Meet the New Year! Same as the old year? As C-VILLE’s journey through our archives comes to a close, it’s nice to know that the more our city changes, the more it stays the same. Case in point? You’re either a Gogol Bordello city or you ain’t—and Charlottesville, you most definitely are. New York City’s gypsy-punk act, which returns to perform at the Jefferson Theatre on New Year’s Eve (page 19), brings equal parts mosh pit and melting pot. It’s the sort of eclectic, cosmopolitan show that speaks as strongly of its audience as the performance itself. So when you toast to 2010, remember the words of another true original, designer Coco Chanel: “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” Hear, hear!
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Paging through the archives
“A gypsy violin and a punk guitar, the semiotics of an Eastern Bloc cabaret—Gogol Bordello’s Slavic- and Israeli-descended musicians have turned cultural bric-a-brac into a kind of post-something happening. But despite the plentitude of imagery and derivations, their message seems to be simple…denouncing cynicism as a capitulation of the spirit, Gogol Bordello subscribes to the concept of theatrical abandon as an instrument of psychic liberation.”
Harry Terris
November 19, 2002
Getting covered
February 15, 2005
