Alina Simone | Joe’s Pub | April 4, 2008
Last Friday night brought me back to the good ol’ days of the USSR. And what better way to celebrate the hard-hitting hammer and sickle than with two bona fide emigrants. Both Eugene Mirman and Alina Simone paid tribute to the motherland the best way they could: comedy and music, respectively.
Eugene Mirman kicked off the show by narrating a slideshow of Simone’s recent pictures from Siberia. He pummeled through punch-line after punch-line, exposing the absurd cultural facet of every image. As a further matter, no other line-up could justify the hilarious, self-deprecatory perspective which was unleashed that night. Mirman poked fun at all things Russian (plight, politics and Jews) and almost made it seem right.
Not only was I transported to a far-off comedic land, but I was also afforded the opportunity to reaffirm the notion that music is equally effective, if not more, in a foreign tongue. In fact, a melody can be far more moving when the exact meaning is temporarily displaced. There is little room for gray matter—no quibbling over semantics to be done. And for that reason, Alina Simone’s performance was strangely endearing.
Simone’s emphatic performance, which revolved entirely around the Russian punk-folk icon Yanka Dyagileva, underscored what could have easily been surmised: the Soviet Union was a rough place to live. Thus, Yanka’s songs were overbearingly personal and, consequently, they are not satisfactorily expressed in any other language. Ultimately, Simone’s interpretations prove that plight is a universal notion.
Her latest, rather tributary album Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware is due out late Summer 2008.
alinasimone.com/yanka
>>> Joshua Pressman
Tags: alina simone, eugene mirman, joe's pub, nyc, yanka
