Life Knell
By:
January 4, 2016
Adam McGovern flashbacks the phenomenon of “Gypsy Punk” troupe Gogol Bordello’s year-end concert rite at New York’s Terminal 5.
The revolution can only spin outside of control. It orbits the world before you’ve gotten there. It moves too fast to make you sick, and would never stop in the same place anyway. The year for me began before it was over, and not in a crowd, in a Masses, a proletariat — Gogol Bordello sabotaged the stage and when the bomb went off, we felt no pain. The eve of New Year’s Eve, in what looks to be a dockside cargo hangar turned cavernous club, apocalyptic hulk bloomed bright with insistent ghosts of the not yet born; not really overrun for communion over commerce, but Gogol and its night-long nation release an atmosphere of consensus chaos and triumphal transgression that feels portably, permanently illicit. “Leader” Eugene Hutz a lost Moses who likes the wilderness better; percussionist/rapper Pedro Erazo-Segovia seizing control and then jumping, not being toppled; violinist Sergey Ryabtsev fiddling with license to burn and bassist Thomas Gobena’s rumble bringing not the house down but the ground up; percussionistas/dancers/riot-starters/deities Elizabeth Sun and Pamela Racine striking mock monumental-statue poses, banging drums to march the crowd over a cliff and into raw sky. Gypsies of no nation, misfits of many, united and conquering. Like watching fireworks from inside the blast, the last celebration of mass-mayhem, missiles shot to heaven as a lightshow, never gone to waste. Mobs, armies, movements, utopian states, are said to show how common action can change the world; artists and admirers show each other how we can enjoy being alive in it. This is the party we were promised when the Cold War climate changed; the enders of history keep containing it so the party has to come to us. After attacks, before freedoms gained, we fill the streets to show sorrow, to show what joy looks like; not to demand a choice so much as demonstrate it. At the end, their back to the audience, a Gogol group photo is snapped, facing out, and the People are the purpose. The great world spins, and in the inevitable, eventual morning we won’t wake up mad.