The Philosophical Attitude of Eugene Hütz, Singer of Gogol Bordello

Gogol Bordello is a band formed in 1999 in the United States. It has always brought to the stage a mix of different sounds and musical rhythms—punk, gypsy music, rock, hip-hop, reggae—and connects, in a harmonious and at the same time explosive way, cultures that are very distant from each other. This is the strength and soul of the group, of which Eugene Hütz—born in Ukraine in 1972—is the singer and the founding leader. Eugene Hütz is also an actor. In particular, he co-starred with Elijah Wood in Everything Is Illuminated, written and directed by Liev Schreiber (2005), and is the protagonist of Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom (2008).Valentina Antoniol: Thank you, Eugene, for this interview that you are granting us for the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture. Being interviewed is obviously not new to you. However, what I would like to try to bring out in this dialogue are above all some philosophical, cultural, and sociopolitical aspects of your music. So, first of all, I would like to start from the mission statement of Gogol Bordello. It seems to me that this document presents some important elements. It highlights a clear, and also consistently premonitory, correspondence with your path and your art. In fact, with a refinement that I would define as philosophical, a whole series of issues are made explicit, which then emerge in your music, in the lyrics of your songs, in your shows, in your way of being on stage and creating a real connection with the audience, in the social-political-cultural-aesthetic messages that you manage to convey. In the mission statement we read:What does it mean, in this context, that the “statement of post-modernism ‘everything has been done’ sounds as an intellectual error”?Eugene Hütz: The widespread attitude of “everything has been done” is a symptom of an exhausted and unimaginative mind, or a mind too lazy to propel itself onto a flight: namely, a mind that has lost its connection with the primordial and soulful joy of being. It is a mind that somehow got on the analytical carousel of the cerebral cortex, but doesn’t know how to get off of it. Naturally, nausea ensues. Yet, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” as Einstein rightly pointed out. We, precisely, want to be in the realm of vigorous imagination; that’s where the “party” is.As you can tell from that juvenile spitfire of our GB mission statement, we approached new possibilities of artistic and cultural fusion with an almost gastronomic mad excitement. “Where does this come from?,” an exhausted mind might ask. I don’t know. I remember David Bowie once describing the Stooges as “the wild side of American existentialism.” Maybe, in our case it is the wild side of Eastern European existentialism. An example to understand what I mean can also be easily found in what is the (relatively) new “Andes step” music scene coming now from Latin America. It is just incredible to hear deep-roots Bolivian, Peruvian, and Ecuadorian ethno-music in a digital context. Conceptually, one may say that mixing ethnic and electronic music is not new, it has certainly been done before; but on the level of emotional impact, it is a new and distinct hybrid school of sound. If you really listen to it with your whole being, it will have an unparalleled effect on you. When a right angle for the clash of elements is found, sparks fly! It’s all in that angle.Ultimately, we can certainly observe an ongoing tendency toward uniformity and imaginative resignation, but I don’t think it has taken hold of everyone yet. That’s kind of what I mean when I say “party,” and it is probably very different from what most people think it implies.VA: Underlying the special issue of this journal is the belief that popular culture needs attention also from a philosophical point of view. In this regard, I believe that the unique aesthetics of Gogol Bordello testifies to the taking of a philosophical/literary attitude. Your magic lies in the refinement with which you manage, through your music and the lyrics of your songs, to make the distance between the so-called high and low culture, between traditional and mainstream sounds, disappear. In one of the most famous songs of your production—“Start Wearing Purple” [on albums in 1999, 2005; as a single in 2006]—you not only managed to put together the English and the Russian language, but also, quite surprisingly, to bring on stage Diogenes and Foucault in a punk and Balkan version. As you sing, indeed: “I know it all from Diogenes to the Foucault.” In the same way, it is the very name of your band that is formed by the terms of what only apparently could seem an oxymoron, but that in fact you manage to deconstruct: the Italian word “bordello”—whose primary meaning is “brothel”—and the reference to the great Russian writer and dramatist Nikolaj Vasil’evič Gogol’-Janovskij, to whom you refer also in the song “Troubled Friends” [2009] with these words: “What do you do, and what if it’s true when a friend confesses to you he never read Gogol?” I know you are a voracious reader of philosophy and literature: How do they influence your creativity and worldview, and how are they present in your music?EH: Originally, of course, I went into music instinctively, but also with exactly the same underlying belief that you are talking about, which is that popular culture needs a philosophical analysis and perspective. I wanted philosophy, psychoanalysis, and insight! I wanted bands where Carl Gustav Jung was the lead singer and where Erich Fromm was on synthesizers, à la Brian Eno. I wanted it to be a way to write letters to the world, to have a dialogue or a monologue or whatever it needed to be. Songwriting is such a miraculous way to paint pictures and communicate, literally any way you want it is possible: Whether it’s linear or has magical thinking in it, vague or very detailed, narrative or beatnik cut-up, the song form will still hold it together for you, as long as it is written in a captivating way and all the nuts and bolts of the art are respected. Moreover, songwriting allows the philosophical and the profane to take equal seats and to keep each other in check. For these reasons, I was naturally drawn to Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan.In a way I think Wittgenstein would probably have been much happier as a songwriter. The limitations of language that drove him crazy were already well addressed in mystical texts throughout the centuries—take for example Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in the sixteenth century—indeed, language has its pronounced limitations especially when it comes to the mystical experience. Songwriting, instead, helps to “smuggle” things from the “other side” on the wings of melody, something well documented by poets and analysts. I mean: Wittgenstein could have been Leonard Cohen of his time, instead he risked coming across as a spoiled rich brat with too much time on his hands! [laughs]You asked me about the name Gogol Bordello, which, as you pointed out, is an oxymoron—although the word “bordello” was more commonly known in Ukraine as a synonym for “chaos,” “havoc” (along with other foreign words such as “bedlam,” which means “asylum,” but commonly had a meaning that evoke some exotic form of chaos). With respect to Nikolaj Gogol, it was a very natural choice. He still remains one of my favorite writers for creating such a fantastic fusion of Eastern and Western literary schools. He had a cosmopolitan mentality, but also respected his roots, popularizing Ukrainian culture and folklore. In fact, it is no accident that he wrote a very profound essay on Ukrainian folk ballads that is almost too passionate to be academic. He really loved these aspects and these issues and he definitely approached them with that “gastronomic vigor” I mentioned earlier.More in general, I just didn’t want the name of the band to be immediately accessible and therefore limiting, so I created a hybrid. In fact, I believe that literalism and face-value shopping are such a huge problem that humankind is still struggling with. On the contrary, humor, metaphor, and nuance are part of common sense and survival tools, so let’s develop them and use them! For this reason, as a band we wanted to encourage a more cosmopolitan audience that was aware of the nuances that seemed to be rapidly disappearing from popular culture where things tended toward uniformity.What about Diogenes and Foucault in “Start Wearing Purple”? [laughs] I should have also added Chomsky (even if he hates Foucault—I remember him calling Foucault “the most immoral person he had ever met”). Talking about Foucault and Diogenes was partly, of course, a self-mock-know-it-all bravado, but I partly also wanted to at least popularize their names among young people, get people to seek them out. In terms of my own experience, influenced by growing up in the Soviet Union, my bandmates and I in Ukraine—our circle of “Bohemian-Perestroika kids”—took on with particular vigor seeking out philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jung, Husserl, because some of them were connected to Surrealism and Dada art, which were basically precursors to intellectual punk. Unlocking sensibilities—I mean the subconscious of artists—was a prerequisite to getting into underground music, so we came prepared. That way, the far-out music of underground bands like The Contortions, Teenage Jesus &amp; the Jerks, The Birthday Party, Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten made perfect sense to us. I literally didn’t know anyone in our music scene who was in a band and hadn’t well read those authors or wasn’t on some esoteric trip. It was just normal.VA: Your success undoubtedly derives also from your performances and concerts. Anyone who has participated in them, or even simply seen them on video, understands that they are an aesthetic experience with a unique character that, with little difficulty, I would even define as cathartic. Your music, your “theater”—“spontaneous and chaotic” at the same time—wraps, enraptures, forces the bodies to move and contort themselves until they break out in a nonstop pogo, as is typical of the best punk traditions. Yet there is much more, there is the depth of forgotten or—worse—disregarded traditions, such as the gypsy one (since you also have Romany origins), the drunken joy of Balkan sounds, the rhythm of reggae and the musical cadence and energy of hip-hop. What does it mean then—as you write in your mission statement—that “Gogol Bordello’s task is to provoke audience out of post-modern aesthetic swamp”?EH: Gypsy music in particular has an unparalleled cathartic quality. Perhaps this is due to the historical memory of forgotten but well-preserved joys, wisdoms and sizzling spices of the long-ago kitchens in the Romany nation; wisdom of the older generations who had a real knack for life, when nomadic or seminomadic life was an undeniably good way of being. And on the other hand, perhaps in part it is related to the severe trauma of genocide and “Gypsy” stigma. Glimpses of freedom from this trauma can be found in the deepest and most cathartic form of melancholy that Federico García Lorca define as “duende.” People who can relate to this, because of their ancestry or because of some other inexplicable special affinity, connect very strongly. It is this understanding of duende that was the common thread that originally brought us—as Gogol Bordello—together. When we were starting out, there was a lot of understanding of that. Some people have come and gone since then, but that part of our foundation remains my sacred personal project that I am always trying to preserve and improve.By saying this, I’m also answering your question about my performance, and why it is so explicit. To be perfectly clear, during shows I go into another zone where duende takes over and it seems like it is possible to “smuggle the good unifying stuff from the other side.” I won’t go into details because it would seem bizarre but, at the time of the performance, the joys and sorrows of all the people in my lineage, and all the spirits that are called upon to dance around that fire of the show, perhaps speak through me in some way. When the show is good, when it reaches its maximum potential, this is what happens! Some people need to take peyote to get there, but maybe I have peyote in my blood [laughs]. Or I don’t know, something . . . That’s what I see as my main service to people, my responsibility to provide this kind of cathartic unifying service: a bubble where persons are connected to other persons as pulsating beings. So, I give it all to the max. It is not something you can do part time.With respect to this point, I want to make a further reflection: Romany culture is a powerful source of life-giving energy and knowledge; in general, a source of something that can be called “knack for life.” What people are trying to master now—being multilingual globe-trotters—was already mastered long ago by the Romanies, as opposed to the militant nomads and conquistadors. When we are touring around the world, there are often people who rush after a show into our backstage screaming from afar in bacchanalia: “My grandmother was also from Romania!” Of course, it is an assertion that is actually just hilarious, because Romany and Romanian are very different things, but still I wonder: Why are people from all over the world running backstage saying this? Maybe they’re trying to connect to their roots, to the idea that there is some kind of better root, because they instinctively know that there is a certain “knack for life” that’s different from mainstream narratives. Maybe they feel like they have been robbed of it.It seems that everyone instinctively knows that basic common sense and cooperative human decency are all we really need to navigate through life. It’s just that people no longer have direct access to it because of a huge absurd problem that is more damaging than any pandemic: age discrimination. People are cut off from the natural, accumulated wisdom of the elderly; they keep the elders out of sight, they have compartmentalized their existence. Since narcissism and reactivity are so glorified in contemporary society and are seen as the true signs of a successful self-expression, the more centered spiritual practitioner’s vibes do not seem attractive to the masses. Underneath, however, people are equally terrified of death, age, youth, and life. Yet, it makes no sense to be afraid of death, just as one has not been afraid of birth. Those in reality are the only certain and already well figured out parts for everybody [laughs]. It seems that it is the lack of adaptive skills that brings on the fear. So, why not roll up your sleeves and develop them? For all we know, it may be the only skill you can take with you on the next stage of your journey, if there is such a thing. Instead, because of systematic ageism, people are completely lost in their screens, they don’t even know how to climb a tree, few know how to fix anything with their hands, and that’s because they are distant from their elders who have the key to have access to those sensibilities. Right now, I’m working on a song called “Devastation Central,” which is about exactly that.VA: Gogol Bordello’s experience is particularly relevant with reference to our specific topic, namely “contemporary popular culture and social criticism,” and to the union of different cultures, histories, traditions, and geographies. This also implies a reflection of a more purely political nature. As band members, you are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and this has always been a trait that characterizes you. It is—I would argue—a political aspect that spills over into aesthetic practices. The question of immigration is indeed widely present in your artistic production. You talk about it with depth, determination, even irreverence in pieces such as “Passport” [1999], “Occurrence on the Border” [2002], “Balkanization of Americanization” [2004], “Madagascar-Roumania” [2005], “Immigrant Punk” [2005], up to a song like “Immigraniada” [2010], whose video has a very strong impact. It is also found in the titles of your albums such as East Infection [2005], Gypsy Punks [2005], Trans-Continental Hustle [2010]. At the same time, how not to remember the beauty of a piece like “When Universes Collide” [2010], in which with sweetness, and I would even say with care, you manage to deal with the violence of ethno-cleansing rides in the slums of big cities? It is in this song that you sing: “When universes will collide, don’t get caught on the wrong side.” So, what does it mean for you to say the words—which you have very often shouted and worn on your T-shirts—“No Human Is Illegal”? What does it mean for Europeans, Africans, South Americans, and Asians to be “together” on the same stage, in the same rehearsal rooms, on the same tour buses, or facing different borders?EH: I love this question; it can literally push you to write three volumes. Being a part of this mixture of different cultures, histories, traditions, and geographies that are Gogol Bordello is natural and enjoyable for me. When I was growing up, we lived in a small apartment in Kiev in a family of eight people, with Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Romany ancestry. Being part Tatar or Moldovan, or half Romany, or half Jewish is not exactly a rarity in Ukraine. Ukraine is a very old place and a really deep melting pot in itself. The same when I was in school, or when I got into the music scene, among bandmates and friends, and even later in life, a similar multinational situation awaited me. I guess it was just a natural habitat for me, so I went with it. In fact, an analyst would probably also note that Gogol Bordello lineup continued to expand to eight members, just like in the small apartment where I grew up in Kiev, it was eight of us. I am just looking for my way back into the womb [laughs]!Ultimately, we, as Gogol Bordello, are not trying to be some kind of example, but twenty years of all-encompassing cosmopolitan pantribal cooperation—on the road, around the world—of people of all nations and cultures, of all ages and genders, is a good sign that things can be done this way, is a decent track record. We all need each other with a bit of common sense and basic human decency... and, maybe, with a good supply of humor and an understanding that we’re all God’s clowns.VA: Gogol Bordello is a band born and raised in the New York underground that has managed to bring its own provenance on some of the biggest stages worldwide. Above all, however, one of the elements that most distinguishes your experience is the fact of being a band formed by musicians from different parts of the world. Simply the visual impact is already very strong. In fact, it is no coincidence that New York—the metropolis par excellence of the melting pot—is your adoptive home. Some of you are from Russia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom (but you also had components from other areas). You yourself are Ukrainian and, after the Chernobyl disaster, you crossed the borders of half of Europe to land in Vermont and then New York and build a new life there. In the documentary The Pied Piper of Hützovina, directed by Pavla Fleischer in 2006, we can see you traveling through Eastern Europe and crossing extremely varied contexts. You move between nomadic camps and record companies, exploring music and cultures that have always belonged to you and that you perpetually transform through the interaction and intersection with other music and other cultures. In this regard, I would then ask you to tell me about the interweaving of different musical styles and the intelligent understanding that “world’s cultures contain material for endless art possibilities and new mind stretching combinations” (as you write in your mission statement). The element that is very interesting to me is not only the fact that you have succeeded in constructing an iridescent art that has been able to bring together very different human, political, and artistic cultures, but also the fact that you manage to respect and bring out their differences. How does this diversity intervene in the process of creating your music, and how important it is for you the fact that your music helps to bring out and respect differences?EH: You are right, Gogol Bordello is a New York baby. I really can’t imagine its home anywhere else. In the band’s formative years, around 2000, there was a really fertile fusion scene of genres and cultures in New York. Alongside underground psycho punk rock bands like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Speedball Baby, there was John Zorn, groups like the Klezmatics (who were creating a fusion with Klezmer music from a modern perspective), and Balkan Gypsy music legends like Yuri Yunakov (a sax virtuoso from Bulgaria). All of these were making a very new fusion from their roots and cultures. Similarly, in our group the interest in various types of gypsy music was particularly felt and this made us feel perfectly part of that artistic dimension.The band’s sound and lifestyle are pretty much a natural extension of who we are as people every day. There are always ongoing exchanges between members about new musical pursuits, some of which have been going on for decades. For example, a conversation we started with Pedro (our percussionist and singer from Ecuador), who is particularly knowledgeable about the music of Native tribes and Latin American underground, is like an endless movie and I think it will result in some purposeful projects. However, as a whole, the band’s collective psyche creates something that is even further and even more adventurous, it manages to bring together very different cultural positions, something that individually cannot be envisioned. If Sergey Ryabtsev (violin, backing vocals) and I were well rooted from childhood in Eastern European acoustic gypsy music of guitar and violin, Ori Kaplan (first Gogol Bordello’s saxophonist) brought the sound of Balkan brass directly from his friendship and lessons with Balkan Gypsy legends like Yuri Yunakov and Ivo Papasov. Then, in 1999–2000, a very charismatic Romany singer and performer from New York, Piroska Racz, had joined us. We really clicked and developed a kind of Carpathian-spirited synthesis of cultures, with emphasis on Ukrainian, Hungarian, and Romanian Gypsy music styles. I remember the many nights when we would get together and sing one Gypsy song after another, learning them from each other. In addition, our (former) accordionist Yuri Lemeshev was also already a well-known figure in the ethno-avant-garde scene from the time I met him, and our very first accordionist Sasha Kazachkov was equally well-seasoned in his favorites like Marcus Miller and J. L. Ponty, as well as Russian gypsy folklore, and he also had a Romany background. So, everyone, in one way or another, had some affinity with Gypsy music and culture, or from the moment they have boarded have known the music of Sasha and Vadim Kolpakov, Taraf De Haïdouks, Angelo Debarre (just to name a few of our favorite Romany musicians). I remember when our bass player Thomas Gobena—who comes from a great dynasty of Ethiopian fusion-jazz-reggae musicians—first heard Taraf the Haïdouks he was inspired like lightning and absorbed and incorporated these new elements in no time, while bringing all of his individual and cultural arsenal. Likewise, with our guitarist Boris Pelekh, who also contains stylistic within himself multitudes, but the unifier here is the desire for a dance around true musical fire, where people connect from person to person at the most fundamental level.More broadly, since Gogol Bordello is more of a collective of artists than just a band, it is always more or less the same and always more or less different, because there are so many members who are constantly bringing a tangible amount of newness. In fact, all of the past and present members have brought their own unique mark, not only the musicians but also our longtime dance artists: Pamela Racine and Elizabeth Sun, and now Ashley Tobias, who is also an incredible vocalist. I wish there was time to tell everyone’s story!So, to get back to gypsy music, to understand its vast field one must really listen to a lot of it, and also understand the culture behind it. А real affinity and understanding of Romany culture gives one the tools to popularize it in a way that goes beyond stereotypes. Only then you can recognize the common thread of (Lorca’s) aforementioned “duende” in it, which naturally unifies all the gypsy genres, which are so very different from each other. No wonder this subject often fascinates serious scholars, like Donald Kendrick and Ian Hancock for example. In it lies a key to the spring-like feeling of life itself, which quite sadly, too often has been taken away from humans.I recently saw a new dance production called “Shumka” that reveals an absolutely unique page of history: Native American tribes in Canada got along well and developed deep ties with the original Ukrainian immigrant settlers. I talked to some scholars on the subject, and found it to be more than true. Perhaps the denominator that united them was the respect and a strong relationship with the soil, the primordial knack for life. And perhaps, most importantly, also the fact that they shared an “underdog” history. Once the opportunity opened up for Ukrainian workers to leave their oppressed country, there was no force in the world that could stop them. It is amazing but, apparently, some of First Nations grandmothers in Canada still wear Ukrainian flower scarves, it has become part of their traditional garb since then, almost 150 years back. How beautiful! To me, this is an important example of successful cooperation and coexistence rooted in basic human decency and common sense. Or better, I think it is an example of what we can define as a cosmopolitan pan-tribal cooperation—I believe deeply in this kind of collaborative capacity that is present in human beings, it is very close to anarcho-syndicalism.VA: Finally, one last, short question that emerges powerfully from this interview: What does it mean to you to be Seekers and Finders, as the title of your latest album [2017] reads?EH: The title Seekers and Finders is kind of an answer in itself. I just tried to point out that being a seeker does not automatically guarantee being a finder. There is so much pseudo-spirituality these days marketed cheaply (you see words like “seeker,” “life-coach,” “guru” in the same package as yoga pants). I mean, some seekers certainly do turn into finders, but not all finders were seekers; essentially, they are two different teams. It might be counterintuitive to a Western mind, but in the East, there are proverbs like: to find, one must stop seeking. At some point you have to drop anchor somewhere, stick with something. There is just a lot of confusion about what consciousness actually is and what the incessant flow of nonstop compulsive thoughts is. A lot of people seem to think they are synonymous. But they are opposites.Valentina Antoniol holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Bologna, in joint supervision with the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (EHESS) of Paris, with a dissertation titled “Genealogies at War: Foucault as a Critic of Schmitt.” Currently, Antoniol is a post-doc researcher in Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna. Her recent work is mainly focused on the investigation of the relationship between conflict, urban spaces, and architecture, starting from a critical redefinition of the concept of “stasis.” She conducted her research in Italy (University of Bologna; University of Padua), in the United States (Brown University; New School), in France (EHESS), in Spain (University Rey Juan Carlos), and was granted many scholarships.