Arts & Culture
Judaism: Weird, Dark…and Great Musical Material!
By punktorah / June 21, 2010
"So, Mr. PunkTorah, does your band play Jewish music?"
I’m surrounded by a group of middle aged Jews, trying to explain my rock band Can!!Can…and trying my hardest not to cuss or fuck up or look like an idiot. Because the easiest way to stump a musician is to ask them what their music is like. Try it some time. It’s hilarious.
"My lyrics draw heavily from my sense of Jewish spirituality, like the Rastafarians with reggae. And since I’m the singer, it comes out a lot. But our music is really just heavy rock, like Queens of the Stone Age, The Cramps, stuff like that."
I might as well have whipped out my dick and helicoptered them. This conversation is totally pointless.
They don’t know what to say to me. Jewish music falls under four categories for them: Debbie Friedman, their parents Klezmer records, the Carlebach family, and the soundtracks to Yenta and Fiddler on the Roof. Maybe a fifth category too, the one that takes contemporary music, pours Mel Brooks love-shmaltz all over it, and becomes a Jewish self parody of the cool music.
The truth is, I’ve never liked that stuff. It’s not authentic to me.
The things in the Jewish tradition that are dark and weird…that’s my area. While everyone is celebrating the victory of Hanukah, I’m thinking about all the Hellenistic Jews that got murdered. My favorite midrashim (Jewish legends) are about Aaron’s sons being burned to death and Abraham smashing his father’s idols, then giving him a "fuck you" answer when asked about it.
It’s makes for great music. On my band’s upcoming album, I unintentionally tackled several of these issues including:
-The Nephilim, who I think don’t get enough air-play in Jewish dialogue
-Meeting G-d at the Mishkan as an allegory for getting laid (inspired by Girls In Trouble, interestingly enough)
-Revering rabbis like golden calves
-And Ha-Satan, the persecutor
Is that Jewish enough for you?
But more importantly, I live in the world. So while, yes, I do write "Jewish" lyrics, to the extent that spirituality is a huge part of my life, for every "Jewish" thing in my music, you’re going to hear more Universal things: love, life, paranoia, drug abuse, surrealism, adventure, sex, prophetic dreams, our culture of victimhood, and false heroism.
And to me, these Universal ideas, are just as Jewish as anything else. If you don’t believe me, read the Torah, you’ll find tons of it.
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the great thing about art, of any kind, is our ability to interprete it any way we want, to view it any way we want, and to talk about it any way we want…and for that, you’ve elevated it higher than it would have been without it. so thank you for that.
That was no psychoanalysis. I didn’t even touch on your relationship with your parents’ record collection, Patrick. Or your subconscious desire to kill Steve Lawrence in order to sleep with Eydie Gormé!
But if the sample of your writing above is any indication of your music, mebbe you should spend some of that free time editing.
If I psychoanalyzed every word I said, I wouldn’t have any free time to write music in the first place :-)
Patrick, by using the word authentic in that manner, you made a claim to arbitrate authenticity. You could’ve written that Debbie Friedman and her ilk never seemed authentic to you, or that they don’t feel authentic to you, making it clear that the lack of authenticity was something that you subjectively sense. Or you could’ve specified what you noticed as inauthentic, e.g., their payes were stapled to their hats .
Instead you chose add weight and authority to your personal preferences by throwing in “authentic.” It’s fine to have your likes and dislikes, but to judge authenticity based on appeal to Patrick Aleph? These musicians —or any musician— need only be authentic to themselves and their aesthetic choices. They don’t need to be authentic to you or me.
So, you either appointed yourself arbiter of Jewish musical authenticity or you were unable to express what you meant —which must really suck if you’re a lyricist. Either way, you made yourself look like an idiot.
Jewish music is music made by Jews for Jews. Plain and simple. Patrick and the editor of this site want to pretend it’s something different than they are dead wrong.
well kokapelye, i never once claimed in the article that i was the arbiter of authenticity…i just claimed that Debbie Friedman, etc. wasn’t authentic TO ME. it doesn’t speak to me, as a person. if you get off on some kick ass acoustic renditions of Lecha Dodi and acapella versions of If I Were A Rich Man, then good for you.
You can always tell a person is from Texas when they read the word “authentic” and think of ad campaigns to sell beer to Hispanics. Oops, I just gave myself away.
Thanks for appointing yourself arbiter of authenticity, Patrick. You succeeded in making yourself look like an idiot.
Not really.
if you are so against Jewish exceptionalismm than why do you bother writing for a Jewish website? Don’t you think there is something a little more extra special about the music your own people make?
Ask them what their definition of what "Jewish music" really is, and then when they give you any of the answers you assume they are going to give you (as noted above), give them a short, but impassioned speech about how klezmer, Debbie Friedman, etc. all took their sounds from Russian/Irish/American folk music.
People are lazy thinkers — they assume that God plopped Jewish culture as we know it out of the sky with the Torah and all the things we are supposed to do and not do. The fact is that Jews have been able to take what they’re given and make it their own. It’s what Tin Pan Alley songwriters did, what Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, Joey Ramone, and every Jewish punk did, and what you’re doing today.
You can always tell a person is from the south when they use the term "cuss."
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