Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing “Immigraniada” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

  When I first saw the group perform many years before their ascent to international stardom, their name conjured Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol’s question: “How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined cultivated manners?” Borrowing from Gogol, Hütz and the band answered that question in the best tradition of punk rock: by identifying the establishment as obscene or ridiculous and redefining it through a jumbled romantic, surreal, incendiary, grotesque, and celebratory response. Hütz does this most skillfully when presenting the stories of the creative immigrant and the imaginative migrant in the new millennium.

  Hütz is acutely aware of the conditions that define life for many trapped between the old world (in Hütz’s case a world defined by the dying ideology of the Soviet Union) and a new one (governed by globalization). The experience of forced migration (Hütz’s journey took him to Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Italy before arriving in the U.S.) included visceral confrontations with many of the most frightening events of the past three decades. A case in point: Hütz’s family lived close to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which melted down on April 26, 1986. Each Gogol Bordello record—Voi-La Intruder (1999), Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony (2002), Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (2005), Super Taranta! (2007)—added more weight to Village Voice Robert Christgau’s claim that Gogol Bordello was “the world’s most visionary band.” In a now classic tune from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, Hütz wistfully translates the immigrant experience and the discovery of creative response (punk) as a connection to an expansive worldview that continually widens as we move away from narrow confines that dictate how we should define ourselves and connect with each other. The song moved me, even though my immigrant story differs from Hütz’s. As a minority mob demands a return to a world that never existed, the majority movement of global citizenship finds the quiet spaces between the screams by organizing their imaginings with creative response:

  Of course we immigrants wanna sing all night long

  Don’t you know the singing salves the troubled soul?

  So I’m relaxed, I’m just lurking around

  I got a method and you don’t

  You got a dictionary kicking around?

  Look up the immigrant, immigrant, immigrant punk!

  “When I discovered punk rock, it was like I never heard music before,” Hütz tells me. “Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Fugazi was a big new cultural experience for me. Those records automatically became a carrier of political information, too.” Just as I had, Hütz encountered all this other information—records—that provided another language to what we were forced to listen to at school, on TV, in the media, from the mouths of politicians. In fact, Hütz learned English by listening to Johnny Cash records. Still, Hütz saw the West and primarily the United States as foes less because we were the enemy and more because Reagan had deemed his country an “evil empire.” “Well, you guys were the evil empire,” Hütz says with a smirk. “We were just like the innocent pioneers with the white shirts on and red handkerchief, you know, red tie on.” Hütz adds, “But then it was like, wait a second, it can’t be that bad over there if they’re making such great music.”

  The Clash, with songs like “Know Your Rights,” represented “revolution street poetry,” Hütz says. “Statements in the rawest form.” The experimentation with sounds and incongruent styles blew open Hütz’s perception of the world around him. “Like what are all the sounds that open up into this other space?” Hütz asks me. “I wasn’t familiar with the reggae approach. That experience of one band sets you on a trip through a whole lot of gold mine.” The gold mine set free Hütz’s imaginations and dreams. When he deejayed at underground clubs and parties in New York City, he mixed traditional eastern European music and Gypsy folk tunes with the punk music of Black Flag. It was the world citizenship soundtrack he was spinning then and now. Spending time with him during and after the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour, I got to see his infinite energy and enthusiasm up close. You can see it as well in his enchanting performance in Liev Schrieber’s Everything Is Illuminated (2005), based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hütz played Alex, a Ukrainian guide for a young Jewish man searching for the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II. His performance turns on two pieces of dialogue that moved me:

  Alex: I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now should remain buried along the side of our memories.

  and

  Alex: This is not so unusual.

  Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello performing “Immigraniada” in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s film Let Fury Have the Hour, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

  Jonathan: What?

  Alex: Not knowing.

  “I heard it like so many times, people come up and say, ‘Listen, I’m from Brazil, but I live here in Sweden,’ or, ‘I’m here from Australia and live in Canada, but your music makes me feel home, man,’” Hütz tells me. “That’s why we made it, because it made us feel home.” Hütz’s music is colored with a surreal quality but rooted in a jagged realism that often speaks to the world’s reverberating cruelty and counters it with blistering defiance. The universality inherent in Hütz’s music is tied together by the infusion of music reflective of Hütz’s Gypsy roots. Hütz sees this music as a major traditional art form just as Bartók once proclaimed. He rankles at the depiction of indigenous cultures as a mascot, meant to be petted on the head in pity. “It’s Hollywood movies feeding us a stereotype,” Hütz tells me. “The poetic yet stupid Gypsy.”

  Hütz is also interested in the situation of immigrants in the United States. After Arizona enacted SB 170, shredding civil liberties and human rights, musicians organized the Sound Strike to boycott the state. Refusing to perform in Arizona until the law is rescinded, musician Tom Morello explains that many people “have become suspects first and people second.” The Sound Strike statement further explains: “Law enforcement agencies in Arizona engage in protracted and fanatical harassment of immigrants. Arizona is a place where immigrant parents are routinely separated from their children for simply having a broken tail-light. The agitated climate has allowed the most notorious sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio who has detained immigrants working on chain gangs and performed other barbaric and demeaning tasks, to establish frightening almost all white ‘volunteer posses’ in his immigrant sweeps. Many of his volunteers are armed.”

  Along with Gogol Bordello, over four hundred musicians have joined the boycott, including Willie Nelson, actor Jack Black’s group Tenacious D, Carlos Santana, Sonic Youth, Kanye West, MIA, and Ozomatli. Hütz and the other musicians on the list continue to call for more artists and citizens of all stripes to join the boycott. “The situation in Arizona forces you to take a stand, politicizes you,” Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli tells me. “We are declaring that this planet is for all of us to share.” Of course, opponents to the boycott tried to shift the debate stating that the musicians were hurting young people and businesses by not performing in Arizona. “Look, it’s making people think about why we’re not coming there,” Hütz explains. “We’re saying that you cannot use fear and hatred as a main tool of manipulation.” The movement also prompted Hütz to look at the United States differently. “In Italy and France, there is a backlash to the Roma people, to immigrants,” Hütz says. “So I see it’s not always the U.S. leading the way doing despicable things. I see that as easy and predictable to say ‘the U.S. is bad, it’s better over there.’ Italy and France are not doing anything like the Sound Strike.”

  Working with iconoclast record producer Rick Rubin on Gogol Bordello’s 2010 record Transcontinental Hustle, Hütz gave us a contemporary anthem for the new millennium migrants who inhabit the world. The song “Immigraniada” places a fine point on the timeless story that, despite actions meant to keep people down, it’s the quie
t revolution of the human spirit that wins out:

  Immigrada immigraniada

  Immigrada immigraniada-da

  Immigrada immigraniada

  We’re coming rougher every time

  Frozen eyes, sweaty back

  My family’s sleeping on a railroad track

  All my life I pack/unpack

  But man I got to earn this buck

  I got to pay representation

  To be accepted in a nation

  Where after efforts of a hero

  Welcome start again from zero

  Unlike any other artist of his generation, Hütz truly grasps the notion of creative response and the role it plays in the movement for world citizenship. “After the struggles of immigration and life as a political refuge, everything else seems like business class,” Hütz tells me wryly. He has set himself apart as an inheritor, not an imitator, of those who went before—Joe Strummer, Manu Chao, Bartók, Seeger, Cash. He loves performing his own rendition of Strummer’s tune “Johnny Appleseed,” which he did for me in my film. Clearly Hütz is moved by the lyrics: “Lord, there goes Martin Luther King/Notice how the door closes when the chimes of freedom ring/I hear what you’re saying, I hear what he’s saying/Is what was true now no longer so.” In the last line Hütz’s spirit as a creative responder is revealed, for he remains true to the art of living, using creative response as a chisel, at times smashing and occasionally tapping, but always carving out a new way to see things, a new way to say things.

  1. Five moments of coming rougher with Eugene Hütz from the film Let Fury Have the Hour: Transcontinental hustle, the idea, is about the evolution of the globetrotting tendency as a movement of world citizenship.

  We gonna build new kind of globalizer

  2. It’s all about ability and your space, and if the political setting does not provide it, it’s just a constant affront and offense on your being.

  Without Pantzer-Foust or a shmiser

  3. If you aren’t building community with your art, it kind of defeats the purpose of that art, you know, because you’ve got a microphone. Better use it in a good way, man.

  And may the sound of our contaminated beat

  4. The beat will eventually wipe them off their feet because that way of thinking, that way of being is a complete dead-end.

  Sweep all the Nazi purists off their feet

  5. It’s like those issues never been resolved. They just fade in and fade out. They’re always there. They’re still waiting for some humanitarian approach to them. Not with a crude bureaucratic approach, but it needs to be a “no human being is illegal” kind of approach to it, you know?

  ’Cause I’ll be climbing top of Never-Neverest

  With my contaminated friends

  Gah!

  Hey heyheyhey, halihali ho, halihali hey

  JOE STRUMMER, TERRORIST?

  By Antonino D’Ambrosio

  It felt like “London Calling” on April 5 when I opened my email to find an inbox clogged with a score of messages: “Man Held as Terrorism Suspect Over Punk Song.” This was not spam but a news item from Reuters reporting that Harraj Mann had been detained for questioning by British antiterrorism detectives after they received a phone call from a taxi driver who had taken Mann to the Durham Tees Valley airport. The driver became alarmed after hearing Mann, a mobile phone salesman of Indian descent, sing along to the Clash’s “London Calling.” The lyric that triggered the cabbie’s concern: “Now war is declared—and battle come down . . . a meltdown expected.”

  Released after questioning by British authorities, Mann fumed, “There’s caution and then there’s taking it to the point where it’s absurd and ludicrous.” Ludicrous indeed, and a chilling reminder that once again fear combined with the perversion of law has trumped rationality (not to mention democracy or basic civil liberties).

  “London Calling” is a song about terrorism, but not the kind we have become so familiar with after 9/11. Written in 1979 by the late Joe Strummer, it describes the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe, environmental disaster, starvation, and war. The threat or terror of nuclear destruction was something that deeply concerned Strummer because some world leaders seemed to treat it as nothing more than a game. “You had Ronald Reagan campaigning on building up nuclear arms. “He said the West is losing the arms race to Russia, the ‘evil empire’. . . .It was like toys to them or a movie where nothing bad would really happen,” Strummer told me when I interviewed him in 2002. Sound familiar?

  Today’s reactionary political climate, built on a merciless patriotism that relies on historical ignorance, creates an atmosphere that cares little for the issues “London Calling” raises. Strummer understood the struggle to be heard over the politically hostile din emanating from a society that wraps itself in the flag of morality and virtue. “In the late 1970s, the National Front [a right-wing extremist hate group] was spreading across England,” Strummer said. “They were a terrorist group if there ever was one, but bands like the Clash were deemed dangerous, evil even, by Thatcher and the like.”

  He understood how undemocratic democracies can become when they seek to solidify the dominant political order and maintain control under the guise of nationalism. He vividly captured that sentiment in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”: “If Adolf Hitler flew in today/They would send a limousine anyway.”

  That’s why Strummer had declared early on that the Clash would be “antifascist, antiviolence, antiracist . . . we’re pro-creative, against ignorance,” while other groups (insert Sex Pistols here) were famously declaring that there is “no future.” This made the Clash an anomaly in the 1970s counterculture scene, standing in direct opposition to the nihilism and alienation dominating punk. The group boldly linked itself historically to artists of every discipline who had fought against tyranny. In “Spanish Bombs,” Strummer sings about the Spanish Civil War and the brutal murder of writer Federico García Lorca. “Washington Bullets” illustrates Western imperialism and invokes the spirit of Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara. And when Strummer learned that beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a fan, they collaborated on the haunting “Ghetto Defendant.”

  ON THE EDGE

  While Strummer did not suffer any serious political reprisals for his art, he was one of the artists who dangled on the edge of creating work whose themes were unpopular sociopolitical issues of the day.

  “Not being understood by the record label, press or government meant we were on the right track,” Strummer said. For his dogged commitment to not “write any love songs,” the Clash became even more successful as they became increasingly politically radical. “London Calling,” which borrows its name from the World War II BBC News report that began, “This is London calling,” serves as a modern-rock news alert told in Strummer’s big howling voice on top of Mick Jones’s air-raid alarm guitar, Topper Headon’s drums, and all strung together by Paul Simonon’s thumping bass line. Commercially and critically successful (Rolling Stone selected London Calling as the best album of the 1980s), it is considered a classic and remains one of the most influential records of the past twenty-five years.

  Still, no one would be less surprised at Mann’s detention than Joe Strummer. When I first met Strummer in 2002, one of the first things we discussed was the suppression of counter-voices as the United States banged the drum for war, made the Patriot Act law, and established the Department of Homeland Security. He understood that there was a very real—and frightening—possibility that music like his would not only be censored but held up as subversive or dangerous.

  “After all,” he said, “we had trouble with these songs then . . . you have to wonder what is wrong with singing about working people [“Clampdown”], racial unity [“(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”], and censorship [“Rock the Casbah”].” It didn’t stop the Clash, which disbanded in 1986, from becoming the biggest (and certainly most important) punk band. As musician Billy Bragg put it: “The Clash were the greatest rebel rock band of all time.” And it di
dn’t stop Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,900 radio stations, from placing “Rock the Casbah” on the list of songs not to be played on the air after 9/11 (the BBC did the same in the first Gulf War).

  Unfortunately, my time with Strummer will always be shrouded in sadness because he died of a rare congenital heart condition not long after we met. His death tabled a documentary film I had asked him to narrate, but it led to a book, Let Fury Have the Hour.

  PUSHING BOUNDARIES

  The arrest of Harraj Mann goes against everything Joe Strummer and his music were about. Strummer’s music always reflected the world around him. Chuck D talked about this in Let Fury Have the Hour: “I had great respect for Joe Strummer. How he used his music—incorporating a lot of black music like hip-hop and reggae—was very different than the guys who invented rock ’n’ roll: He was constantly pushing the boundaries “speaking about things he saw in his life, the things right in front of his face—and taking this message to the world.”

  It was important for Strummer to stand up and be counted as a citizen of the world. His music is alive with that sensibility. “Even though there are extremists in the world,” he explained, “we’ve got to hold on to our sanity and not get crazed with vengeance.” His words echo those of Freda Kirchwey, who in October 1939 wrote in The Nation: “Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic.”