RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Friday, April 30

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #5: "Tribal Connection" by Gogol Bordello


Oh damn, today is the end of the month. This means two things... one, my food stamp card gets replenished tomorrow morning, and secondly, I need to finish this goddamned list today. Of course it was a bad move to split it up into individual posts beause I never get around to doing anything unless it's a giant one-shot overblown 7000 words on nothing type thang, yet here I am, sticking to my guns, which don't actually have bullets and aren't really guns, just stupid self-created parameters for an internet thing.
So we are here, at this song, by a group that has blown up amongst the hipsterati elite, then faded into no longer the it thing, and now resurfaced into the retarded angle world music super hippie crowd where I'm absolutely sure Gogol Bordello will be playing a Gulf Coast Oil Spill Benefit in the next three weeks, probably with Galactic, David Banner featuring the most prominent current Lil rapper not in jail, and The White Teeths. And I know fully that this is the internet, and I'm only supposed to really like things that nobody has heard of or just got recorded last night and uploaded to a blog this morning and now I have a mediafire link with WWW.ROJONEKKU.COM as the listed album. But shit man, for as corny as Gogol Bordello could be if you listened to some hipster contrarian complain at a bar over $2 PBRs about how shitty Gogol Bordello is, they still do alright by me at times. And I fully understand this was a band playing a hole in the wall tea house a few years ago. And an olden days good friend told me they're nothing like they used to be back in the day, which is understandable because hunger makes motherfuckers be awesome. When you are hungry, you can either become criminal or become creative, and usually you are physically wired to be too afraid of one or the other to go but the chosen way. And usually if you go criminal... I don't know; I never went that way. But if you go creative, best case scenario, you get paid, and then easily enough the hunger gets lost. Once the hunger is gone, the creativity goes, so you're just trying to cook up that old simple shit but with more expensive and lavish ingredients. But a fried egg sandwich made with French goose eggs cooked in double organic freshly whipped melted butter on two slices of sourdough, it just ain't the same as a goddamned fried egg sandwich for real. And good lord, organic mayonnaise... like that even needs to exist. I like to dip my organic Vienna sausages into organic mayonnaise while sipping on my gluten-free malt liquor myself.
So yeah, you break down East Europe into fucked up white dudes with crazy facial hair and very specific mixtures of bloodlines that they know far better than us mutt Americans do, and you let them make the musics, and if it comes out like a song like this, I don't care how many stupid fuckfaces like it (perhaps I am one such fuckface), the retarded greatness of the quieter later part is good to me. I'm sure at some point they'll blow up like mad and headline Bonnaroo and all the members will run off and form bands with Les Claypool or DJ Shadow or Robert Randolph or some shit. But whatever. All I can do is what I do, which is let songs play on an electronic contraption. And if a song brings enjoyment to my life, all I can do is hit repeat. My pops couldn't do that. He had an 8-track, so you had to skip ahead three programs and then let it play for ten minutes to hear that same song again. By then, it wasn't again.
STEAL "Tribal Connection"
NEXT UP
: I'm part lesbian!

2 comments:

Purl Scout said...

i just spent a few hours reading your shit. you might have just edged past several of my top five favorite writers, raven.

Raven Mack said...

thanks "Purl". and I hope Richmond still remembers me when I start coming with the books next year. and I hate that new M.I.A. song. it's like an epileptic seizure, from the inside.