"Gogol Bordello" is a NYC musical band, "Ukrainian Gypsy Punk Cabaret", as they call themselves.
Whether these are Ukrainian, or Russian, or Gipsy melodies the group performs with such a gaiety, they often sound familiar, prototypical (at the end of Start wearing purple there is a famous theme of "Fried Chicken" 
, a song written in 1920s during the Russian Civil War), while the lyrics gives me an eerie feeling. The words are almost scary, not the meaning, but how they are uttered. Somebody said that things which scary us most aren't unfamiliar, they are the things that combine familiar with alien. Soloist's (Eugene Hutz) accent vibrates in the space between a normal English speech and an inescapable full-blown accent of the immigrants who were unfortunate to say goodbye to mother Russia after puberty. Eugene belongs to the centauric generation, kids that emigrated when they were 7-14. While their parents absorb new culture only to the degree that would allow surviving, almost unwillingly, only what they have to absorb, their children truly belong to both worlds, crossing the borders with an easiness of a seasoned spy. They switch from one language to another whenever they feel like it, and in their speech phonetic features of English and Russian, two languages not particularly compatible, make one whole, a fusion you would never believe could exist. When in "Start Wearing Purple" the singer abandons English and switches to Russian without warning, it takes me a while to notice the change, and it's a physically unpleasant sensation, like dizziness. I read somewhere that a native and a foreign languages are processed by different parts of our brains, so maybe switching languages is a good way to short circuit the brain.
Start wearing purple wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me now
All your sanity and wits they will all vanish
I promise, it's just a matter of time...
I known you since you were a twenty, and I was twenty,
but thought that some years from now
a purple little little lady will be perfect
for dirty old and useless clown...
I know it all from Diogenis to Foucault
from Lozgechkin to Paspartu
I ja kljanus obostzav dva paltza, Schto ty,
schto muziko poshla ot Zvukov Mu!...
Party!
So Fio-Fio-Fioletta! Etta! Va-va-va-vaja dama ti moja!
Eh podayte nam karetu, vot etu, i mi poedem k ebenjam!
So yeah, start wearing purple wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me now
All your sanity and wits, they will all vanish
I promise, it's just a matter of time!...
My attempt to translate the Russian part:
And I swear, having pissed on two fingers,
That the music originated in "Zvuki Mu" ("Sounds of Moo", a famous Russian rock band)
So Violetta! My lady!
Hey, get ready a coach, this one,
We will go to nowhere.
The last word that I lamely translated as "nowhere", is к ебеням in the original, and I have a confession to make. It is a word from the language that is called Russian mat, an obscene language that is used mostly by males. I had to use a "Russian-Russian" dictionary of mat to understand what it means! Literally, the dictionary said, it means "a very distant place", for example "we were lost and went to some ebenyam". Um, I mean literally it has something to do with sexual activity…
But Russian mat deserve a separate post, and probably more than one.
