Obligatory Post About "Koko Euro Spoko"

As the Euro2012 bears down on us—the opening match merely a day away—I feel compelled to mention the Euro2012 anthem for Poland, "Koko Euro Spoko"by Jarzebina.  Translating to something like Bawk (or cluck) Euro Cool (Note: koko is the Polish word for the sound a chicken makes), the song was voted the winner of "Hit Bialo-Czerwonych" (Hit of the Red-Whites) in a live concert.  The song itself seems to be a semi-disco polo song with lyrics about the Euro2012 tournament, of course playing to nationalist feelings (it's cheering on the Polish National Team.)  It has all the expected imagery: red and white, eagles, balls flying high.  The song immediately led to a mass facepalming from just about everyone who wasn't at the concert voting for it.

Those are traditional folk outfits.  They're not dressed as nuns.  But also fucking check out the guitarists rock out on this one.

Many feel that it's an enormous embarrassment for Poland to choose a cheesy song like this: but they're really missing the point.  The worst part of the song is the lyrics, which are pretty lame; however, most foreigners won't understand the lyrics.  The same works in reverse when trying to tell non-Poles about how great Pan Tadeusz is (the plot is super-lame; one reads it for the language, which is lost upon non-Polish speakers.)
Not all are detractors though.  Some find the lyrics and tune pretty catchy (I myself have annoyed more than one co-worker with my incessant singing of "Ciesza sie Polacy!  Cieszy Ukrainia!"  (Note:  I'm not endorsing this song or admitting that it's good, it merely entered into my rotation of songs to sing out loud for the Euro2012 duration.)
The last I heard, they were not going to perform this for the opening match.

Awwww shit, son!  It's the remix!

This is not the first folk song inspired by soccer.  Maryla Rodowicz also performed for the 1974 World Cup, in which Poland placed third.

All I can say is that I can't wait to see if this is submitted for the Eurovision contest.  Won't that bring down the house.

A New Year

(NOTE:  This post was in the works for some time.  I've only got around to posting it now, so enjoy.)

Well, it's 2011.

Last night was Noc Sylwesterowa (or just Sylwester), New Year's Eve.  Warsaw—specifically Plac Konstytucji— was treated to a concert by Roxette (anyone remember them?) and a fireworks show.  From Centrum to Politechnika, a raucous cheap-wine-swilling crowd formed and danced to '80s pop music.  The slush on the street was trodden many times over, plus the broken wine bottles made it pretty edgy.  There was a small town of portapotties that could have serviced Woodstock.  It was a pretty good time; I had fun.

The Orange Festival: 2009-2010

While the summer is dominated by music festivals like Gdynia's Open'er and Krakow's Coke Live Music Festival, Warsaw's Orange Festival has become a small, semi-respectable music fest.

Last year, The Orange Festival was big, open, music fest with two stages and several worthy acts supported by various lesser ones.  It was two nights of open music in the center of Warsaw.  This year, the Orange Festival moved to the more controllable Sluzewiec Racetrack and ticket prices have been introduced (59zl for the first night and 99zl for the second.)

A year ago, I most maddeningly missed The Crystal Method by fifteen minutes (oooh, I was steamed.)  Instead, I got to see the laughably bad N.E.R.D, whose poorly written, poorly performed music drove me away even before the first song had ended.  Luckily, Calvin Harris was performing on the Young Stage (the second, smaller stage), and gave quite a show.  The respectable MGMT followed, but Calvin Harris really was the highlight of the night.  Ja Confetti played the first night, and I was actually able to enjoy them from across Marszalkowska.

This year's lineup touts both Nelly Furtado and Courtney Love's Hole (both I'm none too crazy about.)  The rest of the lineup is filled with Polish bands, or incredibly minor acts.  It seems that Orange has scaled back this years music fest.  No longer is it in the center and free, but on a racetrack and charging 129zl-tickets for both nights.  Perhaps they lost money last year or at least didn't make as much as they'd hoped.  Granted, Nelly Furtado and Courtney Love are big-name acts with wide recognition; but Courtney Love is fifteen-years past her prime and most of the energy has gone into promoting Furtado.
There was a suggestion that one could enjoy the music by going into the area of the Sluzewiec and one could hear the music wafting on the breeze.  But honestly, it didn't really seem worth it.  None of the bands performing this year piqued my interest.
Open'er 2010 was able to showcase bands and artists like Massive Attack, Nas, Ben Harper, Pearl Jam, Matisyahu, and Cypress Hill.  Coke 2010 had: Muse, Thirty Seconds to Mars, The Chemical Brothers, Panic! At the Disco, (and N.E.R.D).  While many of these artists, in my opinion, suck, they still bring in large crowds and have large, international followings.  It doesn't seem likely that anyone would fly to Warsaw specifically to catch a music festival with Courtney Love & Hole and Nelly Furtado (not to mention the bands The White Lies and Edyta Bartosiewicz.)  Other, more massive, music festivals like: Bonnaroo, Coachachella, Lollapalooza, and Big Day Out, attract top artists at the peak of their careers, plus hundreds of thousands of spectators (including foreigners coming just to see the event.)  The point I'm making is that the Warsaw Orange Festival isn't really worth the $40-tickets.  It ought to revert back to it's open, free-for-all format of yesteryear.  Until they start pulling out the big guns, or at least bands that I would chock up money for, I'll find something else to provide enjoyment (for instance, Roger Water's will be in Lodz next year playing The Wall.  I will definitely try to go.)

The News About

The news buzzing throughout the blogosphere and on the all the media outlets is the outcome of yesterday's election. Well, most everyone knows by now that a runoff will be held in two weeks' time as none of the candidates won an absolute majority. Komorowski garnered the most votes with a little over 40% of the vote.

Yesterday, however, I slept until past noon, so I wasn't really on top of the election madness. I, instead, went to see the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra at the Opera Narodowa. What a thrilling show! It's lead by fro-headed conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. The orchestra is made up of poor youths, who have been granted a way out of their poor social backgrounds through music.

Anyway, it was an amazing show (they played three encores.) Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was played in the second half, while the first half was made up of Margariteña by Inocente Carreño and several dances from Estancia by Alberto Ginastera. For the encores, they played some Hungarian waltz, and some mambo. They completed the effect with the last two songs by twirling their instruments; standing up and moving about; and swinging to-and-fro with the music. Dudamel even switched roles with a violinist, playing violin whilst the lad began conducting. It was a pretty impressive performance all and all.

They take in the rightfully-earned applause.

The Coming Weekend

Last night marked the start of the Chopin Festival here in Warsaw. This year has been dubbed "The Year of Chopin", marking the 200th anniversary of his birth. Last night, the Chopin Open concert was held at the National Opera. It wasn't a purely Chopin performance, as there was Schumann and Bach, but then again the Mostly Mozart festival isn't 100% Mozart, but mostly is. Aside from the traditional orchestral pieces, there was an accordion trio playing an arrangement of Chopin. They didn't look like the typical classical musicians; one had ass-length hair (dreads?) pulled back in a ponytail, while another had a shaved head, the third looked generic. The piece was… interesting, and enjoyable at some parts. The accordion is an instrument that is surprisingly versatile. The shaved head was getting really into the music, bucking and stomping his feet. He looked like he was either involuntarily having his liver removed or having the most intense orgasm of his life.

A ticket cover to the concert.

Oh, and for those who don't remember or don't care, yesterday was the opening of the FIFA World Cup. It's sure to be a snoozefest, and I'm actually kind of glad that Poland isn't in it (it means less Polish hooligans and assholes on the streets.) For those of you who haven't noticed, I find soccer to be the dullest mainstream sport.

Trilling and Dancing

A few weeks back, there was a free concert showcasing traditional Polish folk dancers and singers. The whole ensemble was accompanied by an orchestra in adorable costumes. The dancers (see below) were very entertaining. I was quite captivated by the girls' trilled whoops (see if you can hear them do it in the videos.) The costumes are straight out of a Polish logo (Zywiec, or some butter company, etc.)

I wonder if Polish Folk Dancing will ever catch on the way Irish Step Dancing did. Maybe it's due for a renaissance.

Now, I was shooting this video blind and standing at the very back of the crowd. Please excuse me if the camerawork kind of sucks.

Przystanek Woodstock 2009 Last Weekend: The Performers

The ideals of Woodstock—a weekend of love, art, good times, good people, good music—lives on today, even if the hippy spirit has mostly wafted away like oh-so-many puffs of peyote. The counter-culture culture became mainstream; they were no longer the oppressed youth seeking free love and mind-liberating drugs. Most of them grew old and got jobs and families; some grew old and still live as grubby old men you don't want to sit next to on the bus. Every new generation still has its 'hippies', and festivals like Burning Man and Bonnaroo are huge draws. Phish was immensely popular despite not being very good (let's face it: Phish sucked. Good riddance.)

It is in these the concerts where we come closest to the hippy culture (those, and some communes still eking out an existence.) But the culture is corrupted. These concerts, psychedelic colors and all the puke, piss, and mud you could ever want, are dominated by the mainstream bands of the day. Woodstock '94 was more about Nine Inch Nails' climb to fame than about Jimi wailing on his guitar. Megadeath, Snoop Dogg, and Metallica—all three are decisively 'anti-hippy'—were just a flavor of Woodstock 1999. What happened?

Well, hippies got old and their kids didn't really want to be like them. The bands of the hippy era either broke up acrimoniously, or had multiple members die from a druggie-lifestyle that would have killed a lesser life form years earlier. The music of love and peace isn't exactly topping the charts (that honor goes to music about drive-bys, blowjobs, and why you're such a ho.) So, to capture today's youth, you have to push out a bunch of corporate-sponsored acts whose ideologies are in direct conflict of the original Woodstock.

With all this preamble, I will now bring our attention to Przystanek Woodstock. There were many acts, some foreign, most were Polish. I don't feel like addressing each act individually, since most of it is a matter of taste (plus, I'd probably be reduced to just writing "was good", "was shit" comments after about five reviews.)

Instead, I'll focus on one of the main features of the festival: The Special Anniversary Concert for the Years of Woodstock. Performed half-way through the festival, it sought to bring together all the music of the world and spew it out in a concert of classic covers. The set list included numbers like: The Beatles' With a Little Help From My Friends, Janis Joplin's Cry Baby, and Green Day's When I Come Around. Surprisingly, only one of those songs was sung at the original Woodstock (Richie Havens sang With a Little Help From My Friends and some other Beatles tunes; The Beatles were not at the original Woodstock. Janis Joplin didn't perform Cry Baby.)

Actually, there was a much larger set list, which had several songs that were played at Woodstock, (including the National Anthem (both Poland's and the US') on electric guitar.) The entire set was accompanied by a full orchestra.

The whole idea behind these numbers is that they would meld together different music types from different eras in one big celebration. Sometimes it worked—like in the case of Ewelina Flinta's entirely capable rendition of Cry Baby—and other times it crashed in burned: the operatic singers singing in With a Little Help From My Friends, and the lead singer of When I Come Around.

Ewelina Flinta, a contestant from some Polish Idol show, belts out a throaty song, losing any sort of accent, and proving she can do folk rock/blues/jazz as good as any American crooner. Her outfit, I guess meant to evoke the hippy roots, seems entirely in place; almost as if the psychedelic facade of the stage was actually in the right time and place.

Not bad for an almost-winner of an Idol TV show.

With a Little Help From My Friends is an entirely different story. The leader singer, Piotr Cugowski, isn't so bad. He actually manages to do quite well. The two warblers behind him, however, are so horrifically awful, so terribly shitty, that nothing can save this performance. Their screeching, off-tune 'singing' threatens to drown out the entire ensemble, replacing a very nice song with the equivalent of operatic mayhem. I hear tell, that the rest of the performers (the choir and orchestra) found the entire thing comedic to the effect that they had to stifle their laughter.

Brings new meaning to the words "What would you do if I sang out of tune/ Would you stand up and walk out on me?" —Yes.

The creme de la creme of crap performances (and terrible management in booking performers) is Maciek Januszko's hilariously bad When I Come Around. It's just so, so bad. Watch for yourself to see where his flaws are.

This song is supposed to sound like it's sung by an angsty fifteen-year-old, not a wasted fifty-five-year old wash up.

The finality is the inevitable song together of all the celebrities and performers.

Przystanek Woodstock 2009 Last Weekend: The Revelers

Last weekend marked the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, as well as the fourteenth anniversary of Przystanek Woodstock. The three-day festival took place on the Polish border with Germany, at Kostrzyn nad Odra: the crowd was huge, dirty, and loud; the ground turned to a wasteland of mud and trash; the sex was rampant and free. Overall, it was a smashing success, and the list of B-artists wowed the crowd (and those watching on TV/the Internet.)

Creating a muddy pit.

Quite a lot of people jumping around in the mud.

Others prefer to relax and wallow in the filth.

A bungie pole above the masses.

Two monks amongst the revelers.

The crowd helps 'push' the bus along.

They push even in chairs.

One concert-goer wears a three-bonged hat.

The crowds going to and fro from the town and the concert grounds.

The encampment at dawn.

In the end, a lone angler fishes in the muddy pool.

I'll address the issue of the performers next post.

Przystanek Woodstock 2009 This Weekend

The massive music festival, Przystanek Woodstock (Woodstock Stop ("stop" as in "bus stop"), is due to take place in Kostrzyn nad Odra this weekend. I must admit that I will not be able to attend, but I will be sending one of my merry gophers to go and report back.

It's apparently going to be pretty big (huge, even), with preliminary reports of 200,000 spectators expected as a bare minimum.

As for the acts, I know that Polish pop sensation, Ewelina Flinta will make an appearance at some point. Scientology enthusiast, Juliette Lewis, is also going to perform. As for the rest, a bunch of bands and musicians I've never heard of. They might have small reputations and followings, but no one on the A-list (what else do you expect from a free concert?)

Waxing Nostalgic: Europop

I must admit the sounds of Europop take me back. They take me back to a time when I didn't even know what it was or where it came from. (Nothing says nineties like funky dance music.)

The things about Europop is not that it's deep, meaningful, complex, or even very good; it doesn't offer us perspective on our lives or influence our outlook on life. Lost in the simple beats and repetitive lyrics is a rhythm of Feel Good, which everyone can use. Catchy choruses and easy-to-bump-to beats help define these songs, and are what makes them so popular—if only for a short time.

The songs were more of one-hit wonders, staying popular for a few months at a time; later only seeing the occasional spin when a radio station does a "This Day a Decade Ago", or some DJ wants to induce nostalgia into the audience. They get played all the time, only to tire out the people quickly, and then they retire.

It's precisely these quick spurts of overexposure and overplaying that's the draw. Unlike venerable favorites like Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, and The Prodigy, which are heavy in rotation on my iPod, Europop songs are to be enjoyed on rare occasions. They help serve as markers in our lives; ones that can help us remember back to when it was played every day, and we can groove a little bit (and then have that chorus stuck in your head for the next week.)

Europop's not dead, they still make trashy songs. It's just that the trash of today will be the nostalgia of tomorrow. (Hint: Shaun Baker's VIP, the quintessential crap Europop song.)

I'm Blue - Eiffel 65 - The best free videos are right here

I'm Blue: who can deny this song?

La Bouche: Some of the Godfather's of Europop. Nothing says Nineties like these funky beats.

Crap? Yes. Hate it? Yes. Five years you'll be like, "Hey yeah, I remember that! Man, does that take me back!"? Unfortunately, yes.