238. Song No. 3,542: “Forces of Victory,” Gogol Bordello
Super Taranta!, 2007

My dear good friend
Let’s not forget
That we can take down Pinotchet

I mean, how can you not fall for a song when it begins like that? While I love me some principled anarchists (RIP Jack Terricloth), dedicated comrades like Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz who live and breathe and positively ooze their hard-won political ideals are redwoods among ferns.

If you only know Gogol Bordello from their and Hütz’s performance in Everything is Illuminated and/or “Start Wearing Purple,” the Gypsy-punk dance party that eclipses everything else on the film’s accompanying soundtrack… like, look, okay, I know not everyone’s gomna dig this kind of music, but it’s worth checking out for the message alone, especially since Hütz, a Ukrainian refugee who found political asylum in Vermont 30some years ago, has emerged as an unsurprisingly outspoken contemporary voice ever since everyone finally started caring about what’s going on in his homeland.

And I think that’s probably why no one has as much fun performing music as this band, which churns out high-energy jams on the same stage that’s essentially a gyrating mass caught up in the cabaret/carnival energy one would expect from a musical outfit traveling as an international gaggle of boundlessly enthusiastic performers (like, the above cover image should give you a preeeetty good reference point for the gleefully orchestrated chaos erupting from a Gogol Bordello show). I will forever maintain that decent people emerge from the worst life can offer with a renewed appreciation for how impermanent joy is and the necessity of actively looking for it to ward off the debilitating hopelessness of seemingly interminable dark times, and that authenticity of drinking in all the good that life can offer to give it all back to an audience is something I’ve never had the absolute privilege to witness at any other show.

Befitting the band’s roots, last year’s release Solidaritine was unabashedly steeped in foundationally-punk-rock rage against the war machine and an ailing society’s myriad injustices that go hand-in-hand with it while being unignorably buoyed by hope. Among its 13 fiery tracks was a revamped version of this song reborn as, so far as Google translate tells me, a love letter to and heartfelt itemization of reasons to fight for Ukraine in Hütz’s mother tongue.

This original version of the song is a helluva battle cry in its own right, though. And while this album’s title might not directly invoke the increasingly imperative concept of solidarity, it’s packed with songs like this one, which itself is packed with entire verses like:

When I was younger I thought
Someday that we will win
And in another country
I will find my twin
Spread good music and good poetry
Joining forces of the victory

More important than solidarity that transcends cultures and borders as it seeks out the only “us” that should matter—a shared humanity—is the solidarity that transcends time, the kind of compassionate connection that inspires a person to leave the world in better shape than they found it for people they’ll never meet and a future they’ll never know.

If you’ll remember those before
And the ones that yet to come
Then above suffer of it all
Triumphs the union of souls
With only one thing on its mind
I can’t go on, I will go on!
With only one thing on its mind
I can’t go on, I will go on