scene Witnessed by the Author
December 21, 2006, at the Irving Plaza in Manhattan, the lights flash and the music swells. A guitar lets out machine-gun riffs, a bearded fiddler summons screams from his strings. An acrobatic woman bangs on a giant drum, and an accordianist squelches belching notes from his squeezebox. The crowd is a pulsing mass that shakes the floor, bulging the ceiling of the lower level in. A skinny man takes the drum from the woman and gingerly places it on top of the crowd. He climbs onto it and kneels, and the crowd pushes the drum along, slowly, as if he were riding on a gentle sea. He reaches down and pulls a young woman up from the teeming masses, and holds her steadily on top of the drum. Her face is rapturous, and she is panting, exhilarated, riding with the man across the crowd and back onto the stage.
“Party!” the man screams into the microphone, with a thick Ukrainian accent.
What does this intense scene have to do with the experience of immigration? Everything, when it's created by the New York punk rock band Gogol Bordello, self-described “multi-kontra-culti” immigrant punks.
An example of the incredible stage presence and crowd reactions:
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