Budapest - Eugene Hütz turns 35 on September 6, slowly but surely reaching that age most punkers do not survive (sometimes literally). He may very well be an exception.
Born in Kyiv in 1972 as Evzhen Nikolayev, he was uncomfortably close to the "heat of things" when the nuclear power plant Chernobyl exploded in 1986. Moving with his parents from Ukraine to the United States, he lived as a refugee from the age 14.
Interestingly enough, he was to be at the epicentre of another explosion, metaphorically speaking, when he started the now famed Gogol Bordello band in the New York City in 1999. He himself is credited with inventing the very term Gypsy punk when describing what they do in The Village Voice interview.
As a tribute to this man of boundless energy and wicked humour, we are bringing you an interview conducted last month when Aktuálně.cz hooked up with him after the band´s performance at the Sziget rock festival in Budapest and an impromtu backstage jam session with the Czech Republic´s own Gipsy.cz band.
Gipsy.cz are known for mixing the traditional Gypsy music and hip-hop. You also know a thing or two about these wild crossovers. So what do you think of their music?
What do I think about them? What do you think that I think about them! It is fucking great when someone does such a fucking good show live on stage. Romani culture has many dimensions but this is a new progressive dimension that he is doing, or we are doing. There is not that many of us because Romani culture is very old-fashioned in a lot of ways. It is kind of bold - even for us - to butcher it. We respect all generations and what they have to say and you can never stop authentic gypsy music the way it is already been done by the best performers of it. But we have to make our own way in this music
So do you think that Gogol Bordello or Gipsy.cz can be considered the Gypsy music of the 21st century?
It is part of the picture for sure. The beautiful thing is that if you really go into writings of historians you will see that they predicted the death of gypsy art some 150 years ago. It never happened. So when they said this is in decline, it is bullshit. It will never decline. It will always go on. It became new again and this is what we do.
Will it be possible to see Gogol Bordello and Gipsy.cz on one stage sometime?
Easily!
Lately, you were in connection with another Czech artist. Pavla Fleischer made a film about you called The Pied Piper of Hützovina and it is about your journey through Eastern Europe and Russia. Do you like the film?
Of course, I like that movie. I think it is quite good to sometimes let go and film things the way they are. I mean as an artist you always have an urge to control things and frame them in a certain way. So for me to be in a film and be framed by somebody else is a completly different experience. I am the one who frames the shit most of the time. But I learned that is actually quite good for the soul to let it go. I thought that the movie was succesfull because: number one, it was authentic - which means we were filming people as we knocked on their door and walked in without any preconception, preparation, we were not calling in advance that we are going to come and that is why it was so succesfull. All Gypsies, all Roma, all my friends who saw it they liked it. This is a really new way in showing the Gypsy culture - we connected some of the most poverty-stricken people with artists who were quite well-off and succeeded at making some real connections between them.
Infobox
- Gogol Bordello Super Taranta! tour: 24. November 2007 Theatre Archa / Prague
- Documentary movie The Pied Piper of Hützovina you can see between 18. and 22. October 2007 during the festival Music on Film - Film on Music in Prague
- Gipsy.cz show: 22. September 2007 during the festival Smichoff Summer - Brewery Staropramen, Prague
So did you find in this journey also some inspiration for the new CD?
Actually, the first two songs on our new CD Super Taranta! were literally written in Siberia. The third one is about Eastern European sex-trafficking which I could not have written about before. Five or six years ago, if you went to Ukraine you could find thousands of hot girls but I was there now, looking around and thinking: "Where are they all at?" Now I know where they are. They are in Dubai, Istanbul, across the Black Sea. It is very much informed by travelling and by first-hand information.
You perform widely both in the West and in the East. What is the difference between the shows here and there?
Everybody wants to hear how different it is but it is not so different. Our music is a music of liberation and it makes people buckwild everywhere we go. Of course Serbians are the fucking craziest people. You will know if you go there. But even if we play the shows in Canada, I am telling myself: Wow! Am I in fucking Slovakia or what? People everywhere have the potential to go crazy to good music.
One of the most interesting songs on Super Taranta! is Alcohol. Can you tell us something about it?
Well, I did not even want to put it on the album. It is a song which I wrote on a tourbus after a party. I was thinking that it is not good enough to be on the album. But my friends were telling me that they liked it so I decided to do what they were saying and when I finally listened to the whole album I found out that it was a great idea.
