Music Video and Song Story: "Problem"

Giving Props to Hip Hop

So we’ve been talking about this song a lot on here, because we love it, almost as much as what we consider to be the best track on the new album, “The Rodney Rocket”. (You’ll hear the rest of the album in just five weeks.) But “Problem” is a obviously a tribute to our heroes Gogol Bordello and Goran Bregovic, who of course do that sort of off-beat euro-dance thing better than anyone. Very under-informed North American listeners sometimes call this rhythmic style “ska”. Uh…. yeah.

“Problem” is also our first sequel song; it was self-consciously written as a follow up to “Sleep is For The Weak”. The songs share roughly the same beat, and there’s that callback lyric:

Say it again, Zajebiście, kurwa!

Speaking of that lyric, this is also our first song with, well, hip-hop in it, of the sort that you often find on Gogol Bordello tracks. We made a Facebook post announcing that there would be hip-hop on the new record, and some people actually got mad. And whenever someone makes a whiny comment of this sort, we always have the same response: “Punk is supposed to be aggravating.”

But aside from the actual hip hop breakdown in the song, the whole tune itself is actually inspired by hip-hop. I was walking around where I live (The Bronx), and some dudes by a basketball court were blasting this spanish-language rap track with accordion in it, and I suddenly got inspired. The clincher was when the MC started rhyming in the exact meter of that memorable final verse of Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray”:

I live and die for Hip Hop
This is Hip Hop of today
I give props to Hip Hop
So Hip Hop Hooraaaaay!!

Now listen to the verses of “Problem”. Hear it? It’s the exact same meter or vocal rhythm, copied beat for beat. Perhaps we should have called the album “Nautical By Nature”. (Of course, someone already did that, in fact, the same guy who wrote “Knife To The Eye”. What a prick.)

Seriously though, there is something pretty weird about being a bearded caucasian 40something philosophy professor and heading into a music studio to actually do a hip hop verse with your super caucasian folk-punk band. You kind of have to just go with it. And then just add that the verse is in Polish and everyone in the studio was kind of just like: “What the fuck is going on right now?” But it works, it absolutely 100% works, and we wouldn’t change it at all.

Fuzznuts was like: “Let’s add some dub sounds.” And we unanimously said: “YES.”

The hip-hop breakdown has another layer of meaning for us: when on tour in Poland we would have so many bands give us CDs to listen to, and so many of them had reggae with shouty Polish rap over top of it. One particularly memorable song had this weedy Polish chap screeching “rrrrrrreggae reggae regggae!!” with rolled ‘R’s over and over again in a high voice. With all due respect to those fine musicians, it was super weird and not very good. This is payback, Poland.

And everything else in the song is real: for example, holes in the floor of the tour van during winter, freezing our buns off because the heat stopped working.

Finally, we should mention that our dear friend and tour driver Damian makes an appearance in this song, which was essential for us as we tragically lost him a few years back. He gets to “lean on the horn”, which he actually did. A lot. Often just to intentionally wake me up or terrify me while we were going 137kph. Actually he was kind of a prick, too.

(miss you, bud)