I've never been that big a fan of Good for the Jews. Super nice guys, catchy songs, and they're great at thinking on their feet (and, if Rob was here, I'm sure he'd insert a snappy line here about what they are off their feet) -- but, you know, I'm of the opinion that you can only hear a certain number of circumcision-joke songs a certain number of times before the humor, much like the Manischewitz, wears off. And I'm sad to say I probably exhausted that number listening to 2 Live Jews as an impressionable and easily-amused 11-year-old.

And I guess this all mirrors my fears and expectations in my last month of pre-fatherhood -- of my writing career, and of not making enough to pay for our next-of-kin's extravagant lifestyle. And I have to say, I was super jealous of the amazing-sounding Heeb Magazine/Good for the Jews tour, blogged about right here. But last night, I dreamed that I was standing ouside one of their concerts like a protester, hatin' on them, and on life itself, because Heeb didn't offer me to sponsor my tour (my spoken-word poetry tour or something, I guess -- I don't know, it's a dream, dude).

And then, like a weird angel manifesting in American Pie or Can't Hardly Wait, Rob appears beside me. (In real life, by the way, I have never had a spontaneous manifestation. I've barely spoken to the guy. We were at a conference together once, but that's it, I swear.) He sits down on the curb next to me, channeling Jerry O'Connell, reaches his arm around my shoulder and gives me a pep talk: "This life -- this whole damn Jewish art thing -- it isn't sustainable. Things like this," he says, pointing to my stomach, which isn't pregnant like my wife's but we both know what it means -- "This is sustainable. You can write till you die, man, and they'll keep reading even longer than that. But kids -- the remarkable thing about kids is that they live."

And then he proceeded to jam out in a band with Mike, my dead best friend and favorite guitarist, and Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney, my other favorite guitarist. But I wasn't even listening. I was just blown away.

Whatever doesn't kill you (heroin) makes your sophomore solo effort stronger.

 

I Have ItWent to see Yo La Tengo last night on the seventh of their (what else?) eight nights of ever-so subtly subtitled “Hanukkahpaloozathon” shows at the fabulous Hoboken venue Maxwell’s.

And wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, the “special guests” on night seven were none other than The New Pornographers. I was like, Yo La Tengo, Dayenu! But The New Pornographers, too? At moments like these, gratitude can tend to take on a religious cast, proving yet again that slightly-ironic Jewish identification can be just as meaningful as irony-free Jewish identification!

Yo La Tengo has been doing these week-plus Hanukkah runs at Maxwell’s since 2001, and part of each night’s take is earmarked for a particular charity. Last night’s was for the African Services Committee, a non-profit providing aid to immigrants, refugees and asylees in New York from across the African Diaspora.

Check out YLT’s awesome tour diary, which contains nice deconstructions of each night’s show goings-on.

Booker Todd Abramson, a mensch of epic proportions, was overheard to say “And on the ninth night, I’m taking Ira [Kaplan, one-third of YLT] to see Neil Young.”

(There’s also a harmless little piece in New York Magazine about last Wednesday’s show -- aka Night Two -- the last line of which proves, once and for all: making a stab at “Jewish humor” if you know jack shit about Jewish? Not really a good idea.)

Before she was Jewish: Madonna in 1983 On March 10, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will hold its twenty-third induction ceremony, celebrating the totally under-recognized achievements of luminaries like Madonna, Leonard Cohen, and John Cougar Mellencamp.

John Cougar Mellenwhat? Yup, the Rock Hall is honoring the guy behind “Jack and Diane.” Which is, please understand, a total standout in the world of handclap songs—nobody’s knocking “Jack and Diane” around here—but don’t you think one of these things is not like the other?

It happens that there’s another thing Madonna and Leonard Cohen have in common, at least nominally, but I swear this isn’t Jewish chauvinism speaking. We're talking about the woman who singlehandedly invented 99% of the pop trends over the past three decades, the man who wrote some of the most poignant and most-covered songs of all time, and this guy:

 

 

 

 

Like Wham! only less British: Good For the JewsFourteen shows and fifteen sets in thirteen cities over eighteen nights. That's the exciting way I'll be spending Hanukkah and Christmas, on tour with my band, Good For The Jews. All thirteen cities have been carefully chosen for their large populations of Jews. Even, in the case of Boca Raton, if those populations are mostly close to death.

By the way, "band" is a grandiose phrase to use here. Good For The Jews is me, Rob Tannenbaum, and David Fagin. We both sing, David plays guitar. (I tried to learn once; I didn't care for the calluses.) I do the P.R., David books the travel; I keep track of the merchandise, David drives. He wears driving gloves in the car and usually drives too fast. When we planned the tour, we budgeted for five speeding tickets.

We are, however, proudly, the greatest Jewish music-comedy duo in the land. For a long time, it was difficult to explain what we do onstage. "You sing? But you also tell jokes?" Yes. So we'd describe ourselves as a cross between Simon & Garfunkel and Martin & Lewis. BLANK STARES. Then we'd say we were like Tenacious D, but thinner and without a movie deal. BLANK STARES. Now, we just say we're like Flight Of The Conchords, but without the cute accents or the HBO deal.

We have songs about the holidays ("It's Good To Be A Jew At Christmas," "They Tried To Kill Us, We Survived, Let's Eat"), songs about visiting the parents ("Going Down To Boca"), songs about being Bar Mitzvahed ("Today I Am A Man"), songs about people we like ("Hot Jewish Chicks") and also people we don't like ("Jews For Jesus").

This tour, these thirteen cities in eighteen days: Okay, it's not Sherman's March to the Sea (which transpired at roughly the same time of year, though Savannah has a nicer climate in December than Milwaukee does), or Stalin's winter offensive (no one will be firing Panzerfausts at us, not even in Milwaukee). But that's a lot of rental cars, a lot of airline connections, many opportunities for things to go wrong. We play L.A. on December 14th (our agent, Morey, says there are many Jews in L.A.), then the next morning we fly to Denver for a show on the 15th. Think there might be some snow on the ground in Colorado, delaying our flight? The risk with rock tours isn't that they turn into This Is Spinal Tap—that would be great. The risk is that they turn into Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Mosh your pants off: Hanukkah is one of the dancier Jewish holidays Mentioning Spinal Tap reminds me of the scene where Harry Shearer shouts "Hello, Cleveland!" while the band is in Chicago. Funny, because it's true. (Though not as funny as when Tony Hendra, the band's manager, says, "Do you know what I do? I prise the rent out of the local Hebrews." Also true.) We can't be the 800th band to shout "Hello, Cleveland" when the tour starts there on Thursday night. What are the alternatives? "Shalom, Cleveland"? "Hello, Shaker Heights"?

I've got a little O.C.D., so packing for the tour has taken a lot of time: eighteen pairs of boxers, eighteen pairs of socks, some road flares, a tourniquet, warm gloves, a mosquito net, Purell, Iodine tablets, a rectal thermometer, some Mebendazole. Touring means meeting people, and meeting people means germs. Taking $20 bills from them when they gratefully buy your CD. Shaking their hands when they thank you for an amazing 80 minutes of entertainment. Deep-kissing them while they complain about their lousy experiences on J-Date. And germs, of course, mean influenza, which can really spoil a tour.

I realize how many home comforts I'm leaving behind. I'll miss my wi-fi connectivity. I'll miss having the Times delivered every morning. I'll miss my memory foam mattress and contoured pillow. I'll miss my Toto Washlet C100. I'll miss my warm-mist humidifier, which doesn't fit into my carry-on luggage. Life on tour can be very unsatisfying, as anyone who's listened to an Allman Brothers song already knows.

As I await my car service to LaGuardia, I have in mind the words of Leonard Cohen, who said that Jews are "the professionals in suffering." He also wrote these lines: "Is there anything emptier / than the drawer where/ you used to store your opium?" I'm hoping for more opium, less suffering.

List of Tour Dates 12/06, Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland OH 12/08, Miramar Theatre, Milwaukee WI 12/09, Double Door, Chicago IL 12/10, Triple Door, Seattle WA 12/11, Doug Fir Lounge, Portland OR 12/12, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco CA 12/14, Knitting Factory, Los Angeles CA 12/15, Soiled Dove, Denver CO 12/17, The Social, Orlando FL 12/18, New York Comedy Club, Boca Raton, FL 12/20, Recher Theatre, Baltimore MD 12/21, Birchmere Theatre, Washington DC 12/22, Birchmere Theatre 12/23, Highline Ballroom, New York NY

 

[Read the entire Good for the Jews Tour Diary here.]

New York Magazine recently asked several stylists to ponder the secrets behind Robert Plant's seemingly indefatigable hair. Although we may not be rock stars, we curly-haired folk could probably learn a thing or two from his technique.

She might still win: Grammy voters might not care about Amy's scandalsUSA Today has a searching analysis, complete with timeline, of the "eyelinered, tattooed R&B sensation" whose antics make "reformed bad girl Courtney Love [seem] hatched from a Jane Austen novel." On the bright side, according to Blender Editor in Chief Joe Levy, Amy "has the good fortune of going through this while Britney Spears is making her look like Annette Funicello." How will Amy's position on the Courtney-Britney-Annette-Jane spectrum affect the odds of her actually snagging any of the six Grammys she's nominated for? Maybe not at all: "The album is still a classic, no matter what happens in her personal life or how sad or ridiculous her image becomes," says Entertainment Weekly music critic Chris Willman. Besides, Grammy voting closed Jan. 9 -- before anyone saw that video of Amy allegedly smoking crack.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Dude, your mom likes Chanukah carols: No, really, she probably doesUnder consideration today:
Sid Wayne and Stanley Adams, Chanukah Carols

Chanuka carols. Is there any greater cultural need, do you think, than the drive to adapt the Christmas season to our own devices, to prove to ourselves that our minor holiday is as meaningful and significant as their major one? Is it an inferiority complex, a constant and renewing drive to shirk the label of underdog? Or do we just like making fun of goyim?

Either way: as we are on the fifth day of Chanukah and I am on my third concept album of holiday parody songs (well, second and a half, to be fair—Sam Glaser’s Rockin’ Chanukah Revue was so much more), I begin to ask myself these grand existential questions. I guess it’s inevitable.

Sid Wayne and Stanley Adams’ Chanuka Carols was originally minted in 1962, and Jewish Music Group has seen fit to bless is with its presence (or is it presents?) once again. The album bathes—no, it mikvah-dips—in puns such as these, both groaningly obvious and yet not without its own quaint, old-world charm. This is a record made when our bubbas’ flat grey hair was vibrant and black, teased into a foot-tall beehive. It presses all the buttons of questionable taste that have, in the long years since, been worn flat by the likes of 2 Live Jews, Good for the Jews, the film Hebrew Hammer and every other piece of kitsch in the New Jew Revolution.

The opening track, “’Twas the Night Before Chanukah,” is a poem that exemplifies this kitsch, clever and in pleasantly bad taste, frolicking in raucousness, but not without its charm. My grandmother would be offended, I would be turned off, but my mother? It’s probably about right. “With a OO! And an AAGH! and an OIY GUTENYOO! [sic] He flew up the shaft, like fegeles do.” (Of course, in the Yiddish glossary mandated by these sorts of albums, fegele is translated as bird…) “Matzoh Balls” is “Jingle Bells” redone for the Jews, although I don’t think that “Jingle Bells” was very Christmas-oriented to begin with. “Let’s Put the CH Back in Chanukah” is, effectively, a retelling (or pretelling) of the 2 Live Jews song (more on them later) “Shake Your Tuchus,” in which each speaker dishes out—both songs in different contexts, both with morally questionable setups—a beginner’s guide to speaking Yiddish.

Stanley Adams is a bit actor with some pretty big bits, having appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gilligan’s Island (he was the cannibal headhunter). Sid Wayne is likewise a Hollywood talent, here flexing his oft-unused Jewish muscles. Together, they craft a clichéd and cheeky but ultimately inoffensive tribute to Christmas albums in their own tradition. Oh, well.

The forehead can't rank higher than seventh on the list of most popular body parts for rock bands to autograph (assuming that breasts count as two separate parDreams Do Come True: 15 year-old Andy got his forehead signed by authorts). But for Jews, the keppe is sacred, the font only of education and wisdom, but also the sexuality that never quite emanates from the hips. So we were honored when Andy, a 15 year old at the first of our two D.C. concerts, asked us to sign his forehead. "Good luck with the tumor," I wrote with a black Sharpie, as his boho parents happily stood nearby. Andy will be 18 by the time that note wears off.

The Birchmere in D.C. was the penultimate stop on the Good For The Jews thirteen city "Putting The Ha! In Hanukkah" tour of major metropolises with substantial Jewish populations. The tour ends Sunday night, December 23, at the HighLine Ballroom in New York, with a hometown bash that also includes sets by Dave Attell, the LeeVees, Todd Barry, and Rachel Feinstein. Not since the Sickle Cell Anemia Telethon of 1975 have this many funny Jews gathered on one stage.

We sold 675 tickets at the Birchmere for our two weekend shows. Yes, we perform on Shabbos. Which means it isn't only Nazis who criticize us:

"Just curious," someone named Rochelle wrote to us this week. "How do you guys rationalize/explain performing/working on Friday nights?" A classic Jewish question— feigned innocence, stuffed with judgment and condescension. I explained that we are Jews who choose not to keep Shabbos, and that we offer other Jews the choice of whether or not to see our show on a Friday night. We are pro-choice. That's an explanation, Rochelle; the notion of rationalization presupposes that there are unacceptable ways to practice religion, and that is a description of fundamentalism. Sit on a dreidel and rotate.

The Jews' biggest critics are other Jews. It's a syndrome I call "Jew-on-Jew violence." Orthodox Jews look down on Conservative Jews, for not being observant enough. Conservative Jews look down on Reform Jews, for not being pious enough. And Reform Jews look down on Orthodox Jews, for not showering enough. I think that's unique to our tribe. Does one Presbyterian feel superior to another Presbyterian? Is there infighting among Methodists? Probably not.

Here's another recent email, from Stan Meyer, who makes a point of quickly establishing his religion: "Of all the bigoted hate-filled songs coming out of a fellow Jew's mouth." Stan is objecting to our song "Jews For Jesus," a small piece of mockery conceived around this couplet: "Jews For Jesus, the phrase is pure deceit/It's like being a vegetarian for meat." Although David Fagin and I are not observant Jews, at least we don't worship Jesus. So there are Jews even we can look down on. And Stan Meyer objects to the way we mock Jews For Jesus. "This religiously inspired hate-filled language is as bad as the rhetoric of Al Queda," he tells us.

Admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time on the Al-Jazeera site. But I'm guessing that whatever propaganda they compose about Jews and the decadent west is a lot less satirical than what we say about Jews For Jesus: "You offer me a pamphlet, I decline/I'd rather jam a broom up your behind." Likening a cheap song to Al Queda solicitations of martyrdom is pretty facile hyperbole. If Stan Meyer isn't a Jew For Jesus, then he's a synagogue hall monitor writing detention citations for Jews whose blue Stars of David aren't affixed straight.

Look, Good For The Jews gets plenty of adoration, too. The word hilarious comes up a lot in newspaper articles as we go from town to town. You can read about the show we played in Portland, Oregon, by going to the fantastic chick-on-chick blog Girl Gone Child, and I hope I'm not linking from this blog to that one only because the writer kvells about my wit and charm, and one commenter declares "OMG Rob is hawt and Good For The Jews' little ditty 'It's Good To Be A Jew At Christmas' made my panties explode."

Even better than the rave reviews, even better than being called hawt, better even than signing Andy's forehead was an email we got the morning after our first concert in D.C. It came from Camille, whose last name I'll omit for obvious reasons: "I saw your show at the Birchmere last night and it was HILARIOUS. It was an amazing show. [Additional compliments deleted for the sake of brevity.] Unfortunately, my friend's mom made us leave. I am a twelve year old Christian, and if you can make me laugh when your main target is Jews in their twenties and thirties, you're hitting a pretty wide audience."

Teaching twelve year old Christians how to say shvantz and fehrkakt and Shabbos goy, and how to think differently from parents, seems like a pretty worthy use of a Friday night. Spin that dreidel, Rochelle.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Hooked on Chanukah: My menorah is more fabulous than your menorah.Under consideration today:
Various artists, Hooked on Chanukah

Last night we had a Chanukah party. We didn’t plan on it being this way, but it turned into a marathon—from the family-first moments where my sister and cousin were there and we were setting up, to the first shift (parents with little kids), the second (the party kids—you know who you are), all the way till the end of the night, when it was just a few of us sitting around, drinking up the last of the mulled wine (Manischewitz, of course). My wife Itta put on the new CD we’d just gotten—Hooked on Chanukah, Sameach Music’s holiday comp and possibly the most true-to-Scriptures compilation, featuring songs like “Al Hanisim” and “Lichtalach” alongside standards like “Macabee” and, of course, the ubiquitous “Maoz Tzur.”

At first, it was oddly appropriate for the end of the night mood—jazzed, sort of bouncy, but mellow, just the right combination of laid-back harmonies, acoustic guitars and keyboards that you’d expect a CD with a neon yellow menorah on it to offer.

The real surprise came when Daniel, our downstairs neighbor—who, by the way, is half Filipino and half Chinese—began to belt out the generations-old Yiddish-tinged melodies. In Yiddish.

Daniel, it turns out, speaks more Yiddish than anyone else here (including, I would like to point out reproachfully, my Yiddish-educated wife, whose parents spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want her to understand what they were saying. Yeah, way to pass on our people’s traditions). He started studying the language with a friend, half as a dare, half a way to fill up free time constructively. As a matter of fact, our first conversation was predicated on us comparing our apartments’ gas hookups and me seeing the Yiddish word “pripetchik” written out on it….

So, that was the end of our party. I’m cleaning up dishes, my wife’s moving chairs back into place, and Daniel is belting out “Lichtalach” in a voice usually reserved for particularly intense rounds of Rock Band. The salsa horns of “Yevanim” simmer in the background, fading into the Billy Joel-like piano of “There’s a Light”—except, not the version from Rocky Horror. Yes, as someone raised on secular music, I still find it slightly creepy that prepubescent boys are used to hit the high notes in songs—the “women’s parts,” if you will. But the music and the general air of party-ness on this compilation are good-natured and convivial. It almost makes you want to get hooked on Chanukah. Almost.

The latte paradox: Coffee wakes you up, but living in a monoculture puts you to sleepThe encroaching domination of Starbucks took a minor blow today -- yay! XM Radio and the coffee monolith have dissolved their partnership, which had apparently been less advantageous for the growing satellite radio company than they'd expected. So: gone forever is the creepiness of being able to tune into what was basically the coffee chain's artfully crafted Muzak from any XM-equipped radio. Now all we have to worry about, in terms of cultural vanilla-latteization, are the coffee chain's music label and their incredibly influential featured-book program. Yeah, only those things.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Under Consideration:
The Klezmatics, Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah

My new novel, Candy in Action (out this week!), is an attempt to create a non-Jewish Jewish story—a story where the main character is Jewish and the plot has elements of the Jewish experience (trying to hold onto your individuality while climbing to the top of a culture that’s trying to crush it)—but there’s nothing explicitly Jewish about the story. It’s about supermodels who know kung-fu.

Woody Guthrie, on the other hand, was trying to accomplish the exact opposite with his Chanukah songs. A genius songwriter and American musical pioneer, he wasn’t Jewish himself, but his wife was, and his kids were. Captivated by his immigrant mother-in-law’s Jewish rituals and by her stories, Guthrie wanted to pass them on to her grandchildren, and these lyrics are what came out of it.

A few years ago, Billy Bragg and Wilco wrote new music to accompany some of the 400 song lyrics left behind by Guthrie. The project was attempted a few more times, both by the original collaborators and others—but nothing was able to capture the original joy and chaos quite so perfectly as the original Mermaid Avenue.

The closest anyone got was the Klezmatics, whose album Wonder Wheel won a Grammy last year, and whose adaptations of several-hundred-year-old lyrics make adapting Guthrie’s scribbled notes no problem. These songs succeed sometimes because of Guthrie’s lyrics, and sometimes in spite of them. Lead singer Lorin Sklamberg sounds something less than genuine when he sings:

“It’s Honeykie Hanukah,
huggy me tight
It’s Hanukah day
and Hanukah night”

In his defense, though, I don’t know many people over the age of eleven who can sound genuine singing the words “It’s Hanukie Hanukah time.” I do kind of wish they’d gotten Woody’s son Arlo, who has a natural childlike sparkle to his voice, to sing that song….but that’s just me, I guess.

If the songs sound a bit, well, Christmaslike, it’s no accident—Guthrie was a Christian who miscegenated with a Jewess and, after being enthralled by his immigrant mother-in-law’s stories, wanted to instill a bit of cultural pride in his kids. His deft writing and playful lyrics work lend themselves to radical adaptations—hell, his lyrics are so skeletal that it’s basically a new adaptation every time that somebody new plays one of his songs.

The Klezmatics, meanwhile, excel at their craft. They could cover the sound of breaking glass and it would sound like a dance party. That is, a dance party in Galicia, where beats per minute are counted on violin and bass strings instead of keyboards and Pro Tools.

When the two forces work together in harmony, such as they do on the title track—a countdown song whose lyrics run along the lines of “One Little Goat” (“Five for the brothers Maccabee/Six for the tricks the King did play”)—except it swings and rocks and gets merry like…well, you know what. And its Lyle Lovett-like electric guitar chorus is classic. The four instrumental songs interspersed through the album, thrown on to beef up the content and CD length, don’t feel like filler at all, even if that’s what they are.

Other times, though, the lyrics and music don’t mesh quite so jubilantly, as on the draggy “Hanukkah Bell” and the bizarre choice of adapting an Irish accent to sing the history lesson-laden “The Many and the Few,” a six-and-a-half-minute ballad that, with only a drone in the background, retells the story of Chanuka. It’s interesting enough to listen to, once, and it’s prettily done, but I really can’t imagine anyone listening to it more than once. Ever.

And, randomly: it’s really cool that Guthrie makes references, several of them, to Ezra, who is connected in tradition and scholarship to Chanukah, but who hardly ever gets props in contemporary Jewish culture—let alone, in contemporary Jewish folk music.

Right next to Crackpipe National Park: Richard Bong's namesakeYou might assume that the 454.7 mile drive from Cleveland to Milwaukee is boring. And if, as a result of that assumption, you failed to pay attention, then you would not notice the world’s largest fireworks warehouse in Fremont, Indiana, or the Recreational Vehicle Hall of Fame in nearby Elkhart. And you would completely overlook my favorite Wisconsin landmark, the Bong Recreation Area on Route 94W. We’d like to tour the RV displays, and the Bong seems like a great spot to unwind for a few hours. But David Fagin and I need to move along and make it to Milwaukee for the second night of our thirteen-city Good For The Jews “Putting The Ha! In Hanukkah” tour.

Bill Stace, who runs the Miramar Theatre, a former silent-movie house, tells us the Milwaukee weather has turned “unseasonably cold” today, which sucks, because “seasonably cold” is fucking freezing. Golda Meir grew up in Milwaukee, but at least she had the common sense to leave for somewhere warmer. We draw an even larger crowd here than we did last year, and the Young Jewish Milwaukee Federation has planned their annual “Latke Vodka” event around our show. It’s perfect: The more vodka they drink, the better we sound.

David won’t eat within four hours of a show, which means he always needs a midnight snack. Tonight, after we cruise a downtown that’s overloaded with drunk college kids in t-shirts, he grabs a drive-through McDonald’s feast: two cheeseburgers, small fries, six-piece chicken nuggets.

Then it’s back to our Best Western hotel. Next door, in room 708, there’s a party going on. “What kind of a party is so loud it even keeps a rock band awake?” David grumbles, perhaps dizzy from all the sodium and cow eyelids. Around 2 a.m., through the thin walls, we hear a screech: “I am so drunk!” When we wake up in the morning, I dial room 708. “Urlloh?” a groggy voice stumbles. “Oh! Sorry!” I say. “I must’ve dialed the wrong number!” On our way to the lobby, we pass 708, and I flip their DO NOT DISTURB sign to the PLEASE CLEAN THIS ROOM side. While we’re still at the elevator, a maid uses her pass key to walk in, and we hear confused yelling as the elevator door closes.

Santa's favorite: Sushi on the roadIn Chicago, our car keeps slipping around on black ice, and the weather forecast is for “black fog,” a plague unknown even in the Old Testament. Why can’t Hannukah happen in June? Every station in town is playing Styx songs: Annoying. David knows every word to the Styx songs: Even more annoying.

We’re playing the Double Door, in the Wicker Park area, and our opening act is a local comic, Hannibal Buress, who’s been on the Craig Ferguson Show. Hannibal does a joke about seeing Orthodox Jews for the first time: “I couldn’t believe they weren’t even stopping to say hi to one another. If I saw somebody dressed exactly like me, I’d at least be like, yo, nice hat.” And he talks about a Jewish girl he knows, whose parents disapprove of her being a comedian. “I told her, ‘I know one way you could distract them from that,’” he says. “’Date me.’” Hannibal’s black.

You know what smells really nice? Every place except New York City. Seattle seems like paradise to us: the Triple Door, a gleaming dinner theater, is sold out and we’re fed wonderfully at their Wild Ginger restaurant next door. “I don’t ever want to play in any other club,” David says through a mouthful of sashimi. Fed Ex has misplaced two boxes of merchandise which we’d shipped ahead to Chicago, which means that for four nights we don’t have CDs or t-shirts to sell. But a night like this makes every tour obstacle and boredom seem minor: our improvised bits with the audience work perfectly, my Christian Scientist shtick causes roars and 270 people adore even the stuff we don’t think is so funny. Afterward, a slurry Jewish girl celebrating her birthday makes it clear she’d like to continue to party with us in more intimate circumstances. I give her a chaste kiss and wish her a happy birthday. “Oh,” she frowns. “You’re gay?”

[Read the entire Good for the Jews Tour Diary here.]

Ella ella ella eh eh eh: "Hell no we won't go!" for 2007The Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop poll, which catalogues the best music of 2007, came out today. Celebrating artists such as Amy Winehouse, the Arcade Fire, Radiohead, and LCD Soundsystem, their list of top albums lacks any real surprises, and the accompanying essays cover some well-trampled ground.

Still, I’m a sucker for any argument that ascribes geopolitical significance to a pop song, so I’ve got to recommend Julianne Shepherd’s essay on the politics of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” Shepherd explains that Dream, the songwriter behind “Umbrella,” wrote the song about his friends in Iraq. When she interviewed him this summer, he said:

"I have a best friend that was in the Army. I have another friend that was injured. To me, 'Umbrella' meant a lot emotionally about what the country was going though."

Pazz and Jop was helmed by Robert Christgau until 2006, when the Voice fired him (and pretty much everyone who’d ever worked there). If this year’s poll makes you nostalgic, check out the Christgau-edited Best Music Writing 2007. Again, the social-issue-in-a-pop-song essays are the standouts, especially Daphne A. Brooks’s piece connecting Beyoncé’s self-produced album "B’Day" with Hurricane Katrina.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Absolutely terrifying: Seriously, there are no words that can do this justice.Under consideration today:
Guns 'n Charoses, Gimme Some Latkes

I loved 2 Live Jews. The spur-of-the-moment nature of the project, the way they grabbed the first Jewish cliché they could think of whenever anything came to mind—to my 8-year-old self, it was pure genius. Why not set Fiddler on the Roof songs to a hip-hop beat? Why not rhyme “what exactly is a shikseh” with “a non-Jewish girl who stands out at the bar mitzvah?” You know, I memorized every word on that album. I could probably recite entire songs, still, today.

I really wanted to start talking about Gimme Some Latkes, the first (and probably only) release by the unlikely-monikered Guns ’N Charoses, by discussing the cover—a huge close-up of a latke with a bald, middle-aged, bespectacled, disembodied face floating above it. It’s embarrassing and dorky and actually kind of endearing. The latke, once you know it’s a latke, looks pretty good, but until you realize what it is, it looks….well, sort of gross, almost dog-excrement-like. Which, if you want to know a frightening thought, might be how goyim see disembodied, context-less pictures of latkes.

I shoved the CD in my discman quickly, sensing a desperate need for a change of subject.

You wouldn’t think a song by Steve Winwood would be up for parody, save by some
But a quick search will show how far the phrase “Gimme Some Lovin’” has endeared itself to our language: Ludakris and the book about John Lennon’s FBI files both sample it, and there’s the odd web site Gimme Some Candy. But G&C’s song is the only mention I can find of latkes being demanded in this exact style, and that’s what we’ve got.

The music here is uneven. We’re spoiled, of course: “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parodies usually have the original music note-perfect, and even two-bit fakers will hunt down an original instrumental track. But self-proclaimed “Doris’s son” Mark Edelman, along with collaborator Jeremy Beltzer (“his folks are kvelling”), plays shaky, note-imperfect versions of songs by R.E.M. (“Using My Religion”), Kenny Rogers (“The Mohel”) and former members of Latin American boy-bands (“Trying to Date D’vorah”). But there’s an easygoing charm and an earnest groove going, as well as Edelman’s likeable, talk-singing vocals. They work best on songs like “The Mohel” (it’s “The Gambler,” if you couldn’t tell) in which he’s launching punchlines and telling little stories, and least effectively on songs like “Don’t Worry, Keep Kosher.” If the title doesn’t tell you why, you can use your imagination.

Apollo Creed wants his hat back: San Franciscan nutjob Joe WebbWell, the Nazis have noticed us. Okay, not lots of Nazis, just one. We were finishing a soundcheck for our San Francisco show at the Great American Music Hall, the sixth of thirteen cities on the Good For The Jews national tour, when the lighting guy shouted, "Well boys, you've made the big time. You have a protester outside." We're two guys who sing funny and profane songs about being Jewish. Who would protest that? My family's not impressed, but I don't think they'd follow me to San Francisco and picket.

So we went outside to find a surly, nervous man holding a sign that said "I WANT YOU TO DIE FOR ISRAEL." He'd spelled the S with a swastika. I asked him if he was affiliated with any group. "Yeah," he growled. "I'm a Nazi. And you can publish that." Sure, I knew Nazis existed, but I never expected to see one up close. It was like standing in front of the Great Wall of China, or the Mona Lisa – it's startling, no matter how many times you've seen the image, to confront the real thing, in three dimensions. His sign had small plastic skulls dangling from the top, and he was dressed as Uncle Sam, in a red, white and blue hat, though in truth he looked more like Apollo Creed. He cooperatively posed for pictures, even when I asked him to raise his arm a little higher.

The Nazi identified himself as Joe Webb, a retired corrections officer in his 60s, and he told us he'd been looking for movie listings in the newspaper—he wanted to see No Country For Old Men—when he read an article about Good For The Jews. Since the film would still be playing after we'd left town, he put on his best patriotic costume, Xeroxed some pamphlets and came down to the Tenderloin to protest the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. If there is one, how do I join? I'd like to be staying in nicer hotels. "I bet you'd like to punch me in the face," he said to me. "Yeah, that sounds pretty good," I agreed.

Soon, a squad car pulled up outside the club – summoned by Mr. Webb himself, who insisted the police a) protect his First Amendment right to protest, and b) arrest me for threatening to assault him. The two officers—a woman of color and a man I'm pretty certain was gay—were not sympathetic to his cause.

My friend who grew up in San Francisco, and is the daughter of two Auschwitz survivors, says that when her family went to Jewish events in the early 1970s, there was often a small group of Nazis outside, jeering at the Jews. San Francisco is famous for its permissiveness, so I guess it's a good place for a Nazi to live. The weather's better than Idaho or Montana, and there are lots of freelance Web designers to help you build your white-pride web site.

The Tenderloin is home to every group Nazis revile, and pretty soon, Mr. Webb was being heckled and jeered by blacks, gays, Asians and even a few trannies. Another police car arrived, then a few more, until there were five cruisers with their red lights running. One of the club's security men, a half-black guy in cargo shorts, tossed his cigarette butt into Mr. Webb's burlap bag. By the way, the San Francisco Weekly reported this story on their blog, adding, "Nazis give the best PR."

Not terribly sympathetic: The cops Our Nazi's pamphlet listed sixteen things he'd dubbed "NOT GOOD FOR THE JEWS," beginning with "Jewish behavior" and "Shiksas who figure it out" and moving on to "5 million Palestinians who want their land back" and "Jewish ownership and/or domination of almost all the media." The name of our band, he wrote, typified "the Jewish categorical imperative," as well as Jewish racism. "How is that old Jewish sense of humor doing?" he asked at the end. "Are you laughing yet?"

And no, I wasn't laughing. Any Jew, when confronted with a Nazi, is going to feel a mixture of fear and rage. I was wondering how many other people also thought six million dead Jews wasn't enough. The police insisted he remove the plastic skulls, which kept hitting pedestrians as he marched in front of the building. He tried to pull off the string that attached the skulls to the sign, but couldn't do it. "Officer, can I borrow a knife?" he asked. "Unfortunately, sir, I'm not allowed to hand a weapon to a civilian," the cop said. "Especially not a civilian who's a Nazi," I added.

Right about then, the cigarette butt did its work, and his burlap bag began to smoke. He complained to the officers, emptied his bag onto the cement and began beating the bag to put out the spark. The Jews who'd come outside to gape at him laughed, and then, en massed, we went back inside the club, relieved that this particular Nazi posed no imminent danger. In fact, he'd kind of unified everyone there: As comedians say, our show killed.

Tour scorecard

Cities we've played: Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco

Cities still to come: Denver (The Soiled Dove), Orlando (The Social), Boca Raton (NY Comedy Club), Baltimore (Recher Theater), Washington, D.C. (Birchmere) and New York (Highline Ballroom).

[Read the entire Good for the Jews Tour Diary here.]

Rock-star glamour: Inside the Cleveland Extended Stay Hotel In Cleveland for opening night of the Good For The Jews tour, we check into an Extended Stay Hotel, which we booked through Hotwire for $56 a night. Our room has one queen-sized bed. Switching to a room with twin beds costs us an additional $15 a night. Wi-fi access costs us $5. If we want our room cleaned, that costs $5. Extended Stay seems to be the first a la carte hotel chain. I’m surprised the toilet paper dispenser doesn’t have a coin slot. The next morning, I notice a curly blonde hair on the bar of shower soap, which is weird, because David and I are brunettes.

In the course of the day, we get good news and bad news about the rest of our tour. I have an email from Dave Attell, a fantastic comic, saying he’s free to join the bill for our NYC homecoming show on December 23rd at the Highline Ballroom. But the club we’re playing in Boca Raton, Florida, has decided to not put the name of our band on their outgoing voicemail message, because they’re afraid they “might get some complaints.” Are they worried about a KKK presence in south Florida? No, they’re worried about complaints from other Jews. Jews who are unhappy about a band that’s called “Good For The Jews.”

Would Christian Scientists ever object to a group called Good For The Christian Scientists? Probably not; they’d just look at the name and assume that it was good for them. But Jews are ace complainers. My mother once canceled our temple membership because she didn’t like the lighting.

Our press coverage in Cleveland is three for three, with big writeups and photos in the daily Plain Dealer (“You should be as funny as these Jewish guys”) and the weekly Cleveland Scene (“gut-busting tunes”) and Free Times (“they have their tongues firmly in cheek”). Thank you, Jewish-owned media. Now you can go back to misleading people about those 9/11 attacks!

Coming soon: The marquee in Chicago The Beachland has two rooms: the larger ballroom, where we’re playing, and the smaller tavern, where Jonathon Rice is playing. Rice is a fantastic songwriter signed to Warner Bros., one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates. He’s got a celebrity girlfriend and a huge marketing budget behind him. His hotel probably has free wi-fi. But we have something better: a good gimmick. That’s why we’re in the big room, and he’s in the small room. You won’t get far in the music business relying on “talent,” Jonathon.

On the other hand, he doesn’t have to deal with the peculiarities of playing for mostly-Jewish audiences. After the show, while we’re selling merchandise, a fan named Larry says he liked the song “They Tried To Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat,” a deliberately inaccurate retelling of the Exodus story. He asks if we’ve heard of David Nachmanoff, a west-coast songwriter. Apparently, Nachmanoff has a song with the same title. “His is better than yours,” Larry says bluntly. Aw, thanks for that little dig. It’s almost like playing for family.

 

Tour Scorecard
Shows we’ve played: Cleveland.
Shows still to come: Milwaukee, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Orlando, Boca Raton, Baltimore, D.C., New York.

 

[Read the entire Good for the Jews Tour Diary here.]

If you grew up in the 80's but only became aware of that decade's pop cultural significance in the 90's -- just as an appreciation for jangly Britpop guitar riffs and clever songwriting was on the upswing again -- then you probably attribute the following defeatist sigh to the most-covered song by The Smiths:

I am the son
And the heir
Of nothing in particular.

Now try this:

Fred felt that he made a wretched figure as a fellow who bragged about expectations from a queer old miser like Featherstone, and went to beg for certificates at his bidding. But -- those expectations! He really had them, and he saw no agreeable alternative if he gave them up; besides, he had lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it off. The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic bitterness. To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and Vyan -- certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.

Disaffected and dissolute youth, a mounting boredom with the world and all who inhabit it, and an egomania to launch a thousand clinical studies. George Eliot knew what she was doing, all right, and so did Morrissey.

Those expectations! They could easily give way to what Kingsley Amis once termed the "Silly Little Boys School" of English versifying, a remedial and rather "wet" class of which specializes in "Delight in the height of the night."

Part of what made Morrissey the maudlin pop poet of more than one continent, and more than one generation, is that he knew he was never cutting so terribly bold and dramatic a figure on the landscape of adolescent anomie. He was smart enough to stay conscious of the proud tradition of mopes, sulks and heavies that had gone before. Rather than go Sylvia-Plath-with-a-penis, he used wit and humor and not a little sexual "ambiguity" to get the job done. More often than not, the ambiguity shaded into jaw-droppingly obvious allusion. The album Bona Drag, for instance, was named for a gay vernacular term from swinging 60's London, and the track "Piccadilly Palare" is as much about English rent-boys as "Hairdresser on Fire" is not about a Figaro with high insurance premiums. (People who say Morrissey was always "asexual" are like those who argue that Brideshead Revisted is a lasting paean to platonic male friendship on the quadrangles.)

Indeed, if anything was proved by 2004's You Are The Quarry, it's that Morrissey has grown more heteroerotic with age. There was some chatter about a "woman of my dreams" in the song "I'm Not Sorry," even if she never made an entrance because "there never really was one." For obvious reasons.

Morrissey's politics have gotten more hamhanded and plodding, too. The harmless anti-Thatcherite/meat-is-murder stance worked well in America when he wasn't an American. Now that he lives most of the time in California, he's a broken spigot of moral comparisons between Bin Laden and Bush and Blair (the FBI even opened a case file on him for some of his shriller rhetoric.) Maybe this is overcompensation for the fact that David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party in England, is a major votary of "The Queen Is Dead." Cameron doesn't care that the title isn't exactly flattering to his "base;" he's a Tory for the new millennium and plays the song at his campaign rallies.

Which I suppose is one way of noticing that the phenomenon of Morrissey has been better defined by the audience than by the act. Depressing though all those cris de coeur may have been, some of the people who mouth them at concerts are downright creepy. Just look at all those mini-Altamonts of the heart occurring everytime someone tried to rush the stage and abscond with a hug or buss on the cheek of the least touchy-feely frontman alive. (One woman actually went so far as to make an independent film about stalking Morrissey, a level of obsession taken only few degrees higher than that of the characteristic cult follower.)

While Morrissey's sincerity was never really in question -- he always came off as not giving a shit in interviews, and other musicians who know him attest to his eccentricity as not even coming close to being a stage persona -- there was always something contrived about his love-hate relationship with his consumers. It's not really so awful living a drafty old castle in the Midlands and having limited responsibilities (save for "Don't let the band break up") and, unlike Fred Vincy, no impending debts -- at least not so awful for a working-class Irish boy from Manchester.

Nick Cave, another singer-songerwriter in thematic league with Moz, if much more "Old Testament" in his own approach, was once asked if he ever imagined, in his twenties, that he'd be where he is today. His reply was along the lines of, "I never imagined I'd be alive today." Coming from Cave, it's scary because it's true. Morrissey's low-burn death wish, on the other hand... It might not necessarily be a coincidence that he hit the peak of celebrity at 24, the same age as James Dean (an early idol) was when he inked that first-look deal with legend on a Los Angeles freeway. Weepy, sentimental Keats was also 24 when he bit it, though that's not the poet famously on Morrissey's side...

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly," wrote Oscar Wilde in a moment of extreme self-parody. He might have added that nothing grows older faster than arrested development. It was a near thing for the Pope of Mope there for a bit. Luckily, he got his De Profundis in early, the better to keep the graying imitation pompadours coming to his sold-out shows, with him ripping his shirt off at 40. "I love you all," he confessed last year, halfway through a set at Radio City Music Hall.

He seems happier now.

One in a series of Doc Martens new UK ad series:

Wrong 'em, boyo! Strummer would never shill for the divine or for zapatos like that. Neither would Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious or Joey Ramone (okay, maybe Joey would, nice Jewish boy from Forest Hills and all).

Doc spokesperson:

We wanted to communicate that Dr. Martens boots are ‘made to last,’ and we discovered that these idolized musicians wore them. Showing them still wearing their Docs in heaven dramatized the boots’ durability perfectly. And, as images, they feel very iconic.

(Via Stereogum)

You can thank me later.

A Friday gift: the greatest Israeli band ever, Minimal Compact.  In this French language doc, listen especially for the track that comes in at about 4:24.   Below is the video for the gorgeous, contemplative 'Dedicated.'  You're welcome.  

Pearl HarborWhen I'm not doing comedy, I make my living as an SAT tutor. A damned good one, if I may say so. Every time I hear about some dumb gimmick for studying the SAT (study on your cellphone, "yo momma" jokes, the SAT shower curtain), I think "Well, that'll work for vocabulary." (It's not, however, likely to teach you to deal with fractional exponents, or any serious comparison of long reading passages).

When Flocabulary came out with a hip-hop vocabulary book and CD, I shrugged. That could work. But when the same people came out with Flocabulary: The Hip-Hop Approach to U.S. History, I bought the book and CD. So I could laugh. Blog and laugh.

I loaded the tracks on my iPod ... and proceeded to have a religious experience. Pedagogically religious, anyway. The music didn't suck. In fact, the first song, about the founding of America, began like this:

Black Male Voice Portraying a European, and Rapping in the Most Drippingly Sarcastic Rapper Voice I Have Ever Heard: Wow, I just discovered America!

Black Male Voice Portraying an Angry Native American Speaking as Though to a Small, Racist Child: You didn't discover it. We were already here.

The song goes on to talk about migration over the Bering Strait, the five "civilized" tribes, and the fact that some Native Americans had slaves ("Indians weren't living on some heaven on earth tip"), and to comment, "Isn't that cheap? They call my Jeep a Jeep Cherokee -- what if they called my Jeep a Jeep Jew?"

In the course of this album, Harriet Tubman gets a Lil Kim-like solo ("Reward for my capture? 40 G's"), Frederick Douglass gets to sound like the incredible badass he was, Carnegie (in "Big Ballin' in the Gilded Age") raps about Social Darwinism while Rockefeller points out that Jay-Z named his company "after me," and Sacajawea guides Lewis and Clark through the Rockies "like Mapquest." Lincoln (whose Emancipation Proclamation, of course, failed to free any actual slaves) is portrayed with a dorky, squeaky white guy voice -- but FDR gets a booming, dignified white guy voice. Perhaps my favorite line is when Sally Hemings first attracts Thomas Jefferson:

She's dressed in yellow. She says "Hello,

You probably noticed me in the fields of Monticello."

Below is a sound clip (a couple verses, so as to say within fair use) from a song called "Would You Drop It?", which presents, I think, a not-bad-at-all explanation of World War II up to Truman's decision to drop the bomb. I challenge anyone to better explain fascism and its appeal to Germans, isolationism, the Great Depression, and Europe's falling to the Germans until Pearl Harbor galvanized us "like 9/11" -- in one minute, in rhyme.

All these tracks are on iTunes (search "Flocabulary"). If I could buy them for every teenager in America, I would.

"Would You Drop It"? (clip)

NOFX, But Politics Aplenty: Left-wing Israeli punk band Useless I.D.If recent developments within the Israeli punk scene are any indication, our rock brothers in the Holy Land have reached the “blank generation” stage. Remember the famous words of Richard (Meyers) Hell: “I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time”? The nihilism of certain segments of punk, the “nevermind” that Kurt Cobain so eloquently expressed (“a mosquito, a libido … a denial”) during the “year that punk broke” has attained something like a messianic fervor in the Promised Land – and maybe that’s a good thing.

Never a true force in a commercial radio sense, Israeli punk nonetheless has in recent years seemed to express the deepest yearnings of Israel’s cutting edge youth. Whether it was the mass of left-leaning political bands (Nikmat Olalim and Dir Yassin) or the skinhead-like fraction of right-wing groups (Retribution, Lehavoth), political engagement was at the heart of Israeli punk from its beginnings in the late 80s to its heyday a few years ago.

“Israeli punk was DIY in the truest sense,” says Liz Nord, director of Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land, a 2005 documentary that chronicled the various factions within the scene and their relationship to the punk Diaspora. “Like the hardcore bands that emerged in the second and third wave of punk here in the 1980s, Israeli punk was politically engaged, mostly on the side of peace and negotiating with the Palestinians. And yet, where the political edge of punk kind of went underground here, it remained an integral part of the Israeli scene almost up until 2000."

But, as Bob Dylan might have put it, they were so much older then, they’re younger than that now. Today, nearly a decade after peace seemed imminent at Oslo and nearly a year since Ariel “The Bulldozer” Sharon uprooted the settlers he’d helped become rooted in the first place, peace seems further away than ever, and Israel’s youthful brigade of punk activists feel fine. Like those Displaced Persons Formerly Known as Settlers, they’ve uprooted their metaphorical concerns and retreated from the political arena as it relates to Palestinians and a two-state solution.

For to say “fuck it” to the whole political process, to reclaim the personal over the political, is an act of political engagement itself. As they said during the Vietnam era, “What if they had a war and nobody came?” Israeli punks have taken this ironic and utopian vision for perpetual peace and turned it into a license for perpetual complacency. Israel has had several wars and the punks haven’t “come.” Rather than protesting the occupation, or marching for binational negotiations—let alone setting these as demands in their songwriting—they’ve decided to carve out their own piece of occupied territory at home. Large swaths of “leftist” punks have joined the growing Squatters Movement in Tel Aviv. This is as hardcore as the desert disciples of The Clash have allowed themselves to get.

“I think everyone has become so discouraged by the ongoing mess and the lack of movement regarding a solution to the occupation that they’ve decided to focus their energies elsewhere,” says an activist organizer who goes by the alias “Cat.”

Three years ago, while working on my book about the New York Jewish origins of punk, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, I interviewed Cat as he hid from the IDF in the Palestinian town of Nablus (“basically a big refugee camp,” he said). Suddenly, I heard what sounded like firecrackers in the background, some muffled sounds, and then my cell phone went silent. “Cat? Cat?! Are you alright?” There was a pause of about fifteen seconds, and I was just about to hang up, disturbed, when I heard Cat’s voice, much lower now. “Yes, I am ok. It is like this every night. They’re shooting.”

I didn’t have time to ask who was shooting. And looking back now, I realize that wasn’t really the issue in terms of how the music of anarchy has evolved in the holy land. Rather than going off to “fight for an end to the conflict,” Israeli punks have opted to conceive of a kind of mini-Zionism within Israel itself. In fact, the most “punk” thing about them might be how they have passively altered the definition of illegal residence in one region where this has been a perennial source of misery and bloodshed.

The casbah will no longer be rocked; it’ll be dragged into tenancy court.

I'm recycling here from this morning's Spritz, but this video is worth it for only one minute and eleven seconds of your quickly-fading Thursday afternoon. Actor/comedian Zach Galifianakis, playing a fat farmer dude with a big red beard, lip-synchs to Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing." (It's also possibly the most poorly timed lip-synching in history.)

 

I was listening to KBCS (Bellevue, WA) and the DJ played a song that knocked me out. Being Jewish, having a strong interest in Israel, and knowing Hebrew, whenever I hear Hebrew anywhere my ears perk up. But this song didn't start out in Hebrew. It started out in an African language I didn't recognize (which later turned out to be Amharic) with a performer calmly speaking lyrics. Only later did the song switch to Hebrew lyrics and the melody and lyrics took on tremendous urgency and passion. I was listening to Bo'i ("Come") a huge Israeli hit by the Idan Raichel Project. And the Amharic comes by way of Israel's large Ethiopian community which immigrated during Operation Moses in 1984. The Ethiopians have found it hard to integrate into Israel since it is a largely ethnically fragmented society. The power of music is that it can acknowledge these tensions and overcome them by integrating the sounds of diverse cultures into a single song. What impresses me about Raichel's music is that he is attempting in musical terms to create an amalgam of all of the cultural and ethnic strands that constitute Israeli culture. He is doing this much more boldly than most other Israeli performers who are content to perform in a conventional and largely derivative western idiom. Raichel is searching for something more. He recognizes that Israel is not in Europe or Brazil, but rather smack in the middle of the Middle East. To achieve a genuine Israeli sound that recognizes and embraces this fact is a great achievement. What is also remarkable is that Raichel is of Ashkenazi ethnic background. He does not come naturally by way of embracing Israel's eastern roots. So in a sense his is a rebellion on many fronts against normative culture. Here is what Raichel's biography says at his website about his family background:

Idan Raichel, the architect of this unique recording project, is a 29-year old keyboardist, producer and composer from Kfar Saba. Idan was born in 1977 to a family with Eastern European roots, and although music was an important part of his upbringing, his parents did not place much emphasis on performing music from his particular cultural background. “I think the fact that I didn’t have strong family musical roots is what made me be very open to music from all over the world,” says Idan. Idan started playing the accordion when he was 9 years old, and even at this young age was attracted to the exotic sounds of Gypsy music and tango.

Here is some background of how he came to his interest in Ethiopian music:

After he was discharged [from the IDF] Idan starting working as a counselor at a boarding school for immigrants and troubled youth. Notably, the school was filled with young people from Ethiopia who were part of Israel’s growing community of Ethiopian Jews. It was here that Idan first started getting familiar with Ethiopian folk and pop music. While most of the young people in the school rejected their own cultural traditions in an effort to assimilate into mainstream Israeli society, a small core of Ethiopian teenagers remained fans of Ethiopian music. They passed around cassettes of songs from artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Aster Aweke, Gigi and others, and the exotic, otherworldly melodies piqued Idan’s curiosity. “I started to hear lots of cassettes from Addis Ababa. Village music, like Ethiopian pop and reggae, or the native village songs,” says Raichel. “I noticed that immigrants from the Ethiopian community changed their names when they got to Israel. They try to assimilate into Western culture and don’t keep their roots.” He wanted these kids to “remember that they like hip-hop but they are not from Harlem, they like reggae but they are not Bob Marley. The Ethiopians have a great culture that should be cherished.” Idan started going to Ethiopian bars and clubs in downtown Tel Aviv. It was like entering another world, a country within a country that remains a secret from most Israelis. As his connections to the community deepened, Idan began attending Ethiopian synagogues, weddings and other ceremonies, and he began to learn more about Ethiopian music and culture.

And this provides a pretty good summary of Raichel's musical mission:

Idan was a unique talent that offered a new vision for how Israelis, their neighbors in this volatile region, and people all over the world, can cherish their own cultural traditions, celebrate their differences and through respectful collaboration create new and inspiring expressions.

While this may sound quite prosaic to a westerner steeped in multiculturalism, to know Israeli society is to understand how radical such an all-embracing view is. Israel is a country that devours cultural difference and subsumes it into an artificial "Israeliness." Ethnicity is frowned upon. When you become an oleh chadash (new immigrant) you tend to flee your past adopting a Hebrew name and even a new Hebrew surname to eliminate your Diaspora past. So what Raichel is doing is quite radical and refreshing. But hey, none of this cultural-social analysis would matter worth a damn if the music didn't groove and it does. The World's Marco Werman interviewed Raichel for the radio program. It's a short, breezy interview but worth a listen.