Photo by _SiD_”
Late one evening on the last day of a tour we did with Worn In Red back in 2009, there was a party in Richmond, Virginia at Matt Neagle’s – the bassist’s – house. It was cold outside, and everyone was keeping warm with drinking and yelling. Putting on wigs for compromising photos to be laughed about and shared days after online, the last day celebration went late night well into the early morning.
Somewhere between two and three a.m. I fell asleep sitting straight up on a couch with my sleeping bag over my head and wrapped around me. Opposite side of the living room the stereo was blasting directly at me from atop the television. Eugene Hutz warbling in his Ukrainian accent over the gypsy frenzy of Gogol Bordello. As I drifted to sleep I thought, “damn…this is pretty amazing…..”
When I first heard of Gogol Bordello, my reaction to that was similar to that of any band doing the culture/punk mash-up – e.g. Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphy’s – “Fuck this, keep punk, punk. Fuck your re-appropriating punk rock to fit yer bullshit.”
But fortunately, my ignorance was short-lived. That tour specifically, I was bumping the likes of Man Man, which was confusing I think to people who knew my musical tastes up to that point – loud, angry, punk. Albeit I still am not a fan of Dropkick or Flogging Molly, Gogol Bordello seized me to the point of fan-boy adoration. To think that I would love something to the extent that I do that is labeled as “gypsy punk” amazes me to this day.
I get it though. Gogol Bordello is what music should be – over-the-top, theatrical and exaggerated, larger than life, an escape from the boring frivolity of reality.
So few bands aim to do this. They stare at the floor, put on a face, and expect us to give ourselves to them. Hey, I’ve been in the same place. We want people to dig our bands . Cool, I get it. But music is so much more than that. It’s creativity. It’s art. Whoever stared at the painting of a bowl of fruit and really thought that shit was amazing?
Take a piece from Banksy, or Jason deClaires Taylor though. That hits us with it’s brutal honesty, it’s magnification of reality, it’s theatricality. “Holy shit, how did they do that?” Why do you suppose movies and video games have supplanted music and books? Couldn’t possibly be the over-the-top effects, the explosions or chases, or any other flame for the A.D.D. moth-like generation.
That shouldn’t be mistaken that I think music should drink from the same fountain of mindless entertainment. Of course not. These days I simply want more from the music I listen to. I want to feel the words you’re singing. I want to believe the things your spouting. Walking the walk while talking the talk, if there’s any talk to be had at all.
So ultimately there’s only a handful of bands/artists that I’ve been listening to this last year. Epic, weird, original stuff is what I crave for. I feel that there can’t be enough emphasis on originality these days. These days of music regurgitation. Past ad nauseum straight into full-blown arms hugging the toilet bowl and spewing.
It seems that we’re now in a realm of music where very few individuals are interested in being different. You look at every decade in music, and it seemed at least someone was trying to push the envelope as a movement. The hippies of the 60′s, punk rearing it’s head in the 70′s, hardcore in the 80′s, grunge from late 80′s into the 90′s, even “emo” in the early 2000′s…but what now?
Between All Time Low and Ke$ha, I’ve had my fill. Even a lot of punk bands are bent on perfecting their carbon copy version of their favorite band. We don’t need another Dillinger Four. We don’t need another Kid Dynamite. We need you – uniquely. Specifically. Originally.
Subscribe to sakesalive.org
