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Monday, December 11, 2006
MONEY BONEY
OMFO
Trans Balkan Express
Essay : 2004
[buy it]
You've noticed this post-Soviet thing happening in our culture, right?
New Yorkers will likely know Gogol Bordello, whom I caught at a world music festival in Chicago, back in 2000. (I'll not digress here to gripe about how world music might as well be called IMMIGRANT STUFF, the way it's used in the States.) They played after Fanfare Ciocarlia, which was nuts: these round, ancient Romanians who played like the devil and spoke no English whatsoever, on stage at an Irish bar on Chicago's west side, in front of a granola-ish audience of twenty-somethings. And here comes Gogol Bordello, with Eugene Hutz hanging cruciform off the mike stand, and striped cabaret girls banging on drums. Five years later I saw Gary Shteyngart and Jeffrey Eugenides do a panel at the same venue. You don't get more post-Soviet than Gary Shteyngart. The event was sponsored by Nextbook, one of the many outfits that promotes Jewish culture to the young and hip. So they do Shteyngart and Israeli reggae and Hasidic rap and all this klezmer, which leads us back to Eastern Europe again.
As a trend, as a demographic shift, as a local manifestation of global capital: whatever its causality may be, I'm enjoying the results. It's not all good, but for every Alexander Perchov, there's something like OMFO, Our Man from Odessa. This is not an earth-shaking discovery, I realize; that's why I don't write for Pitchfork. "Money Boney" is featured prominently in Borat, one of the only movies I've bothered to see all year. OMFO's label, Essay Recordings, is also home to Balkan Beat Box and Boom Pam, bands I've written about, and De Amsterdam Klezmer Band, which I'll write about next week. But I still didn't figure it out until I saw a post about OMFO on my new favorite blog, undomondo. Could there be a more perfect song? It's goofy and tinkly and makes me laugh. It's obsessive with a sense of humor, and that's catnip for me.
In recent weeks, I've devoted a lot of my own high-quality obsessivating to unraveling the lineage of klezmer music. You will reap what I've sown next week. Because I'm a syncretist, I'm most interested in klezmer's cross-pollination with adjacent cultures: with gypsy music, with local Balkan styles, with Turkish rhythms and modes. How could one begin to make separations between them? Take these two songs:
CRAZY SERBIAN BUTCHER'S DANCE
Brave Combo
Polkatharsis
Rounder : 1987
[buy it]
TRELLO HASAPOSERVIKO
The Klezmorim
First Recordings: 1976-78
Arhoolie : 1993
[buy it]
Brave Combo is a polka band from Texas; did they not know the Serbian Butcher's Dance was really a hasaposerviko? Or did the Klezmorim not know they were playing Greek music? But it's all of these things. Hasaposerviko means hasapiko, or fast butcher's dance, Serbian-style. The name is derived from the Turkish word for butcher. I know the hasapiko as a Greek dance, related to the sirtaki. And if you look at OMFO's playlist, he's playing the sirtaki too. Except his is called "Sirtaki on Mars." Opaa! Hasaposerviko for everyone.
And that's just a start. Like klezmer, gypsy music has become an established market niche. Witness the New York Gypsy Fest, another Gogol Bordello-induced phenomenon, or Asphalt Tango. A snooty New York friend of mine turns up his nose at nouveau gypsy groups. "Megan, they aren't REAL gypsies." But then, it's hard to be a real gypsy after World War II and Ceausescu, isn't it? Ceaucescu had intended to breed gypsies (more properly, Roma) as a "robot work force" to serve the pure Dacian people of Romania. (Under the Roman Empire, present-day Romania was a province called Dacia. That should give you an idea of how far the clock needed to be turned back.) So the wall fell, and Ceausescu was shot, and then there was Tony Gatlif's film Latcho Drom, which helped put the Roma on the world music map. But in Romania, Roma music had been government regulated since 1944, creating an alternate tradition of fakelore - state-sanctioned, "pure Romanian" music. The aforementioned Fanfare Ciocarlia, comprised of authentic Roma musicians, was a touring group assembled by a German promoter. He's the one who came up with the name. (See how tricky this authenticity thing can be?) And yes, they're on the Borat soundtrack, too.
Next week, I'll be trying to tease some of this out into a coherent and entertaining format, while also delivering some quality tunes. Don't think it's easy.Labels: megan, world
posted by Megan
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