For the 2005 film Everything Is Illuminated, the Ukrainian-born Gypsy punk rocker Eugene Hütz returned to his home country to play Alex, a hip-hop-loving, liberty-taking tourist guide for American Jews. The musician’s own life couldn’t be more different – as the frontman for raucous, multicultural band Gogol Bordello, he has been a longtime fixture on the arts scene of the Lower East Side in New York and toured with Madonna. But now, as the world watches Ukraine defend itself against Russia, Hütz finds himself taking on the role of a real-life guide to Ukrainian culture for westerners who have previously shown little interest.
“One of the things that I’m trying to debunk is that I’m some first guy from behind the iron curtain that got into western pop culture,” says the 49-year-old. “Tommy Ramone, who started the Ramones, escaped with his family from Budapest when Russian tanks rolled in there in 1956. He was a political refugee from the east bloc because of communist invasion.” The late Ivan Král, who collaborated with Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, “was born and raised in Prague and emigrated [to the US] when Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. People like that, in the very fabric of punk rock, their underdog energy was coming from a real place.”
