THE PROPHETIC POLITICS OF GORKY IN FIVE SONGS.
People have always asked me about the name of our band, and wondered if there were political connotations.
There weren't at first, but I leaned into it after a while.
The name of our band comes from my childhood best friend Whitney's name for her comfort blanket, which she called her ‘gorky.’
Neither of us had any fucking clue that ‘Gorky’ was the name of a park in the then freshly-unSoviet Russia, or that it was the name of a Communist Russian author, but once I found out about that stuff, it led me to read Marx and all the great socialists of the olden time, like Che Guevara, who is one of my personal heroes, when I was 16 and 17 years old.
And from there I became something of a Marxist. I even joined the CPUSA, a fact I had to conceal when I joined the Army later, in 2006.
I still would consider myself something of a Marxist, but more philosophically than in a DSA sense. Anyhoos--
Gorky's songs are often about nostalgia, or heartache, or sometimes even about funny, novelty things, but I think most people would not think of us as a political band. Certainly, we're not Rage Against The Machine, but we're not the least political band either.
So I thought--are we a political band? I usually steer away from taking a strict political view because Gorky is a big tent that is welcoming to everyone, and everyone should feel welcome with us, but that being said there are some political positions I have taken in my songs that do amount to what could be described as a left-wing position.
This is interesting to me, because I don't quite fit the leftist/progressive/liberal mold socially or artistically. I mean, look at our songs and our approach to parody and satire. We have been called everything under the sun: sexist, racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, offensive, crude, crass, and so on and so on.
I would say that's because Gorky was born out of a moment in pop culture where the works of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Dave Chappelle, and Tenacious D reigned supreme in our teenage minds, and we sort of just stayed there. When we finally started seeing some success in the 2010's, that culture was beginning to be repressed in the youth, and replaced with the unfortunate “woke” culture we see now, so of course songs like “#Datass” and “Super Drunk” were frowned upon, even if they were popular.
This has become difficult to navigate, especially as the stuffy performative social conservatism of my youth has been absorbed into the left more than into the right.
We're in a weird time.
I do know that I am going to stay on the same path I started on a ½ of a century ago, when the band began, because if anything in another 25 years people will look back and Gorky will maybe have accurately diagnosed the first half of the century. Who knows.
I just let the music speak for itself…
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“DUMP ON TRUMP”
“Hey, Donald Trump in office is scary, so if you feel the Bern go vote for Sanders in the primary--”
What is the most bizarre thing about this song is that it was a remix of our 2015 song ‘Super Drunk’ and is just as old as Donald Trump's political career, yet not one word is irrelevant or needs changed. The song is just as relevant today, over a decade later, as it was when we first released it. The cover art features Trump shitting into his own mouth a la ‘tub girl’ for those who know some history of the internet. Anyways, the artist Alex Voss said we could use the art as long as we donated to Bernie, and we did and actually ended up playing Bernie's rally in Flagstaff, Arizona that year, and the song was retweeted by a CNN News Anchor which was cool.
“AMERICAN IMMIGRANT”
“Keep your head low when you're runnin' from the Border Patrol--”
This song, to the tune of ‘Froggy Went-A Courtin’", tells of my ancestry on my father's mother's side, so the non-Yaqui side of my dad, but after going through this and that ancestor on down the line, I bring it back to current events: the same people who are going after migrants now, like ICE, are the same feds who went after my bootlegging ancestors, my ancestors who were conscripted in mines for labor, and so on and so forth. There's no difference, it's just an authority figure trying to stop people from moving around because it threatens the power structures in place.
“BRAVE NEW ANIMAL”
“With this new ruler, everyone is to blame--”
With the advent of AI, this pre-AI track from 2019's Mathemagician hits different. The song is really about the over-digitization of society and its effects on mental health, and the song ultimately blames the people for this outcome. If people weren't such flawed moral beings, things like this would never happen, but here we are, in a barely functioning dystopia with an authoritarian leader, and everything that was awful about the future in the movies I grew up watching are now coming true. It's bonkers.
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
“I'll free Palestine, Tibet and Bangladesh--”
I was saying ‘Free Palestine’ back in 2008 and 2009 when this little rocker came out on The Deuces, while I was still enlisted as an MP in the US Army. I knew back then that these imperialist wars were being fought on Israel's behalf. I have always been against Israeli apartheid and for the liberation of the Palestinian people. As an indigenous person whose family and people were genocided by imperialist powers, I have nothing but sympathy for the people of Palestine and nothing but loathsome disdain for Zionists, which has probably hurt my job prospects over the years.
“LET'S WAR”
“If disinformation got you killing somebody, I think y'all need a shrink--”
Technically this song is on one of my solo records, but it was supposed to be a Gorky record. Anyways, it's all the Gork. But the song is really like a sequel to 'Brave New Animal' in the sense that feeding into these algorithms like we have been doing, these little boxed worlds, has created this awful sentiment between people that ultimately has led to violence. People are getting assassinated and no one cares. School shooting after school shooting, and so on. The way out of this is to get out of our heads and into community.