Getting Wasted at a Russian Wedding with Gogol Bordello

Gogol Bordello is an eccentric international band with members of Russian, Ukrainian, Ethiopian, and Brazilian origin that mixes hardcore punk with Balkan, Romani, and Latin American musical traditions. This wild mix is not just a novelty gimmick, but a constantly progressing form, perfect for the topics of cultural interfusion, postnationalism, and anti-authoritarianism that the band addresses. Gogol Bordello is also very lyrical, with the frontman Eugene Hutz interweaving multiple languages to create complex poetic texts. Many of his songs fall somewhere in between lyric anecdotes and abstract streams of consciousness. A great example is the song “Dogs Were Barking” from the band’s breakout album Gypsy Punks (Underground World Strike).

In accordance with Perrine’s definition of poetry, Hutz creates an experience that simultaneously speaks to the listener’s senses, emotions, imagination, and intellect. He is describing a Russian wedding where his narrator is invited to perform. He begins with simple auditory imagery and a general identification of the occasion:

Dogs were barking, guests were parking
And my wedding was about to start

As the story progresses, Hutz repeats the opening line of the song modifying it with every repetition to raise the degree of absurdity. First, it becomes

Dogs were barking, monkeys clapping

Then,

Dogs were barking, monkeys clapping
Bears were dancing and girls were cutting loose
Cops were lurking, kids were snarkling

And after several more varied repetitions, he ends the song with a simple

Dogs were barking

This is the backbone of the song that carries the transitions between the physical experience of a euphoric party and the irrational elements of spirituality that arise from it, ultimately leading to a synthesis of the two. As the narrator gets audibly more drunk and carried away by the music and dancing, he goes through several emotional, physical, and spiritual states. After the lighthearted physical description of the party culminates in complete comical absurdity, Hutz cries out “Energy of the awakening-ing-ing!” in Russian and proceeds to a convoluted pseudo-philosophical monologue:

Remember things, things that are eternal...
Remember things...you forgot those things

Obviously, this speech is given not to literally deliver a message, but to reflect the sudden transition from euphoria to melancholy in the narrator's mood. Through incredibly clever bilingual wordplay, Hutz ties the narrator’s elevated metaphysical contemplations on subjects like “the impossibility of suicide” to his earthly physiological state. The deliberately ambiguous lines

Нельзя понять, нельзя измерить
Только бросать, и только ввысь!...

that in Russian sound like fancy philosophy talk, literally translate in English to

Can’t understand, can’t measure,
Only throw, and only up!

Thus, by singing the lines in Russian, where the literal translation of the phrase “to throw up” does not have its English physiological connotation, Hutz poetically reveals the interweaving of the sensual and the spiritual elements.

As the party progresses, the narrator’s melancholy once again gives way to exaltation. Aside from the instrumental shifts and vocal inflections, Hutz shows the contrast between such mood swings through diction and syntax of the text. Convoluted compound sentences in multiple languages and SAT words give way to short choppy lines, abundant interjections, and the vocabulary of a seventh grader.

I met a crazy dancer
A party tabashi
She held me by the hair I held her by the aaass
...nananana...
She was a crazy dancer...
...nananana...
She was a crazy dancer

After individually deconstructing the emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual components of the party, Hutz brings them all together in the last stanza:

And the dogs were barking, and the guests were parking
And the monkeys clapping and girls were cutting loose
Thinking bout things, things that are eternal
When her mother came up to me and said
Dogs were barking.

To me, that’s poetry: interweaving multiple motifs and layers of meaning through condensed language to synthesize a multidimensional experience. Hutz packs so much into this relatively short song that I could only touch on a third of the text at most. I recommend listening to the song in full, because the experience he creates is so dense and complete that the listener could fully appreciate a Russian wedding without risking a kidney failure from critical alcohol intoxication.