"And the Glitter Is Gone", the final track on Yo La Tengo's rewarding new album Popular Songs, opens with a fade-in, gradually immersing the listener in the pools and eddies of a groove whose source lies somewhere upstream. For someone expecting the well-defined intro of a conventional pop song, the effect is disconcerting. Yet it efficiently communicates a feeling that permeates the whole record: it's not worth starting over. 

"If It's True" has a well-defined intro, but one cribbed straight from a classic Motown 45rpm. "Here To Fall" kicks off with the lingering, echo-drenched notes that stud Steve Miller's Fly Like an Eagle and other stoner rock classics. But most of the tracks on the album, "And the Glitter Is Gone" included, recall Yo La Tengo songs more than anything else. As the album's title wryly suggests – none of the tracks are destined to be "popular" in a traditional sense – Popular Songs rejects the notion that progress is measured in novelty.

Because Popular Songs is the work of mature artists – co-founders Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley are nearing fifty – this message might initially seem like the self-serving wisdom of those who celebrate continuity in order to suggest that they are still relevant. But as a listen to the early Yo La Tengo material on Ride the Tiger amply testifies, they were never that interested in starting over.

Like other rock acts that formed in the wake of hardcore's implosion, including The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Stone Roses, and The Smashing Pumpkins, Yo La Tengo made a point of reconnecting with the towering musical legacy of the 1960s, even as they celebrated the disruptive power of punk. They wanted to have their beauty and ravage it too. In Yo La Tengo's case, however, the reluctance to choose between hippie and punk, Brill Building and CBGBs, delicacy and brute force was so pronounced that the band struggled to make a distinct impression.

 

Although Yo La Tengo's music appealed to concert-goers who saw them opening for bands like Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, they failed to make a major impact during the alternative culture explosion of the early 1990s. It wasn't until the Nirvana era had faded from view, when sugary pop acts like the Backstreet Boys and not-so-conscious rappers like the Notorious B.I.G. were dominating the charts, that Yo La Tengo's remarkable musical consistency was truly rewarded.

Their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One didn't break new ground. But its disarming combination of noisy guitar bursts and diaphanous vocals resonated with music lovers who were still coming to terms with the realization that the alternative rock revolution had been retroactively downgraded into a short-lived disturbance. Yo La Tengo finally found itself on the top of the college radio heap because their sound mirrored those station's eclectic playlists.

A prime cut of Velvet Underground, a healthy portion of vintage Stax soul, plenty of Television, and a few slices of Fleetwood Mac, seasoned with more recent influences like The Dream Syndicate, REM and The Clean all blended together to give Yo La Tengo the taste of sophisticated comfort food. They paid tribute to their musical forebears, while also distilling the essence of fellow alternative rock bands undone by the drugs and money of the early 1990s. In short, the band was a music critic's dream. And that made sense, since Ira Kaplan had been a music critic before starting the band.

But it also annoyed people who should have been celebrating Yo La Tengo's rise from also-ran to leaders of the indie rock pack. As good as Yo La Tengo's records were, they still sounded like climate-controlled simulations of artists whose maddening inconsistency were a big part of their charm. Even more than Sonic Youth, another alternative rock survivor periodically critiqued for making avant-garde notions too safe, Yo La Tengo suffered the ignominy of having their shit together in a world where mistakes are considered a sign of artistic integrity.

Eventually, as Yo La Tengo's detractors matured and a new generation of artists started paying homage to them, the band slipped on the mantle of respected rock elders. The very people who had once grumbled that Yo La Tengo made wonderful music without much sense of wonder now praised their professionalism and respect for tradition. While the band surely appreciated the irony in this reversal of fortune, it did nothing to change their course. Pressing on with the same sense of purpose  – Ira Kaplan once described the band to CMJ magazine as "inner-directed" – that had sustained them during their years of being overshadowed, they kept making music of the same quality as before.

The main reason for Yo La Tengo's remarkable stability is that Kaplan and Hubley have been happily married since 1987. Part of the fascination with rock bands is that most of them function like bad marriages, with a messy break-up always looming on the horizon. Some, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, keep getting back together again, only to realize that the problems that led to their last divorce haven't disappeared in the interim. When a band revolves around an actual marriage, though, and one that meets most people's standard of success, the storm and stress of musical collaboration takes a back seat.

It's no accident that Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, whose founding members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have also been married for a long time, are the two alternative rock bands that have managed to survive the ups-and-downs of the music industry with the least disruption to their production schedule over the past two decades. And that's troubling for music lovers invested in the notion that rock music is for the men and women who make like rolling stones. Fidelity to one's musical ancestors may be regarded as a virtue, but other modes of faithfulness are not.

In Yo La Tengo's case, however, making a distinction between life and art proves impossible. Interviewed with her sister Emily about what it was like to grow up as the daughters of the award-winning animators John and Faith Hubley, Georgia Hubley suggested that, although she and Ira work very differently than her parents did, in a medium that requires less structure and planning, "the way our life is, is really similar." Their partnership doesn't survive in spite of their musical career, but because of it. Hubley also notes that her parents taught her to be "independently minded," a statement rendered poignant by the fact that her father was blacklisted in the early 1950s because he wouldn't name names before HUAC. He was able to reconstruct his career, with Faith at his side, and become an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. But their art emerged from the sort of struggle that artists who came of age after the early1960s rarely had to face.

 

Perhaps Yo La Tengo, for all of their devotion to the history of rock and roll, are actually a throwback to that postwar era, when fidelity to one's past wasn't a sign of conservatism at all, but of a refusal to renounce radical beliefs. Celebrating continuity means something quite different in that context. If Yo La Tengo is imaginatively honoring that legacy, it makes perfect sense that their most famous concerts take place as part of a fundraising drive for hometown record station WFMU in Hoboken. Since 1996, the band has generously volunteered to play, on the air, any cover request that comes in with a sufficient donation attached. From classic rock staples to TV themes, punk fury to easy listening, they have done their best with all manner of tunes, some of which were collected on the Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics compilation.

 

 

Yo La Tengo also puts on Hannukah-themed shows at Maxwell's in Hoboken each year, a different sort of testament to their conviction that keeping something going can be much more significant than starting from scratch. Popular Songs probably won't win the bands that many new fans. Their stewardship of the soundtrack to the film Adventureland was more likely to do that. But the album does enough to remind listeners why they should keep coming back for more. The fourth track "Nothing To Hide," a short rave-up shrouded in garage rock fuzz, is probably the least original song on the record. Yet it holds the power to keep fans' passion burning long after it should have gone out. Sometimes the true miracle is keeping the faith.

Although Matisyahu’s musical and religious interests have expanded since he began his musical career, he continues to be labeled a Hasidic rapper. Whereas early profiles concentrated on the strangeness of that coupling, more recent ones have tended to emphasize that he is no longer a “novelty.” Yet in making that point, they reinforce the impression that his music must be understood as an expression of his cultural identity. Whether he wants to talk about other matters or not, his interviewers relentlessly force him back to the subject of his religious convictions.

And Matisyahu, as someone who cares deeply about his faith, takes the responsibility too seriously to play the rock star who brushes off difficult topics. It’s clearly a good thing that his music is helping to educate previously oblivious Americans about what it means to practice his kind of Judaism. At the same time, though, one gets the nagging sense that he will soon weary of pieces that wrap discussions of his music inside discussions of his religion.

A recent feature in The Aspen Times states that, “Matisyahu's faith appears to be more fundamental to him than the particular style of music he makes.” Nor does the musician argue with his assessment. How could he? Any true believer is bound to confess that, yes, religion takes precedence over art. But whereas country or soul singers who are practicing Christians are permitted to have that fact tacitly acknowledged, Matisyahu is forced to declare his priorities openly.

Tellingly, although the piece notes that his “high-energy stage presence” is “mostly untouched by his religion” – a significant point, given the fact that his commercial stature rests heavily on his reputation as a great concert performer, as made evident in his 2006 album Live At Stubbs – it still concludes by exoticizing him: “One aspect of his performance, however, has been limited by his religion. Matisyahu, who is married, no longer stage-dives, for fear of being touched by women other than his wife – something forbidden in Orthodox Judaism.”

While such trivia may be old news to those who have followed Matisyahu’s career – he has repeatedly been asked about the challenge of keeping faith on tour – it still carries a hint of sensationalism targeted at those unfamiliar with his work. Just as the few Jewish, Hindu or Muslim students in otherwise homogeneous suburban or rural schools tend to be assigned the awkward task of explaining why they don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter like everybody else, Matisyahu becomes a figure here for a cultural difference that intrigues people to the precise degree that it remains foreign to them.

The irony in all this is that Matisyahu’s music itself represents a fetishization of difference. The affection that Jewish young people have for reggae has often been noted, sometimes wryly. One persistent joke holds that this appeal derives from the frequency with which the name of “Israel” is invoked within the genre. What Matisyahu did, whether consciously or not, was to turn a taste for otherness into a way for others to get a taste of his otherness.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that reggae is inextricably bound up with a religious practice that is simultaneously conservative and countercultural. The faith that the genre’s greatest stars professed has roots in Christianity and African spirituality, yet adds up to something distinctive. From one perspective, it looks a good deal like the Lubavitchers take on Judaism. In Matisyahu’s able hands, the reggae that serves as the foundation for his musical approach provides a means, both of breaking with tradition and asserting the importance of becoming reacquainted with its essence rather than perpetuating the “broken” traditions of the modern world.

The release of Matisyahu’s new album Light, now due in late August, was put off at the behest of his record label. Significantly, it’s a major label, Epic, even though the trend in the music industry has been for many long-established artists to migrate to independent labels. That confirms the commercial potential that his work is deemed to have. But the decision to expand and revise the record’s contents suggests that there may be trouble ahead. Such delays are often a warning sign, suggesting that the artist has failed to produce the sort of music that label representatives expected, that they have deviated from the form that made them a desirable commodity.

So far, Matisyahu hasn’t conveyed any displeasure at the label’s decision. Yet if we read between the lines of the interviews he has been giving on his current concert tour, originally intended to accompany the album’s release, it’s not hard to see that he has been struggling with the burden of expectations. Although he continues to confirm his religious devotion in interviews, he has parted ways with the Lubavitchers in favor of an approach more open to kabbalistic Judaism. And although the album contains plenty of reminders of his music’s reggae roots, it also takes bold steps in the direction of rock and electronica.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Epic wanted him to work with reggae legends Sly and Robbie, whose contribution will make it more likely that Light reproduces the formula for success – the familiar rhythms of reggae and its offshoots – that made its predecessors unexpected hits. Although the label couldn’t very well ask him to return to the religious beliefs that underpinned that success, one almost gets the sense that insisting he bend his new musical directions back towards their roots was tantamount to the same thing.

 

 

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.

Advance word on Sonic Youth’s latest record The Eternal was mixed. Some listeners praised it for picking up where its predecessor Rather Ripped left off, disciplining the band’s tendency for extended improvisation in single-length, propulsive tracks that pay sufficient tribute to rock’s traditional verse-chorus-verse structure without sounding too pop. Some, noting the same continuity, lamented the band’s aesthetic retrenchment, as if the experiments with form that made their music special had been abandoned for commercial reasons. And some notable critics, like Wire editor Mark Fisher, who writes under the name “k-punk,” took the opportunity to question the notion that the band was ever that innovative to begin with.

“The problem,” Fisher declared, is not that Sonic Youth failed to be the sort of “self-destructive fuck-ups” that play a central role in rock history, so much as that “they seem to be so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn't appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them. It isn't that they ‘don't mean it’ so much as they only mean it.” In other words, the band’s artistic moves have always been too calculating to seem like the expression of true feeling. “There is no sense, even in the early work as far as this listener is concerned, that the music is drawing on any unconscious material.”

As even staunch defenders of Sonic Youth will attest – and I count myself among the staunchest – there is considerable truth in this critique. In live performance, the band excels at building to forceful crescendos without ever seeming to peak personally. Almost preternaturally relaxed on stage, they manage the musical ebb and flow with the insouciance of technicians who have turned the most challenging work into a routine that doesn’t require them to break a sweat. And their records reflect the same eerie calm, even when turned up to a window-rattling volume.

If anything, The Eternal takes this sense of coolly going through the motions to a new extreme, which explains the mixed reception it has been receiving. Although I settled easily into its familiar patterns on my first listen, I still haven’t shaken the sense that they could have done more. At the same time, though, the music conjures the distressed sheen that the band’s fans love. The songs run together, but that’s nothing new. Indeed, it’s the album’s “nothing new” air that makes it both satisfying and troubling. Sonic Youth is happy to give you what you expect from them, whether you have played every one of their records so many times that they feel like bodily appendages or whether you’re coming to their music for the very first time, because you’ve heard that they are a band you simply have to experience in the course of your aesthetic education.

Although Fisher makes it clear that he doesn’t think highly of the band’s music, he acknowledges the unique place they have occupied in the past twenty-five years of rock history. “It seems to me that Sonic Youth's very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being ‘people of good taste’ - curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff.”  While this assessment is intended as a negative judgement of the band’s own music, certainly, it also provides a way of understanding the influence it can have on receptive listeners.

I didn’t hear Sonic Youth until 1988, when I was freshman at UC Berkeley.  I was browsing in Rasputin’s Records on Telegraph Avenue when I noticed that the in-store stereo was playing tones that sounded like nothing I’d heard before. Intrigued, I listened closer. Although I’d spent my teenage years thoroughly caught up in the psychedelic revival underway at the time, playing Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane when my classmates were fixated on Van Halen, I still struggled to find my way through the record’s noisy passages. They made me feel as if I’d lost my balance. But this sense of disorientation was one that I welcomed, because it was set to bass and drums purposeful enough to lead me through the sonic labyrinth. More bluntly, even though the music was radical by my standards, it still rocked in a way that made sense to someone who thought that John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow was a masterpiece.

I was sufficiently impressed by the music coming over the loudspeakers to overcome my fear of appearing out-of-touch and ask the man working the register the name of the record. “Daydream Nation,” he muttered with more than a hint of scorn. “That’s the band name?” I inquired sheepishly. “No, no,” he responded, his eyes starting to roll upward, “The band is Sonic Youth!” As upsetting as this interaction was for me – no one likes to be identified as ignorant – I nevertheless went to find the CD in the racks and then purchased it immediately. I knew that this was one opportunity I couldn’t afford to pass up.

Predictably, when I later told my more cosmopolitan acquaintances of my remarkable discovery, they looked non-plussed. I thought I’d been lucky enough to learn of obscure music with the capacity to change one’s consciousness overnight, like mind-altering drugs without the attendant consequences. But, even if they weren’t familiar with Sonic Youth, they had all heard of them. Once again I had the awkward sensation of having arrived at a party a day late, stupidly holding a six-pack whose superfluousness was made clear by the empties stacked by the door. In this case, though, I didn’t mind. The interactions I had with Daydream Nation –  it really did feel like I’d become acquainted with a new person, incredibly knowledgeable yet willing to teach me without making fun of me – were so rich that I was willing to put up with the shame of growing up far from the centers of cool.

“Malibu Gas Station” is one of the least successful songs on the new album, adhering so closely to formula that listening to it has repeatedly stopped me short, convinced I had somehow entered an artist-specific shuffle mode offering up a number from the band’s back catalogue. Although it will never be a favorite, however, I find it impossible to hear with unpleasure. The memories of what Sonic Youth did for me two decades ago are too strong. Call it reasonable gratitude or excessive fidelity, I know that listening for The Eternal’s flaws instead of its strengths would be to reject myself as much as the band.

I suspect that many of Sonic Youth’s fans feel similarly. The band falls squarely into the category of artists who have the special power to serve as a “first time” for their audience. We tend to be sentimental about those turning points in our lives when our worldview is transformed, even if they constitute a loss of innocence. Developing “good taste” in the musical sense that Fisher means forsaking, to some extent, the capacity to listen without measuring one’s own pleasure against the pleasure of others. But what I learned from Daydream Nation wasn’t just to sort the “good” from the “bad” in a more sophisticated, stylish way. As I listened to the album for weeks on end, I also learned to immerse myself in the experience of music in a manner antithetical to the passing of critical judgment.

The Eternal does not introduce any major innovations in Sonic Youth’s repertoire. The most noteworthy change to my ears is the more sinewy bottom end introduced by new bassist Mark Ibold’s playing, especially on the pleasingly pared down “What We Know.” But it’s not like founding member Kim Gordon was a slouch on bass. The guitar parts somehow sound both grittier and more focused during the verse-chorus-verse portions of songs than has typically been the case on their recent records. And the noisy interludes that interrupt most tracks, those “bridges to nowhere” for which the band is famous, feel uncharacteristically goal-oriented. Despite the fact that this is no ground-breaking album, however, it still manages to do most of the same things that Daydream Nation did. I am fairly certain, that had I been able to hear The Eternal at Rasputin’s, it would have had almost as powerful an effect on me as its much-lauded predecessor.

Maybe the best way to think about this new record, as well as Sonic Youth overall, is to reconceptualize the curatorial dimension of their work that Fisher smartly singles out. Yes, they have done an enormous amount to introduce worthy younger artists to new audiences, including notables such as Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, Pavement, Bikini Kill that they brought on tour with them. Thurston Moore, in particular, has made a point of seeking out new music and mentioning it in the course of the generous interviews he gives to publications big and small alike. But the band’s support of what Fisher terms “good taste,” isn’t simply a matter of putting their imprimatur on the music of others.

Sonic Youth have made a point of trying to collapse the divide between mass culture and the traditional art world as well, showcasing notable visual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Jeff Wall on album covers. While the gallery-hopping set might regard this as a ham-handed exercise, intended as much to benefit the band – conferring legitimacy to its choice of medium – as to benefit those visual artists, the fact remains that this move actually did introduce many fans to their work and, more importantly, inspired some of them to reflect on the relationship between different means of cultural expression. For better or worse – and I would definitely opt for better – Sonic Youth has played an important role in the reorganization of the arts that has occurred during the postmodern era. The elevation of comic books, genre fiction and, of course, popular music to the status – potentially, anyway – of “serious” art and the concomitant weakening of the distinction between “high” and low” culture that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century has resulted in a situation where the definition of “curator” itself has undergone a massive overhaul. While museum curators still exist, they have do-it-yourself competition that would once have been unthinkable.

Even if we factor Sonic Youth’s interest in bridging the gap between different media into account, however, we are still thinking of their curatorial work in terms of content. From my perspective, as someone who vividly remembers the impact that listening to their music had on my mind, the most interesting aspect of their body of work is the way it simulates a curatorial function at the level of form. The detachment the band’s members project with regard to their craft, that sense that they are technicians managing a flow, rather than embodying the stereotype of the tortured artist handed down to us from Romanticism, is doubled in the music itself, which invites listeners to imaginatively stroll down its passages at their leisure rather than forcing them to a particular destination.

Sonic Youth has certainly supported artists who used their music to vent their passions, from Kurt Cobain to Johnny Thunders, whose photograph is featured on The Eternal’s sleeve. But their greatest achievement has been to create music that avoids the sort of identification that such individuals elicit without becoming so cerebral that it denies us the pleasures of rocking out. Indeed, we could conceive of Sonic Youth’s whole project as an attempt to demonstrate that true ecstasy comes, not by living our lives through others, but by seeing how we can live differently as ourselves. The Eternal may not be their best album, but still forcefully reminds us of what their music can do for us if we open our minds to its mind-altering power.

Considering the religious allusion in the title of Inbar Bakal’s debut album and the fact that this child of Yemenite and Iraqi parents was raised in a traditional househould that had little in common with the faux Southern Californian cultural scene of beachfront Tel Aviv, it makes perfect sense that her music sounds a little behind the times. But the era to which she transports us is not the pre-modern world so much as the 1980s.

Although the tablas, oud and bouzouki on the record impart the flavor of true folk music, they struggle to avoid being reduced to the least common denominator of the synthesizers that ground each track. Surprisingly, however, Song of Songs works in spite or, perhaps, because of this antagonism. The fact that Bakal’s supple, multi-lingual singing has to thread its way through chords straight out of Peter Gabriel’s back catalogue gives it an impact that a more traditional musical setting would not.

More specfically, in reminding listeners of her Yemenite forebearer Ofra Haza, who managed to achieve international crossover success while proudly embracing her non-European heritage, Bakal helps to conjure nostalgia for the heady days when the rise of World Beat suggested that a new world order might be shaped with music instead of war.

Since this is Bakal’s first collection, it’s hard to determine how much of its time-out-of-joint feel was deliberate. There was a time when the work of musicians aspiring to professionalism came drenched in the difference-leveling tones of synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7, which brought the digital age to keyboards. While artists with punk roots tolerated the sonic muddiness that came from recording with limited time and money, those who wanted to mimic the sheen of major-label releases, from Bruce Springsteen to Sade, could make up for their lack of financial resources by studding their music with electronic beats and chords of superhuman smoothness.

So prevalent was this approach that most recordings from that era, no matter how big or small, sound distressingly similar to contemporary listeners. As the decline of the compact disc as a commercially viable medium has picked up its pace, vast numbers of remaindered records, the ones with the notch cut out of their plastic case, have surfaced at discount stores, making apparent the extent to which even self-produced albums of dubious merit share the DNA of platinum sellers from the 1980s.

Needless to say, the possibilities for new artists to express themselves musically have expanded vastly in the era of low-cost computer production. A teenager alone in her bedroom can capture the artificially enhanced brightness of Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” if she wants, without ever having to invest in a real synthesizer. Or she can inexpensively record the burblings of her backyard sprinkler system and then slow them down into delightfully organic hip-hop beats in a matter of hours. Everything is permitted, provide you have access to a decent computer set-up and field recorder.

It is telling, then, that Song of Songs, has the sonic texture of recordings from a time when such permission was much harder to come by. Bakal’s attempt to integrate traditional Yemenite music with anonymously professional Western sounds doesn’t always succeed. But the awkwardness that results is sometimes fortuitous. On “The Bride,” for example, a song about a young woman who pleads to avoid a forced marriage to an older man, the content of the music mirrors the form of the music to a startling degree.

Her desire for a modern bed, signaled by the synthesized timpany and drone that both sets the track in motion and undergirds it throughout, is insistently undermined by propulsive reminders of her heritage that insinuate themselves into the aural foreground. Listening to “The Bride,” listeners can viscerally comprehend the reason why Bakal felt it necessary to leave her homeland, where she served as the first female officer in the Anti-Aircraft Combat Division, and relocate in Los Angeles. It’s a powerful song, one that elegantly showcases Bakal’s artistic promise. The album’s opener, “The Battle of Jerusalem,” is similarly effective, achieving a dance-friendly momentum that recalls the great 4AD band Dead Can Dance.

Other tracks, like “Song of Songs,” are somewhat less successful in this regard, not because they lack good ideas, but because the sonic balance tips too far in the direction of the digital age. Instead of sustaining the tension between old and new, traditional and modern, they imply that technology has managed to transcend it, imbuing the album with too many moments of mirror-shaded confidence. For someone who was relieved when the culture of the 1980s gave way to grittier, more sonically diverse work, the album’s slickness can be hard to swallow.

From another perspective, though, that failure might also be perceived as a kind of success. For in recalling the rise of World Beat and its incarnation in Ofra Haza, the first Israeli popular musician to achieve major international success, Bakal’s debut inspires nostalgia for an era that seems increasingly hopeful in retrospect, at a time when political and economic pressures have done major damage to the American Dream and its Israeli counterpart.

By invoking this musical heritage, Song of Songs suggests that the traditions that hold us in bondage are not only the ones that hearken back to tribal ways, but also those of more recent provenance. After all, World Beat was fueled by the optimistic conviction that cultural and political progress go hand in hand. These days, by contrast, we live at a time when the expansion of musical possibilities only serves to underscore the contraction of political options. Significantly, Bakal describes her relocation to Los Angeles as a learning experience she would have been hard pressed to achieve back home. “I’ve spoken with more Palestinians here than I ever had the opportunity to talk to back in Israel.” In the Diaspora, she continues, “I found a whole new way of listening.”

Long before the promotional campaign for the new Star Trek film started in earnest, commentators had already discerned an uncanny similarity between the personalities of Spock and Barack Obama. Calm in the face of anger, collected when others are scattered, the President-to-be struck many as the ideal to which anger management aspires. Far from taking offense at the analogy, Obama was happy to declare his love for the original television series. Leonard Nimoy reported with obvious delight that, upon meeting the actor, the junior Senator from Illinois forsook the usual pleasantries for their Vulcan equivalent, saying “Live long and prosper” while making the shape of a V with his fingers. Anecdotes of our new President engaging in other Trekkie behavior, such as pretending that his wife’s new belt buckle concealed a teleportation device, added more fuel to the fire. By the time the film was released, the link between Obama’s White House and the USS Enterprise was being insisted upon with a vigor usually reserved for official marketing campaigns.

Part of that, surely, had to do with the curious circumstance that, at a time of unprecedented crisis in the print media, pictures of the Commander-in-Chief were blanketing newsstands to an unprecedented degree. At times, it was easier to pick out the magazines that didn’t feature Obama on the cover, like Hot Rod and Needlepoint Now than the ones that did. Not only was the man struggling to rescue free enterprise from the aftermath of a grave systemic failure, his public image was serving as a substantial source of economic thrust in its own right. From this perspective, connecting his Presidency to Star Trek made as much sense as tying in other commercial ventures like the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to it.

Don’t Believe the Hype

No matter how much one admires Barack Obama or wants him to succeed, it is more important than ever to obey Public Enemy’s injunction: “Don’t believe the hype.” Whether positive or negative, the media attention devoted to him is both excessive and deceptive. If asked, I’m sure he’d say so himself. Caution is especally crucial for the Left, whose membership is divided between acolytes who see every decision the President makes another confirmation of his strategic brilliance and detractors who complain that the new boss looks an awful lot like the old one. There has to be middle ground for progressives, a position from which they can give Obama the respect he deserves without giving up the right to call him on his shit.

That’s why our initial reaction to comparisons of Spock and Obama should involve raising an eyebrow to heights worthy of Mr. Nimoy. Clearly, this coupling has been backed by the rich and powerful, which provides reason enough to be suspicious. Whoever floated the rumor that the President had requested a special screening of the new film at the White House made it painfully clear that the analogy was breathtakingly safe.

Political Allegory and Popular Culture

Once upon a time, the move to interpret popular culture allegorically was fraught with risk. Even when artists intended to spur such reflections, the social pressure to regard their work as disposable entertainment, with no function other than to bring temporary and limited pleasure to the masses, was often too strong to overcome. But things have changed. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, a number of mainstream pieces pondered whether Americans had been prepared to have an African-American President by seeing one represented in fictional texts like 24 and Armageddon. Whatever their conclusions, they took it for granted that the entertainment world has a profound effect on our perception of the real world. Instead of being dismissed as the work of out-of-touch academics or amateur conspiracy theorists, this exercise in connecting the dots between fantasy and reality was presented as a legitimate form of political analysis.

There is much to applaud in this development. Paying to attention to how and why people identify politicians – classifying them as members of some categories and not others – and, just as importantly, identify with politicians is a critical step in transcending the debilitating belief that they choose leaders by simply making a rational assessment of their own self-interest. Because identification is a fundamentally cultural process, shaped by textual influences from preschool onward, paying attention to the ways in which fiction interwines with fact enables insights that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with an approach that focuses narrowly on the domain of electoral politics.

Proceeding on the assumption that “throwaway” popular culture can have profound politicial significance also directs scrutiny to the relationship between money and power. Success in the cultural marketplace is not merely the result of a neutral competition in which innate quality prevails. On the contrary, a work’s popularity more often than not reflects the force of its financial backing. While this support sometimes converges with critical acclamation, there is no guarantee that it will. In the case of the new Star Trek film, for example, the extensive advance promotional campaign – posters started showing up in multiplexes last year – and wide range of product tie-ins emphatically demonstrate that a lot of time and money was spent trying to make it a hit.

The danger, though, in embracing this conception of popular culture is that we will let the mainstream media dictate how we interpret particular texts. To put this another way, just as the promotional give-aways at fast food restaurants are carefully orchestrated to increase a film’s profile without inspiring potentially counter-productive reflection on its deeper implications, so might analyses of the sort that equate fictional and real-world characters. Everyone knows that Barack Obama isn’t really Spock. But repeatedly emphasizing the similarities between them can have the effect of naturalizing the analogy, exempting it from critical scrutiny.

We need to let this metaphor shape our perspective on the new President without forgetting that the invitation to see Spock in Obama serves the interests of powers that stand to benefit from the analogy. One way of doing that would be to compile a list of points where the analogy breaks down. We could, for instance, focus on moments in which the President has appeared to place passion before reason. A more interesting approach, though, might be to follow through on the comparison, constructing a series of if-then scenarios.

Was Spock a Jew?

To give an example of how this latter strategy might play out with particular resonance for readers of Zeek, we can start by considering the origins of Spock’s character. The greeting Obama mimicked, making the sign of a V with one’s fingers, supposedly derives from one that actor Leonard Nimoy witnessed as a child. In his autobiography I Am Not Spock – tellingly followed by a sequel titled I Am Spock – Nimoy wrote that the idea for the hand gesture came from the childhood experience of being taken to an Orthodox temple, where he saw the Kohanim make the sign for the Hebrew letter Shin. In effect, this codes Spock’s otherness vis-à-vis the Enterprise’s multicultural human crew as analogous to the status of Jews held in the postwar American society of the original television show, a “model minority” imagined to be superior to other marked ethnicities, occupying a privileged position – Spock is First Mate on the Enterprise – but one that is in some ways further removed from the WASP norm than that of other characters.

It’s important to note that Spock is only half-Vulcan, however. As the new film repeatedly reminds us, his decision to exemplify characteristically Vulcan traits is the result of hard work, performed on him by others and by himself alike, to restrain his human tendencies. His upbringing has conditioned him to identify with his Vulcan side without entirely repressing the knowledge that he could have turned out quite differently. Within the context of the mid-1960s, the trajectory of his character combined with Nimoy’s background to imply that, in attaining the status of “model minority,” Jews were forced to suppress traits incompatible with that image. This was the price of assimilation.

Half and Half

The most compelling argument for seeing Spock in Obama derives from the President’s biracial identity. The product of a short-lived union between a dark-skinned African father and a light-skinned American mother, his life story provides an interesting comparison to Spock’s. On the one hand, his education at a mostly Caucasian prep school, Columbia University and Harvard Law suggests that he followed a characteristically “white” path. On the other, however, Obama's subsequent political career, based in the predominantly African-American areas of Chicago’s South Side, indicates that he eventually chose to embrace his minority heritage. In other words, the President's biography comprises a tale of both assimilation – suppressing his otherness – and self-conscious identity politics – celebrating his otherness.

Crucially, while Leonard Nimoy’s Spock distanced himself from the passion-ruled irrationality associated with dominant WASP culture, Obama’s rise was predicated on a careful negotiation of the relationship between a dominant WASP culture identified with being calm, cool and collected and an African-American heritage that has been historically aligned, often with gravely pernicious consequences, with an excess of passion and a concomitant dearth of reason.

We must remember, however that the coupling of Spock’s non-human side with a worldview in which the rule of logic was paramount reflected a major shift in the perception of Jewish ethnicity in the postwar United States. There was a time, during the waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the stereotyping of Jews borrowed heavily on long-standing anti-Semitic traditions. Far from being considered a “model minority,” they were identified with a series of negative character traits – untrustworthy, rapacious, lustful – that were also applied, though with more force and political malice, to Americans of African descent. This is what gave both Jews and African Americans a common experience of racism, but also distanced them from one another as well. 

 

The Passion of Dispassion

To the extent that commentators have pushed the Spock = Obama equation, then, they have implied, however unwittingly, that our new President has ushered in a new era for African-Americans, in which they have the potential, finally, to wriggle free of the negative stereotypes that have limited their advancement. Indeed, his stunning ascent from the Illinois State Legislature to the U.S. Senate to the White House has been heralded by both African-Americans and members of the Caucuasian majority as a fundamental turning point in the country’s attitude towards race.

But what about the Jews? Here is where following through on the analogy pays particularly interesting dividends. The new Star Trek film seeks to reanimate a rather morbiund franchise by fleshing out an origin story for the special relationship between Spock and James T. Kirk, the Captain of the Enterprise. While the familiar tension between Spock’s devotion to reason and Kirk’s willingness to act first and think later is retained from the original television series, we also get new insight into Spock’s human heritage.

To make a long story short, the film shows us how the appearance of disinterestedness can be a cover for self-interest. The new film’s twist on the original Star Trek narrative is to have Spock, not Kirk, assume command of the Enerprise. After First Mate Kirk questions Spock’s ability to make the right decisions after witnessing the destruction of his home planet Vulcan, Spock sends him into exile. With the assistance of a much older Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, Kirk finds a way to return to the Enterprise and convince the younger Spock that he is unfit for command, thereby securing the post of Captain that he held on the original television series. The point, ultimately, is that Kirk’s impulsiveness is not necessarily less rational than the dispassionate façade Spock works so hard to maintain.

Teacher/Student

This point is reinforced by a scene from early in the film. As the new cadets of Star Fleet are being mustered to respond to an unexpected threat, Spock, who has served as one of their instructors, is confronted by Uhura. She demands to know why, despite her superb marks, she is not being assigned to the Enterprise, the most sought-after post. Spock responds, rather cryptically, that he did not want to give the impression of favoritism. But he quickly relents and lets her transfer to the Enterprise. Only later does it become clear that he and Uhura have been having a teacher-student love affair that continues to smoulder on the mission. What this deviation from the original Star Trek confirms, in short, is that the appearance of disinterestedness can just as easily indicate that one is overwhelmed by unruly passions as that one is ruled by logic.

The fact that Uhura is the Enterprise’s only featured African-American woman crew member further complicates matters. We see Spock, who was already being identified with Barack Obama before the new film was finished, getting to occupy the position that Kirk famously assumed on the original series, when he and Uhura shared one of television’s first interracial kisses. In light of the previously mentioned ethnic coding to Spock’s character, the amorous relationship between him and Uhura encourages us to scrutinize the new film for insight into the current state of the often fraught relationship between Jews and African-Americans in the United States.

One of the most interesting developments to which the original television series led was the popularity of so-called “slash fiction,” in which sexual relationships between well-known characters of the same gender are narrated. These days, the Harry Potter books are probably the most fertile source for such copyright-flaunting tales. But the original coupling, the one that started it all, in a sense, was Kirk and Spock. Interestingly, most of the people responsible for getting that romance off the ground were female fans of Star Trek who identified themselves as heterosexual. Even today, that demographic plays a significant role in the communities that have developed around slash fiction.

Because copyright issues ensure that slash fiction based on franchises like Star Trek can only exist outside of the conventional marketplace, it has managed to retain a resolutely anti-commercial aura. That hasn’t stopped copyright holders from trying to stop its production and distribution. George Lucas, for example, is reported to have strenuously opposed the “queering” of Star Wars characters. With Star Trek, however, the situation is more complicated. Although series creator Gene Roddenberry obviously could not endorse tales in which Kirk and Spock make love, his openly stated intention of promoting diversity of all sorts made many fans feel more welcome to repurpose the show’s characters.

Whether the team responsible for the new Star Trek film was self-consciously responing to the history of slash fiction associated with the franchise is unclear, though it seems likely that at least some of the people involved were thinking of it when they concocted the forbidden love subplot between Spock the instructor and his student Uhura. Given the vast quantity of Kirk/Spock fan fiction out there, though, the invocation of such transgressive behavior and the emphasis on Spock’s passionate nature provides plenty of fuel for reanimating that subculture.

Who Is Obama’s Kirk?

Less obviously, it also provides the raw material to radicalize the comparison of Spock and Obama in intriguing ways. The invitation to see the Spock in our new President typically seems to proceed from the assumption that fictional characters can be pried loose from the narratives in which they originally appeared and treated as self-sufficient entities. But what if this analogy were returned to its place of origin, the tale of the Startship Enterprise?

Latent within the Spock = Obama equation is the notion that he must work in tandem with a figure equivalent to Captain Kirk. Shortly after Inauguration Day, The New York Times ran an interesting piece on Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that described the former Congressman from Illinois as a “fierce partisan” with a partially justifiable reputation as a “relentless hothead” who was trying hard to “rein himself in.” Those are all traits identified with James T. Kirk. But the similarities don’t stop there. Consider this sentence. “How will the feisty, bombastic and at times impulsive former congressman blend with the cool, collegial and deliberate culture of Obama World?” Substitute “Iowa farm boy” for “congressman” and “Vulcan” for “Obama World” and you have the perfect tag line for a campaing to promote the new Start Trek film.

But it’s not just the adjectives associated with Emanuel and Obama here and those used to describe Kirk and Spock that make the current White House sound eerily like the Enterprise. Again and again stories on Obama have emphasized the crucial role that Jewish advisers like Emanuel and campaign strategist David Axelrod have played in his political life. Frequently, the implication is that the President needs the passion, fight and basic willingness to get dirty identified with these advisers in order to be successful. In a reversal of longstanding stereotypes in the entertainment industry, where performers were typically depicted as passionate and lacking in self-discipline, we are being sold a storyline in which an excessively cool and calm African-American requires the heated frenzy of Jews working behing the scenes to get things done.

More subtly, we are also being encouraged to conceive of post-WASP leadership as a hybrid of superficially opposed ethnic legacies. In an era when the notion of the “model minority” has been turned on its head, the only truth that seems to persist is that cultural self-sufficiency is an illusion. Without intimate relationships that are by definition transgressive in nature, like the coupling of Kirk and Spock in slash fiction, attempts to take command of the political situation will always fall short of their goals.

When a group that hasn’t achieved big mainstream success releases a compilation record, they’re usually trying to capitalize on a sense that their time has come. That makes the decision to lead off Carne Masada: Quite Possibly the Very Best of Hip Hop Hoodios with the brand-new track “Times Square (1989)” rather curious. Not because it’s lackluster – it’s one of the album’s highlights – but because it does a fine job of sounding like it’s from 1989. The fast breakbeat, forced through an echo chamber worthy of dub reggae master Lee “Scratch” Perry, recalls the heady days when artists like Public Enemy, De La Soul and KRS-One elevated hip-hop to the same cultural significance that rock music had enjoyed during the counterculture of the late 1960s. Clearly, Hip Hop Hoodios want listeners to hear them as direct descendants of this tradition, rather than the bling-bragging megastars that followed in its wake.

Unafraid of pushing buttons, the work of the pioneering musicians of the late 1980s showcased an oppositional political perspective rooted in the legacy of Third World Marxism and multicultural entrepreneurialism alike. As important as the music was as a tool for raising awareness about social issues, however, its biggest impact was aesthetic. It was as if all the highbrow discourse about postmodernism circulating through the art world had suddenly materialized in a form that didn’t require an advanced degree or a subscription to ArtForum to decipher. Indeed, the music was often so exciting that the very idea of deciphering it seemed absurd. People had been busy interpreting the world for so long that they’d forgotten how much fun it could be to change it.

Josué Noriega and Abraham VelézBy using the latest computer technology to sample a vast range of sources and then collage them together into pieces of astonishing complexity that still rocked, these artists demonstrated that history could be a source of inspiration as well as dread. Sadly, though, the conditions that made that breakthrough possible were only to endure for a few years. As Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod demonstrate in their superb new documentary Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport , musicians’ freedom to mine the past for material that can be “repurposed” in new work, while it had been a staple technique of gallery artists for decades, was severely curtailed by a series of lawsuits claiming copyright infringement. Unless contemporary hip-hop artists have enormous budgets to work with, as only someone of Kanye West’s stature can boast, they cannot afford to legally simulate the late-1980s aesthetic unless they can find a way to make many of the raw materials for collage from scratch.

And that’s precisely what Hip Hop Hoodios have managed to pull off over the course of their career. By marrying Latin and Jewish musical idioms, with the help of everyone from Ozomatli to The Klezmatics, the group has managed to conjure the multicultural fervor of Public Enemy – not to mention a good deal of their humor-inflected outrage – while still remaining topical. Although Hip Hop Hoodios were often portrayed as a novelty act early in their career, the seriousness they bring to progressive causes has helped them wriggle free of that straitjacket. The 2007 song “Viva La Guantanamera,” for example, effectively transposes the sort of music popularized in the film Buena Vista Social Club into a hip hop format, while also forcefully denouncing the American prison at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.

One of the five new tracks on Carne Masada, “Que Pasa in Israel (Checkpoint Culero)” does an even more impressive job of mixing music and politics. The song interrogates the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, making efficient use of a serpentine melody suggesting the Middle East without sacrificing the Latin sabor that permeates most of the group’s best music. Hip Hop HoodiosBut what sets this number apart from most “conscious” hip hop is the sophistication of its critique. By opening with a dialogue in which a Mexican seeks entry into Israel, Hip Hop Hoodios encourage us to think hard about the relationship between the border checkpoints here in the States and those in Israel, both of which function as tools of a discrimination that is simultaneously economic and political.

More than anything, Carne Masada attests to the fact that the politicization of hip-hop culture was not a phase that could be outgrown as profits mounted, but a legacy that we should return to in the struggle to make popular music that both delights and instructs. For all the accusations of anti-Semitism that plagued the hip-hop scene in the late 1980s – some of them justified, some not – it provided a way for people with non-WASP backgrounds of every color and creed to preserve their collective heritage without becoming mired in nostalgia. Hip Hop Hoodios point the way forward without ever succumbing to the arrogant delusion that we can leave the past behind.

Discussing the 2008 film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist for Nextbook, Stuart Klawans noted a discrepancy between the way the film was advertised and what it actually contains. “The promotional campaign for Nick & Norah mostly wants to sell you on indie rock, downtown Manhattan glamour, and a couple of actors who are extremely cute, in an approachable way,” he wrote. “Their eventual union, of course, is a foregone conclusion. What you won’t know in advance is the nature of the critical moment.”

He means the scene, set in the recording studio owned by Norah Silverberg’s father, in which she initiates her first sexual encounter with Nick O’Leary by invoking theological doctrine. “That reminds me of this part of Judaism that I really like. It’s called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world is broken into pieces and it’s everybody’s job to find them and put them back together again.” Although the slice on this come-on is treacherous, Nick has no trouble returning serve. “Well maybe we’re the pieces, you know, maybe we’re not supposed to find the pieces, maybe we are the pieces.”

Some commentators on Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist praised its willingness to showcase the heroine’s ethnic identity, even if it tempered the Jewishness of the book on which it was based. Others, like Claire E. Gross, faulted the film for making details that are integral to the original story seem too random. “Norah’s mentions of an upcoming year at Brown seem closer to bragging than worry, her concern that she can’t orgasm is voiced once in passing and then quickly dismissed, and her sudden, stilted explanation of Tikkun Olam. . . is an even greater non sequitur than her Jewish identity itself. Why bother?”

The same might be said for the 2009 picture Adventureland. Although it feels like one of the many coming-of-age stories that focus on the end of high school – director Rob Mottola’s 2007 smash Superbad was a classic of the genre – the protagonist, James Infinite Playlist TrailerBrennan, is actually a recent college graduate who has been forced to take a summer job at a local amusement park rather than travel to Europe like his privileged former classmate. The work is tedious, but brings him into contact with other overqualified “carnies,” including Em Lewin, an attractive young woman who eventually becomes his love interest.

Midway through the film, we learn that Em is Jewish and then get to see her rally to the defense of another Jewish carny who has been dumped because he isn’t Catholic. Like the intellectual foreplay in the recording studio from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the outburst comes out-of-the-blue, making it seem like shorthand for character development that the film fails to deliver. Again, the question “Why bother?” is hard to suppress.

Certainly, there’s a way in which the Jewishness of major characters in these films reflects a broader trend in contemporary Hollywood, typified by the work of Judd Apatow, that has given us characters who are demonstrably not WASPs, but are also not stereotyped on the basis of their race or religion. One of Nick’s bandmates is both Asian and gay, yet not reducible to either. While his sexual preference plays a role in the film’s plot, it isn’t simply raw material for making the audience laugh.

And yet most of these films are trying hard to do just that, often by deliberately pushing the buttons of those with an investment in appearing “politically correct.” It’s a delicate balancing act, which succeeds more in some areas – the representation of race and religion – than it does in others – the representation of gender. But the shortcomings of this new aesthetic shouldn’t provoke us, to paraphrase a scene from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, to throw our chewing gum out with the toilet bowl full of vomit into which it has been ingloriously expelled.

In other words, there are reasons to bother thinking hard about the representation of collective identity in these pictures and, more specifically, the simultaneously understated yet prominent role they let Jewishness play. First and foremost, the very fact that they can inspire the question “Why bother?” is a clear indication that they represent real progress, however fitfully realized, on the pathway to a world in which we can be judged by the content of our character without having to whitewash our pasts in the process.

Less obviously, the fact that films like Adventureland and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist depict ethnicity in a sidelong fashion while focusing most of their attention on the power of music to bring people together indicates that they might have something profound to tell us about the function of religion today.

Both Nick and James make mixes of their favorite songs that play a role in finding a soulmate they can have sex with. There’s a telling scene in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist in which Norah, after scrolling through Nick’s iPod, enthusiastically exclaims that it’s amazing how much her musical taste overlaps with his. Later, they struggle over who will select the songs for their drive through Manhattan in Nick’s Yugo. James and Em bond over shared musical interests in similar fashion. In both cases, it is made very clear that the couples could never come together without the help of their cultural taste preferences. From this perspective, personal history such as where a person attended school, how much money they have, what religion they were born into etc. all function as potential impediments that only music has the power to transcend.

At the same time, though, Norah and Em assert their Jewishness in ways that actually serve their amorous goals. While the possession of compatible musical taste is the precondition for an intimate relationship, it doesn’t quite seem to be enough on its own. The coupling only comes off with the acknowledgment of differences less mutable than one’s digital music library.

The title Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is interesting in this regard. The majority of the story is devoted to two parallel searches, one for a secret concert by the revered indie band Where’s Fluffy? and the other for Norah’s inebriated friend Caroline. At one point, Caroline calls to say she’s hanging out with Jesus. Because we get to see this “Jesus,” smoking a cigarette and looking bored, while Caroline is making this confusing statement concerning her whereabouts, we are fully prepared to appreciate the irony in the comment Norah makes when the phone call is over: “I need to find Jesus.”

And yet, the theme of redemption is taken seriously enough within the film that these words seem like more than a way to get a cheap laugh. The characters in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Adventureland seek salvation in music because it still holds out the possibility of a transcendence that the constraints of daily life otherwise prohibit. “Infinite playlist,” in other words, is a clever way of naming G-d indirectly. No matter how many songs there are in a person's library, there will always be something missing, a lack that exchange with others can remedy to a degree -- Nick and James make mix tapes that turn their recipients on to new sounds -- but never absolutely.

The etymology of the word “religion” clues us in to what’s really going on in these films’ depiction of collective identity. The root lig- – also found in “league” and “ligature” – means “to bind.” Religion is what connects us to each other with bonds that last. In an era in which fundamentalism of all stripes seems bent on severing more links that it enables, music has the potential to serve as religion’s surrogate. But the sharing of songs is what facilitates belief; it isn't belief itself.

Perhaps the deep structure of rock and roll is inseparable from the Christian tradition out of which it emerged. But Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Adventureland suggest that it may be possible to find one’s religion in the music while remaining a Jew. Indeed, Norah’s invocation of Tikkun Olam reminds us that the impulse to redeem the broken world can motivate action without the figure of the messiah ever becoming flesh.

Significantly, although Nick and Norah spend their night trying to find the secret show that Where's Fluffy? is supposed to be playing, they depart the concert before it begins, letting us savor the memory of what it feels like to want something that badly, rather than the inevitable disappointment of realizing that the desired end was merely a substitute for an ending that cultural experience can never provide. 

Let's Stay Together

The receptions held at scholarly conferences tend to be short and not too sweet. They serve more as a staging ground for splinter groups that will head out on the town later than as celebrations in their own right. But tonight’s event at the Sunset Tavern in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood has become its own after-party. Even though it’s last call and participants at the Experience Music Project's annual Pop Conference have been going strong since early in the morning, they still linger around the bar, talking animatedly. It’s the first time in the eight years of the conference that organizers opted to move the reception out of the cavernous Frank Gehry structure where the sessions are held. As Eric Weisbard, who has been the driving force behind the Pop Conference’s since its inception, remarks, “The problem with holding it at EMP was that we had to end things too early. Here we can stay together for the whole night.”

What he doesn’t say, but is probably thinking, is that the need to stay together has never been stronger. This isn’t the first year in which dire conversations about the state of the music industry have intruded on the conference. The 2007 program concluded with an anguished roundtable discussion about the impact of new media on the state of criticism. But the economic crisis of the past six months has lengthened the shadows encroaching on the lightheartedness of the proceedings. Universities are cutting programs with alarming speed. And things are even worse in the field of journalism, where even the most prestigious positions are now in danger. It makes sense that conference-goers don’t want this night to end. For many of them, tomorrow’s flight home means confronting the possibility that their preferred mode of existence, making a living on cultural criticism, can no longer be sustained.

Mind you, they’d still be writing about music if it didn’t pay them a dime. Some of them already are. There are plenty of doctors, lawyers and businessmen who profess to love their work. But it’s hard to imagine them doing all of it pro bono. What sets the Pop Conference apart is the degree to which it blurs the line between business and pleasure. Conference-goers network, certainly, but in a way that rarely feels like work. Although there’s a heightened sense of professional urgency this year, the conversations that start up between participants are never just means to an end. It’s part of what brings many participants back to this conference year after year.

But the biggest draw, naturally, is the music itself. No matter how much conference-goers already know about popular music, they always come away with something new. Sometimes it’s trivia with an impact that’s far from trivial, as when Asha Puthli , one of this year’s plenary speakers, briefly compares her Indian background with that of Queen’s Freddie Mercury. Sometimes it’s a different way of listening to familiar records, as when a rough cut of Kembrew McLeod ’s superb new documentary Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport authoritatively demonstrates how classic hip-hop tracks from the late 1980s borrowed from the same underappreciated sources. And sometimes it’s exposure to previously unfamiliar music, whether by Joe Bataan, Love and Kisses, or The Bags. The Pop Conference provokes a lust for new records, one that some feel the need to indulge before they leave the city. Indeed, the music played over the four days is so rich and varied that tired participants fantasize about attending sessions in which all they would have to do is settle back and listen.

Achtung, Baby!

The Experience Music ProjectBecause this is a scholarly conference with an educational mission, however, that sort of passive listening is only fleetingly possible. More often than not, conference-goers are leaning forward in their seats, using their powers of concentration to make sense of a presenter’s words. And that’s despite the fact that presentations have grown steadily more accessible over the course of the Pop Conference’s existence. Not only does the writing tend to be less convoluted and more attractively delivered, it’s frequently supplemented with multimedia content.

One of the most exciting presentations at this conference came from Douglas Wolk , an expert on both music and comic books, who managed to stand at the podium for twenty minutes without uttering a single word. The paper he had written for the occasion was delivered instead by a series of pre-recorded voices, many of them female. While this approach disoriented some members of the audience at first, it perfectly suited his topic: the capacity of music to free us from our biological bodies. Less obviously, it also underscored the degree to which the Pop Conference has turned into an event in which individual voices overlap in complex harmony.

This was not always true. During the conference’s first year, back in 2002, the format baffled many of the non-academics in attendance. If you aren’t used to listening to complex prose being read out loud, the delivery of a scholarly paper can be hard to follow. When that paper also drops a wide range of references, some of them decidedly abstruse, the pleasure of learning something new can dissipate rapidly.

That’s part of the reason why, as good as that first year of the Pop Conference was, panels were sometimes tense. The laudable effort to bring together academics, journalists and musicians did not always work the way that organizers had hoped. Academics complained that journalists were trying too hard to please. Journalists, in turn, targeted the tendency of academics to write for themselves rather than reaching out to a broader audience. At one point, long-time Village Voice critic Robert Christgau stood up during the Q&A session following a particularly dense paper and delivered an indignant speech, calling for academics to pay more attention to the craft of writing instead of hiding behind convoluted syntax and jargon-filled diction.

Not in Concert

The musicians, for their part, seemed wary of both camps, not to mention the very idea of holding such a conference at the Experience Music Project, whose patron Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is a controversial figure in the region. Their reluctance to endorse the proceedings came to a head at a panel meant to showcase their contributions to the Pacific Northwest’s music culture. Scheduled for the museum’s gaudy concert venue, the Sky Church, the panel had been anticipated by conference-goers as eagerly as a concert. Once the four performers – Mark Arm from Mudhoney, Sam Coomes fromQuasi, Calvin Johnson from K Records, and Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney – walked onto the stage, though, their body language made it clear that this was not their idea of a good show. Chuck Klosterman describes the mood in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. "For two hours, I watched four people stare at the audience, all trying to prove they were cool enough not to care about the attention."

To look around at the crowd, more hopeful than hip, was to see the word "crestfallen" made flesh. Whatever their professional commitments, everyone in the audience was also a fan. They had come to witness these highly regarded musicians confer legitimacy on their devotion, proving that a conference on music can be as rewarding as a live show. But what they were getting instead was another reminder that no matter how much they might identify with musicians, the musicians weren’t bound to return the favor. 

When it was Brownstein's turn to be the focal point, though, a few shafts of sunlight penetrated the collective gloom. Although she appeared even less comfortable than her fellow panelists, it was hard to tell whether her distress was inspired by the setting, the audience, or the men on stage with her. She looked up, still blushing. "I wrote this little paper. . ." Unlike Arm, Coomes, and Johnson, Brownstein definitely had an idea of what typically happens at academic conferences. She knew this was a situation that called for a specific type of performance: not a concert, not an interview, but the delivery of a paper. And she had written one. Only she wasn’t going to read it.

Whether Brownstein was embarrassed at herself for taking the conference so seriously or at her fellow panelists for not taking it seriously at all, she seemed reluctant to differentiate herself from the other musicians on stage. Despite the audible groans of conference-goers when they realized she was truly serious about keeping her “little paper” to herself, she stood firm in her decision. Although she did go on to improvise some thoughtful remarks derived from what she had written, the paper itself never left the table in front of her, a monument to the conference’s inability to collapse the divide between musician and critic, despite its best efforts to the contrary.

From Fretboard to Keyboard

But two years later, when Harvard University Press published This Is Pop, an anthology based on that first conference, Brownstein was among the contributors. Most of the selections reproduced words spoken out loud at the conference. Hers, by contrast, featured words she had refused to share live rather than a transcription of the ones she had spoken in their place. Two factors made this switch particularly noteworthy. First, a photograph of her playing guitar, together with former Sleater-Kinney bandmate Corin Tucker, dominates the book’s cover. Second, Brownstein’s piece specifically addresses the difficulty of pinning a show down in words. “Essentially, the live show is nothing more than an impromptu conversation. It’s a moment that lets us connect on a level free from the constraints of everyday discourse. It welcomes as opposed to shuns lexical ambiguities.”

Inside the EMPSuperficially, this would seem to be a classic case of keeping one’s music collection while selling it too. Yet perhaps Brownstein’s refusal to read her paper out loud wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment-decision, but a carefully planned move designed to open up space between her live performance at the conference and whatever printed record of her thoughts might follow. To read off the page about the difference between records and live performance without acknowledging that she was, in effect, putting on a show might have struck her as hypocritical. Whatever her reasoning, though, it was hard for the audience not to interpret her refusal to read the paper she had brought with her as a repudiation of the conference.

Interestingly, Brownstein’s reservations about trying to pin experiencedown with words have not stopped her from pursuing a writing career. Even before Sleater-Kinney declared it was going on indefinite hiatus, her byline began to surface in the alternative press. Now she writes regular blog entries for NPR under the heading “Monitor Mix.” Although she writes insightfully on a range of topics, music heads the list. In a recent entry, she reflects on the fact that bands are often a bigger influence away from home than they are within their own local scene.

“While Unwound's impact was felt more in Southern California and the Midwest,” Brownstein writes, “the band's hometown of Olympia – where I resided during much of my 20s – was being swept up in a love affair with Britain's Huggy Bear. The band flew into town in the summer of 1993, sans its handsome and brilliant guitarist Jon Slade, and proceeded to infiltrate basement shows, beach trips, practice spaces, dance parties and, most importantly, song structure. Basically, everyone who was in a band at the time, or who was thinking of starting one, wanted to harness the kind of chemistry Huggy Bear possessed; the sort that left the listener addicted to unsteadiness, vertigo and spontaneous fits.” This is the kind of writing good music critics do, particularlythe sort who participate in the Pop Conference. But does that mean thatshe is now a music critic?

When Sleater-Kinney was active, Brownstein and her bandmates frequently questioned the way their band was classified. Interviewers who weren’t deeply familiar with their work or the cultural milieu from which it came were likely to have their pre-conceptions politely dismantled. In particular, band members took pains to resist the pressure they felt to let Sleater-Kinney serve as a representative for some broader category. They indentified influences and allegiances, as popular musicians inevitably are asked to do, but they also sought to disidentify with definitions imposed on them from outside, in effect declaring, “We’re not x.” Brownstein’s cultural reportage demonstrates a similar wariness, suggesting that she might be reluctant to take on the mantle of “critic” or even “journalist.”

Doesn't Anybody Stay in One Place Anymore?

But what someone in Brownstein’s position is able to do by choice,operating in the liminal space between different vocations, others havebeen forced to do out of necessity. Each year’s Pop Conference program lists biographies for the presenters. Many of them have returned repeatedly, which is why this year’s reception at the Sunset Tavern feels so much like a family gathering. Yet if you only pay attention to the professional affiliations listed in those biographies, you might think that the turnover has been much greater. One year a person is a Music Editor at a well-known magazine. The next she is teaching and doing freelance pieces on music. And the year after that she has another new set of professional identities.

That flux reflects the economic turmoil that has beset what Theodor Adorno famously termed the “Culture Industry.” A lot has been made of the fact that few workers these days stay with the same company for decades like they once did. In the world of people who write about music, even a year can seem like a long time. While some lucky individuals have managed to persevere in a full-time job that lets them do what they love, most conference participants lead a more unstable existence. Even Christgau, who was honored at the first Pop Conference for being the “Dean of American rock critics,” was pushed out of his position at The Village Voice in 2006 despite having worked there since the 1960s.

It’s hard to find anything good in this state of affairs. People are working harder, for lower pay, with little job security. Yet that is also why the Pop Conference has remained relevant, long after the initial novelty of bringing academics, journalists and musicians together wore off: the four days participants spend there provide the means to transform necessity, at least for a little while, into virtue. The sense of common purpose that now animates the event derives, in part, from the fact that many participants have been forced to switch roles in recent years. They understand each other better than before and take pleasure in that development.

Come Together

This sense of solidarity has also helped to wear down the differences between the different styles of performance apparent at the first Pop Conference. Some presenters still read from the page in the stiff manner characteristic of most scholarly conferences. But while it was usually easy to tell in the conference’s early years who came from a university environment and who did not, that is no longer the case. Even first-time presenters seem to understand that they can break with professional convention. Academics know that their work will be better received if it’s accessible and delivered with as much attention to style as substance. Journalists who have suffered the tyranny of ever-shrinking word counts and editors who demand that they dumb down their work take advantage of the conference’s flexibility to indulge their passion for detailed research or philosophical speculation. And the musicians, who, like Carrie Brownstein, are often teachers and writers as well, seem to have grown comfortable with the idea that exposing their craft to critical scrutiny can actually enhance its power.

The reception at the Sunset Tavern is the perfect testament to this convergence. For much of the evening, entertainment is provided by people who have spoken at the conference. Sean Nelson of local band Harvey Danger serves as a wry MC, as well as performing a compelling solo set, as do Franklin Bruno, Sarah Dougher, and David Grubbs. David Thomas, who got started as a writer before playing in the hugely influential bands Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu, uses his time on stage to deliver spoken-word pieces with a dark Beat edge. Throughout, the intimacy of the venue combines with the sense of camaraderie developed during the conference to make the show feel like a social gathering rather than a formal concert. It makes perfect sense when, during electronic duo Matmos’s stint as laptop DJs, an abrupt shift from a club-friendly dance track to head-rattling hardcore brings conference-goer Seth Sanders, a professor of religion, rushing in from outside to form a mosh pit of one. This is one scholarly event in which passions, however singular, are collectively encouraged.

Paper Planes

That’s something that Alex Ross noted in a long piece he wrote for The New Yorker after attending the second Pop Conference back in 2003. “I often had the happy experience of being held hostage by an informed fanatic who convinced me that whatever he or she was discussing was the most important music on earth.” As the tone of this sentence suggests, Ross managed to praise to the event, which he clearly enjoyed, without passing up opportunities to make fun of it.

Building on a long tradition of journalistic pieces that mock the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, he contrasted this benign fanaticism with the impulse to take popular music as an occasion to theorize. “There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin’ on. Walter Benjamin’s name is dropped at least as often as the Notorious B.I.G.’s. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gets more props than Dr. Dre. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word ‘interrogate’ in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School.”

The Print PressAlthough the archness of this dig is unfair, Ross at least backed up his mockery of scholarly pretense with a serious critique. “Scholars of this type always want to see pop music as the emanation of an entity called popular culture, rather than as music that happens to have become popular. As a result, songs and bands become fungible commodities in the intellectual marketplace.” In other words, they are deaf to the specificity of the music they discuss, treating it as a starting point for their pet arguments rather than an end in itself. There’s merit to this claim, as anyone who has attended MLA-style conferences can attest. But whether it was fair to apply to the Pop Conference, even in its first few years, is another matter.

Anyone who has listened closely to the conversations between panels, at the museum’s café or bar, or at the pizza place or Thai restaurant up the street over the years knows that even the driest scholarly presenters at the conference love music with a passion that threatens to overwhelm them. They might seem to be slotting a randomly chosen song into their paper, but are in all likelihood picking something with great meaning for them. The challenge is to convey that fact effectively, a task that academic presenters struggled with in the conference’s first few years. But not anymore, surprisingly.

There’s something disconcerting about the degree to which the skepticism Ross conveyed in his piece has faded. Like the Experience Music Project itself, the Pop Conference began life as the target of considerable hostility. Right as the conference was about to kick off its first year, it was savagely attacked in The Stranger – a publication, it should be noted, that has also featured praise for the event – by then-Music Editor Jennifer Maerz, who ridiculed its very reason for being. “I avoid events like EMP’s Pop Music Studies conference like I avoid making out with boys with gigantic cold sores on their mouths—there’s nothing attractive about them,” she began, before specifically singling out the notion of writing “papers” about popular music for special ridicule. “Christ, when did rock becomes something we’ve gotta take this seriously? Rock ‘n’ roll is sweaty, wily, irrational and emotional,” she continued, inimical to the “theoretical baggage and critical posturing” of academic critics. “They have to throw in pretentious ideas, obscure references, and often times, things pulled outta their ass last minute to explain why, say, the Rolling Stones are so much better than the Beatles. (Which they are, by the way.)”

It was telling that Maerz wrote this piece, not as a review of the conference, but a declaration of why she wouldn’t bother to attend it. A more clear-cut example of journalistic prejudice would be hard to find. To be sure, she refused to conceal her antipathy to the event behind a mask of objectivity. But that doesn’t absolve her of responsibility for contributing to the tension during that first year. In particular, the musicians seemed to be powerfully affected by her disdain. It hardly seems like a coincidence that her antipathy to the very idea of presenting papers on popular music was mirrored in Carrie Brownstein’s refusal to read what she called her “little paper.”

People That You Meet in the Neighborhood

While the brazenness of Maerz’s piece made it hard to justify, it did echo resistance to the Experience Music Project in the local music scene. The fact that the admission fee to attend that first year of the Pop Conference was quite steep reinforced a perception that it belonged to a different reality than the one inhabited by the city’s current bands and their supporters. The building’s placement in the middle of the touristy Seattle Center also didn’t help. Although EMP staff members were eager to plant roots in the community, the fact that most of the people the museum welcomed came from somewhere else clearly complicated these efforts

In moving the reception off site this year, by contrast, the Pop Conference has signaled that its integration into the local music scene, while not complete, has come a long way. Admission has been free the past few years, inspiring more residents to attend. And organizers have worked closely with the local independent music station, KEXP, to ensure that the sessions are well publicized. Instead of looming on the horizon, out of proportion with its surroundings like the building in which it is held, the conference is starting to blend in with the city that hosts it.

By a happy coincidence of timing, this night at the Sunset Tavern falls on Record Store Day . Inaugurated in 2008, this consumer holiday represents the collaborative effort of many stores and labels to remind people of the pleasures of shopping for music in person. A decade ago it would have been derided as crass commercialism, an injunction to confirm music’s status as a major cultural commodity. That even people who are otherwise highly critical of global capitalism have fully endorsed the event indicates just how radically the music business has changed in the intervening years. More specifically, the need for such a holiday confirms the degree to which the coupling of those two words, “music” and “business,” has been called into question.

It’s worth recalling Alex Ross’s critique here. Back in 2003, his reference to an “intellectual marketplace” was meant to complement the literal marketplace. But as more and more exchange bypasses the financial system altogether, figuring out what constitutes a real commodity and what is merely a metaphor for one has become a trying task.

Shining New Path?

Music remains popular, one of the most important means of making sustainable interpersonal connections. But that social function no longer requires the purchasing of many records. This is not to imply that music culture has transcended consumerism. Money still changes hands, obviously. The difference is that its destination has changed. Whereas music lovers’ primary expense used to be “software,” such as LPs, tapes, CDs and the magazines that cover the field, they are now likely to spend more on the technology needed to manage their collection.

The crisis of music criticism is the direct result of this transformation. It used to be that record reviews served primarily as a form of financial planning. When you only have enough cash to buy one album a week, being sure that you’re making the best choice is crucial. Things are different now. Although music criticism is still an important resource for those who seek guidance in building their collections, the need for it is less pressing. A sizeable percentage of contemporary music lovers know how to “test drive” music without having to pay for it. And they also have a wealth of internet resources with which to gauge the opinions of other consumers.

The advice this demographic requires is more diffuse in nature. In an era when the term “content” has come to stand in for specific media, what they seek in music criticism, often without realizing it, is the means of sorting the culture potentially available to them so that it serves a purpose beyond mechanically filling out their collection.. In a sense, time is the new money. Most music lovers have less of it to spend on culture than their predecessors did. For them, the value of music criticism is proportional to the time it prevents them from wasting.

That's a task for which the participants in the Pop Conference are perfectly suited. And it's what coming to the conference teaches them how to do even better. Maybe that's why the tensions manifested during its first year have melted into an easygoing, but engaged solidarity. Even for those possessed of the anti-intellectual bias typified by Jennifer Maerz's piece, the time to complain that studying popular music robs us of its pleasures is over. "It's easy to jab at EMP for being nerdy," wrote Eric Grandy in a favorable review of this year's event, also for The Stranger, but at least during the Pop Conference it is world-class nerdy."

The expertise that confers that aura of nerdiness can serve as a superb personal organizer, helping to sort through the vast amount of music at our disposal more efficiently than all the algorithms that purport to mirror our taste preferences back to us. Because you can only move to the beat when you've found the beat to move you, a task that scrolling through playlists can make extraordinarily tedious. In other words, what once may have seemed beside the point, a detour weakening the force of the pop narcotic's fix, now looks like the best way to reconnect the body with the power of music.

Pre-Digital Underground

A few blocks down the street from the Sunset Tavern is Bop Street Records, a store that recalls an era when the internet we know today existed only in the speculations of futurologists. It’s hard to imagine a less efficiently organized store. Row after row of tightly packed vinyl dominates the shelf space. Although there are used CDs for sale, they are outnumbered not only by the LPs, but by shellac as well. There aren’t many places where customers can leisurely sample 78rpm records from the era when the fox trot was the hot new dance, but Bop Street is one of them.

Like Sonic Boom, a local chain with an outlet in Ballard, Bop Street is honoring Record Store Day. Because they only sell used items, however, they don’t have any of the special promotional merchandise labels have released to stores for the occasion. Business is heavier than usual, though, thanks to the 15% discount and the influx of out-of-town music lovers. One customer is delighted to spot the cover of a disco record he learned about yesterday in a panel at the conference. Another has a stack of obscure spoken-word discs that he is Researching Music Off-linethinking of incorporating into his next sonic collage. And a third is content to just browse aimlessly, breathing a sigh of relief that places like Bop Street not only exist, but show signs of a surprising resurgence at the expense of the compact disc

In a way, this remarkable store is a mirror image of the Pop Conference itself, simultaneously the relic of an outmoded culture and the promise of a future in which modishness ceases to matter. Best of all, at a time when the slogan “Show me the money” has the ring of sarcasm, it’s still a financially viable operation. What keeps it running is the same thing that brings folks back to theconference year after year, the conviction that value is a means, notan end.

Presenters at the conference sort through the past like the record collectors at Bop Street or, for that matter,the crowd that gathered earlier on Record Store Day to rifle throughthe $1 bargain CDs and LPs around the corner at Sonic Boom. They redeem the promise of forgotten artists and scenes by asking us to stop for a minute to contemplate them. No, it’s not a “sweaty” or “irrational” performance. Yet it plays a crucial role in the music world. Without it, we might bliss out on the dance floor or in the mosh pit, but would have a hard time stringing those moments of abandon together into something that lasts.

 

Lead Image: Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney.

“L'chai-im!,” the boozy voices blare, “L'chai-im!” The surging mass is a sea of open mouths and raised arms. But the solidarity is overwhelmingly cheerful. Even those who came reluctantly or in a mood to judge have succumbed. No matter how frantic things get, this is a crowd tuned to a non-violent pitch. The irony of the situation is that so many young, hip people keen to avoid ridicule have abandoned their impulse to find irony in the situation. The chanting, in other words, is sincere.

Since this scene took place, not in some quaintly progressive summer camp where Theodore Bikel songs fill the air, but a dark concert venue whose patrons are usually more interested in pairing off than achieving unity through music, this behavior is remarkable. Once again, Tel Aviv band Monotonix has pulled off its special brand of performance art, making something whole out of a crowd that had seemed hopelessly fragmented.

Given the difficulty that Israel has been having at getting any good publicity in the world, Monotonix’s achievement might seem like grounds for a commendation or, at the very least, a fat government subsidy. For a demographic that encompasses young Americans who love alternative music – and those who pretend to love it, in the hopes of becoming a “Friend With Benefits” – the long and frizzy-haired threesome of guitarist Yonatan Gat, drummer Haggai Fershtman and front man Ami Shalev is doing more to inspire goodwill towards their homeland than heavy-handed propaganda ever could.

Bar RafaeliThe same might be said for Bar Refaeli , the Israeli model who recently graced the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. But whereas Refaeli’s elaborately preened loveliness informs Americans that Israel can be a place for musing on the body as well as body armor, Monotonix conveys a more complex message. Their performances also celebrate the body, surely, but in a less goal-directed sense. They urge us to rethink the standard usage of the word “concert,” since the crowd is as much a part of the show as the musicians who lead it. Everyone, in a sense, is working in concert, their bodies fused together by the desire to move as one .

While there is nothing overtly political in Monotonix’s art, they remind us that Israel wasn’t only created by the conservatives who currently steer its foreign and domestic policy. Their shows feel like a slice of life on a progressive kibbutz, where individual differences dissolve in the recognition of common purpose. Israel’s strong heritage of a leftism committed to decentralization and the do-it-yourself ethos has largely vanished from public view in the past few decades. But vestiges of it can still be discerned in the country’s libidinal life, where transgression can still be conceived of as a goal instead of a pitfall. Perhaps Monotonix’s greatest achievement has been to reactivate this attitude and present it in a form that holds appeal to young people in the United States and Europe. They might not be the sort of cultural ambassadors that government bureaucrats approve, but that’s precisely why they are right for the job . 

In a way, the band practices a kind of diplomacy simply by striving to make alternative rock, American style, rather than the club music typical of its native city. Interviewed before the show for a feature to appear in the Tucson Weekly , Shalev explained that, "In Israel, rock music isn’t really in our culture. For us in Israel rock and roll is kind of a foreign culture. The only way for us to see and hear rock and roll music is through records, TV and the internet. In America people understand that rock and roll should let you free. It’s the people’s culture. It’s nature. It’s in the blood."

The irony in this sincerity is that Montonix does a better job of stirring that blood into action than most American bands. Like the musicians of the British invasion, their distance from the United States inspires a passion that natives find difficult to muster. And the strength of that conviction gives Americans permission to suspend disbelief. It's like seeing our new President through foreign eyes. Whatever reservations we may have about the performance of the current Administration, the fact that Barack Obama is so popular abroad, especially when his predecessor was not, makes us feel better about our homeland. And in reminding American audiences what they love about their own heritage, Montonix also encourages them to think positively about Israel. Could a culture that produced such a fierce commitment to freedom really be as bad as the country's detractors suggest?

Unlike some of the clubs that a band of Monotonix’s stature plays, this particular venue, at Tucson’s storied Congress Hotel, attracts an audience which, if not racially diverse, at least bridges the gap between hardcore scenesters and casual concert-goers. Although some of those in attendance already know what the show promises, others are taken completely by surprise. Coming at the tail end of a two-week series called WXSW, the city’s low-intensity attempt to take advantage of all the musical talent passing through on I-10 on its way to or from Austin’s famous SXSW music festival, this particular bill has attracted many people who want to get more mileage out of their $15 festival pass. In a way, it’s the perfect crowd for Gat, Fershtman and Shalev, whose approach to rock and roll benefits from the friction generated by non-believers.

This is not to suggest that repeat customers will be disappointed. If longtime fans of Bruce Springsteen can act like new converts at his musical revivals, so could the followers of Monotonix. The Israeli band is certainly capable of inspiring devotion of that intensity. By the end of their set at Club Congress, people are lined up to purchase their records at the “merch” table even though the music has often seemed more like an appetizer than the main course. When a handlebar-mustachioed man in a tight-fitting, yellow knit outfit that makes him look like a huge bee has repeatedly leaped over and, in some cases, onto your head while his bandmates keep relocating their “stage” farther and farther into the crowd, it’s hard to pay attention to nuance.

Maybe that’s why Monotonix’s sound is so relentlessly spare. Live, their songs often feel like the preludes or codas to tunes that never come, the sort of improvisations that a rhythm section cobbles together while the singer struggles to resolve technical difficulties. And there are plenty of those. Because Shalev is continuously scrambling over the invisible walls that normally divide a band from its audience, his microphone cord takes on a demonic cast, snaking its way through the crowd with potentially deadly results. People keep tripping over it. One man gets his foot caught at the precise moment when the impromptu mosh pit demands a sudden shift in stance, making him look like a novice skier about to break both legs with a sickening crunch. At one point, I look to my right to see that the cord has become a noose tightening around the neck of a blissed out young woman who seems to welcome auto-erotic asphyxiation. During one ten-minute stretch, Shalev bellows on top of the bar without realizing that the cord has become disconnected, transforming him into a silent-film version of himself.

Fershtman’s drum kit is also subject to bouts of silence, as it gets dismantled and redeployed throughout the set, sometimes as a platform for Shalev’s crowd-surfing antics. Only Gat’s guitar remains in action for the duration of the set. When Shalev and Fershtman lead the bulk of the crowd out the emergency exit onto Congress Street, playing the part of the pied pipers of Tel Aviv, Gat stays behind, his staccato squalls eerily muffled by the blacked-over windows that separate him from his bandmates. During this part of the show, which recreates one of Montonix’s favorite forms of disruption, documented in numerous clips posted by the band’s fans to YouTube, I am startled when I suddenly realize that, overcome with the refreshment of cool air on my skin, I have stepped into a street that has not forsaken its usual function. Cars pass by, swerving to avoid the crowd, their occupants no doubt wondering if they have stumbled upon some strange midnight protest.

It’s a surreal climax to a show that has been engineered for surrealism. The more I think about it, though, what’s really surreal is how normal the show’s surrealism feels. Together with many of my fellow audience members, I have risked injury, taking one blow from Shalev’s leg as he was being passed through the crowd and narrowly avoiding more substantial impact when he dove headfirst off a table in my direction. I have been drenched in a variety of alcoholic beverages because he periodically lurches forward to repurpose concert-goers’ distractions. I have sought, despite my abject failure to tie proper knots in Cub Scouts, to keep the chords from getting hopelessly tangled on my account. And I have done all this and more while alternately bouncing up and down or letting the waves of energy rocketing through the crowd carry me to a new part of the floor. But the band’s refusal to play by the alternative rock rules strikes me as strangely rule-bound.

Like the riots my anarchist friends from college would spend weeks planning, the spontaneity in Monotonix performances is clearly the result of much foresight. Asked in the Tucson Weekly interview about how the band decides whether to include fire in their act, Shalev made it clear that the band's transgressions are decidedly prudent. "If we want to do the fire thing, we ask the permission of the promoters and the owners of the venues. We don’t do it without asking or something like that. And if we’re allowed to do it, we see if it’s not too crowded and if it’s not and we feel that it’s not dangerous, we do it. If it’s too dangerous. we don’t do it. That’s the policy." His choice of the word "policy" is no accident. Monotonix wants to convey the thrill of anarchy without courting the dangers of true chaos. It's a sensible goal for a band that wants to build a career. But it's also why, despite the singular pleasures of my experience at the Club Congress show, I find myself pondering what it must be like for Monotonix to bust their asses to shape this sort of disorder night after night after night.

What’s it like to see Monotonix a second, third or fourth time? The thought clings to my body memories of collective bliss like something you just can’t scrape off your shoe. It’s one thing to visit a kibbutz for a month and participate heartily in its activities and another entirely to live there for years and years. Of course, this tension between singularity and repetition is integral to all live performance. Audiences expect shows to be carefully choreographed, yet wait eagerly for deviations from the plan. Whether the artist is Placido Domingo, U2 or Miley Cyrus, those deviations provide the details that give a particular performance value. And yet those are the same moments that inspire fans to traffic in live recordings. What resists reproduction in a live setting – the misplayed note that makes a song more poignant, the conversation with the audience that frames it in a new way – is precisely what fuels the urge for mechanical reproduction

Because the music Monotonix plays frequently seems like an afterthought, they aren’t like the bands that inspire a brisk traffic in concert recordings. Gat, Fershtman and Shalev certainly improvise with the best of them. But the variations they craft on the fly have more to do with the experience of the show as a whole. The Grateful Dead remain the gold standard for live recordings. They allowed their fans to bring in tape recorders long before file sharing made do-it-yourself reproduction seem like a natural right. The Dead were famous for their vast repertoire – set lists often varied wildly from one night to the next – and what aficionados call “space,” the unstructured jam sessions that would convey the show from one song to the next. Although Monotonix concerts include a good deal of sound that isn’t found on their limited discography, it lacks the distinctiveness, shorn of its setting, to inspire collectors. What gives their shows character is not the way they sound, but how and where the sound is made.

In a way, this makes Monotonix more like the Grateful Dead than its members or fans would likely acknowledge. The Israeli band’s live performances also involve “space.” But in their case it’s the musicians, more than the music, that moves. That’s why concert-goers who are possessed by the impulse to document their experience turn to video. These days, young people are accustomed to hold up their phones or cameras to capture shots of a band for absent friends or their own archives. The show at Club Congress took this practice to another level, though. As the performance rapidly escalated to a fine simulation of anarchy, many individuals decided that they had to record the whole concert. Some, clearly prepared for what they were witnessing, had brought high-definition cameras with them, which they gripped precariously above their heads amid the intense moshing.

Because it was often difficult to see the band from where I stood, I had the sensation that I was witnessing a “flash mob,” in which a group of people converge on a location and engage in a common activity that appears uncommon to the precise extent that they are doing it together, in public. Monotonix, I concluded, is the perfect band for the YouTube era, in which people not only feel the urge to document their meaningful experiences but share them with the world. The fact that Shalev would periodically strike a pose and hold it for several seconds, making sure the amateur documentarists had a clear shot of him, only reinforced this notion.

This is where the good that the band is doing to promote an alternative image of Israel has the potential to be compromised. Although it may be fashionable these days to assert that there’s no real difference between participating in an experience for its own sake and participating in it for the sake of storing memories for later use, the distinction still matters. And it holds particular significance for American attitudes towards Israel. The tourist so overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Land that he shuts off everything but his camera is an appropriate figure for a broader failure to see the country as more – or less – than a thrill ride. As powerful an experience as a Monotonix concert can be, the band’s insistence on making transgression into a ritual, performed as dutifully as their set list, threatens to limit the power of their example. The best tribute to Israel’s progressive heritage would be to inspire people to move in concert, not only during the show, but long after it is over.

This article was written with the assistance of Annie Holub

There’s always something tricky about analogies. They are supposed to get you closer to the truth of something. But they do it through a falsehood that, even when we are conscious of its workings, has the power to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. A temper tantrum is not a raging sea. The setting sun is not an overripe tomato. The tire tracks on this loamy path are not the scar on my body I trace with my fingertips. But once a statements like these are made, it is hard to get them out of one’s head.

The problem is more pronounced when the terms of the analogy are more closely linked. That’s why I was so disturbed when, during the height of the IDF’s recent incursion into Gaza, a casual acquaintance defended it by asking me to make a hypothetical comparison.

“You progressives can talk all you want about how the Israeli action is disproportionate, given the disparity in casualties. But I bet you’d feel different if you woke up every day with the fear of being blown up. Imagine if they were firing missiles at Tucson from just across the border in Nogales. Trust me: you’d change your tune.”

The unease inspired by this provocation was amplified by other discussions I’d been having about the conflict. Predictably, most people at the Jewish Community Center expressed support for the rationale behind the operation, if not the operation itself. Still, dissent could be discerned beneath the surface. Elsewhere, I was repeatedly struck by the degree to which coverage of the situation in Gaza had bypassed the usual ideological stamping process. Despite the tight restrictions Israel had imposed on the foreign press, the ugly details of a war in which innocent civilians were the primary victims had managed to seep into mainstream consciousness. Individuals I’d never imagined to have much interest in international politics were eager to share their opinions of the operation. Many, even those I would normally classify as Republicans, were highly critical of it.

Clearly, for all of their concern with managing the flow of information, the Israelis were losing the publicity war. What they needed was a way to make Americans and Europeans understand their motivation for being so ruthless. They had to make them identify with their position. That’s why the analogy between Gaza and the border towns of Mexico struck me as both brilliant and insidious.

Regardless of their political orientation, residents of southern Arizona are acutely aware of the risks and rewards that derive from traffic between the United States and Tucson. Until the current economic crisis took hold, discussions of what to do about the border, and the problem of illegal immigration were invariably the hottest topic in the state. Even now, with the state of Arizona making unprecedented cutbacks and unemployment rising steeply, complaints about “illegals” still resound on talk radio and in the grumblings of working-class men and women who blame their difficulty finding or keeping a job on Mexicans.

At the same time, many of the stores in Tucson are depending on legal border-crossing to stay afloat in these tough times. Because consumer goods are cheaper and more plentiful in the States, middle-class Mexican citizens regularly drive several hours to shop here. Just as the city would suffer irreparable damage if the well-off “snowbirds”, most of them retirees, who winter here no longer came, it would be grievously injured if more stringent border controls or customs regulations discouraged consumers from south of the border.

There is also the black market to consider. For better or worse, a shockingly high percentage of the illegal drugs that enter the United States pass through the Tucson area on their way north. The crime rate associated with this traffic is rising steadily. The effects of the Narco Wars in Mexico, which have thrown its border states into chaos, are manifesting themselves in places like San Diego, Tucson, Phoenix and El Paso to an unprecedented degree.

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Heard out of context, the music collected on this intriguing record might seem easy to place. Americans are among the world’s least worldly people, slow to learn and fast to conclude that they already know what they need to know. But even a NASCAR enthusiast from rural Georgia could probably identify this sound without much hesitation. The United States has been in the Middle East too long and too deeply for the culture of that region to remain anonymous. News reports and narrative films are scored to conjure up impressions of its geography with remarkable efficiency. Location shots may be done in Twentynine Palms instead of Palestine or Pakistan, to save money, time or lives, but our ears convince us that what we’re seeing is authentic. Like Southeast Asia before it, the Middle East has been transformed from a blank on the map to one that it is all too easy to flesh out with the details of stereotype.

Yet it’s precisely the belief that we understand, more or less, where the songs are coming from that underscores the problems that this sort of cultural artifact poses. Listening for what we expect to find makes us deaf to what we need to learn. Perhaps if the music here is easy to place, it’s because our conception of the region is insufficiently nuanced. Like the real estate developer who decides to plop a grid of tract homes down on land that is far less flat or featureless than his plan indicates, our ability to locate the music on Give Me Love (Honest Jon's, 2008) is the product of a failure to perceive where it might prove out of place. The plucked notes of Salim Daoud’s “Abuthiyya” may stimulate a craving for lamb or eggplant dishes, the beat in Badria Anwar’s “Lega Taresh Habibi” the urge to see a belly dancer perform, but those impulses derive more from the fantasy of a generic Middle East, the product of what Edward Said famously termed "Orientalism" than from the realities of any particular locale.

The record’s striking cover responds to our capacity for self-delusion. An awkward-looking person, wearing improbably dark glasses, plays the violin like someone shut off from the outside world. Were the image sharper, its provenance and purpose might be clear. But its high contrast and poor resolution distance it from the photograph it reproduces. The evidence of half-toning indicates that it derives from a newspaper clipping, thereby making it a copy of an imperfect copy. With its clotted blacks set off by an antiseptic blue, it looks like one of the more subdued panels in a series of Andy Warhol silk screens. Consumers familiar with the graphic design made popular by punk could easily take this picture for one of the savagely decontextualized images favored in that genre, the sort that appeared on 45 RPM record sleeves for bands that sought to brutally eviscerate tradition.

The large-font title on the cover reinforces the impression. The forceful injunction to “give me love” resonates oddly with the image. Is that a wry smile on the violinist’s face? Could he be using the violin as an instrument of seduction? Or is the insistence more sinister, his expression the index of a subtle sadism? Were it not for the fine print beneath the title, questions of this sort might overwhelm prospective listeners. Indeed, it’s not difficult to imagine a person sufficiently intrigued by the cover’s ambiguity to purchase the record in the hopes of answering them. This helps to explain the length of the subtitle. Presumably, the title conveys a lack. The “brokenhearted” demand love because they do not have it. If they insist, it is from a position of weakness not strength.

More importantly, they do so from a specific place and time. These are not new songs. And they are not songs from a generic “Middle East”. No, they come from a city with a rich cultural heritage, during a period when it was poised uneasily on the cusp of modernity. Baghdad in the 1920s was, in a sense, out of place. In the wake of World War I, as the British and French divided up the defeated Ottoman Empire, Baghdad became the capital of a country as arbitrarily imposed on the landscape as any ground-leveling subdivision. The British had rewarded the man who led the Arab rebellion against the Sultanate, a story made famous and partially false by the writings of T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), by installing him as the king of the new state, even though he hailed from nearly a thousand miles away in Mecca. As the recent misadventures of American foreign policy have reminded us, this move went hand in hand with a decision to give the area’s Sunni minority a disproportionate amount of power relative to its Shi’ite majority. During the time specified in the record’s title, however, the monarchy’s autonomy was circumscribed by the British Mandate of Mesopotamia, a situation not unlike the one that prevails in Iraq today, where the nation’s government still acts, to a large degree, at the pleasure of the United States.

In other words, the historical context from which these “songs of the brokenhearted” derive is highly significant, though of the sort that most listeners will only be able to comprehend by doing some research. That’s typically what the liner notes for a collection of this sort are for. Though extensive, however, the ones included in Give Me Love are narrower in scope. Like the record’s cover, they are also disorienting. Although notes about the music itself and translations of the songs are included, the first thing a listener confronts when looking at the CD booklet is a long text, commencing without title or byline, that begins, “I was born in 1921 in Baghdad. I lived in the area only inhabited by Jews, though we had no limitation on going anywhere.”

The end of this meandering autobiographical piece reveals it to be the result of an interview with Yeheskel Kojaman, credited– together with Mark Ainley, who put the whole collection together – as the co-author of the notes on the music that follow. Yet that information does nothing to mitigate the reader’s sense of being immersed in another world, one where the singers in nightclubs were women “chosen from amongst prostitutes;” where coffee shops had become not only the spot for men to play games and chat, but where they gathered to listen to music played over loudspeakers; and where professional instrumentalists were exclusively Jewish. While the piece doesn’t romanticize this period unduly, it does remind us that there was a time, before the Middle East was called the “Middle East,” when tolerance of different religious and cultural traditions was one of the region’s defining traits. Kojaman’s narrative charts the decline of this relative freedom, as resistance to British power gave rise to political movements founded on an exclusionary nationalism. After a coup d’etat briefly put a pro-German regime in place, the situation for Baghdad’s Jews worsened greatly. Some turned to Zionism. Others, like Kojaman, joined the Communist movement, a decision that led to nearly a decade of imprisonment and, upon his release, flight into Israel.

The fact that Kojaman’s story precedes the booklet’s more conventional liner notes and that he devotes considerable time to matters only cursorily related to Baghdad’s music scene speaks volumes about the intentions behind Give Me Love. This is not a collection for completists. Nor is it directed at experts on world music. Rather, it represents an attempt to rethink the way we place music. The disorientation the compilation inspires is not an end in itself, but the means to inspire listeners to pay closer attention to particulars. “Abuthiya,” for example, is not just the title of the song by Salim Daoud included here, but for a kind of song also represented by “Wehak El Kab Walkossein” and “Malek Ana.” The track listings make this much clear, but no more, inspiring listeners to discern what these songs have in common. Similarly, the presence of songs with origins in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Kurdish lands, as well as a Hebrew hymn, “Abney Eqdah,” raises questions about the relationship between local and regional identity. Give Me Love wants to give listeners enough detail to destabilize their assumptions without taking measures to reorient them.

At least, that’s what the record’s approach towards geography implies. Things get more complicated when we consider the way that Give Me Love inspires us to reflect on media. The CD booklet features more images like the one on the record’s cover, presenting photographs in a way that foregrounds their imperfection. Regardless of how poor the source material may have been, these pictures could at least have been restored to the point where the half-tone grid’s effect was diminished and where some of the details lost within it were made visible again. Instead of going this route, however, Will Bankhead’s design concept accentuates the distance between the “then” these photographs capture and the “now” in which faces of the dead stare out at us. Whereas the blue background of the cover image gives it a curiously modern aspect, like a photocopied handbill, the yellowish tint of these images in the booklet gives them an antique appearance. It’s a strategy that echoes the work of artists who have sought to represent the “unrepresentable” tragedy of the Holocaust by rendering loss visible. Unfortunately, it’s also a strategy consistently deployed by purveyors of exoticism intent on summoning nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” of colonialism.

This move would not be noteworthy if Give Me Love as a whole indulged in this form of distancing. Yet that is not the case. Because both Kojaman’s story and the notes on the music are written simply, without the adjective-laden passages that typically characterize invitations to nostalgia, a tension permeates the booklet. More importantly, the songs on the record are presented as cleanly as possible. Indeed, because they feature a small number of musicians and derive from idioms in which bass sounds were unusual, they sound much younger than they are. Part of the reason why the songs seem so easy to place is that they do not sound displaced. Even though they come from phonographic records that were bound to contain flaws, it’s easy to forget, listening to the record, that these songs were captured long before the era of high-fidelity reproduction. Indeed, someone listening to the music without knowing its source would be sorely pressed to identify it as dating from the 1920s.

The fact that the CD comes in a separate sleeve decorated with the labels from two His Master’s Voice recordings, with track listings in Arabic and English, confirms that the record’s packaging is meant to provoke listeners to relate to the music in a specific way. The idea, clearly, is to remind them that the music they are about to hear is from a long time ago, even if it does not sound that way. It seems like an effective approach, too, for those listeners who still listen to CDs. Unfortunately, though, even dedicated music lovers are likely to leave their discs on the shelf these days. We live at a time when much of the culture we consume either comes without a cover or with one that we are invited to customize. The resulting confusion affects everything from people who get their internet content through a news reader to Bit Torrent users who get their movies without having to pay for packaging.

But it’s in the music industry where this trend first materialized and where it has had the most far-reaching consequences. Although new technology like the iPhone has inspired attempts to revive interest in album art, the fact remains that there are millions of young people in their teens and twenties whose primary experience of music has come from downloading individual songs, decontextualized and sometimes even mistitled. For many of them, CDs are what their parents buy at the local Starbucks, an overpriced commodity destined for the dustbin of history.

Indeed, this transformation has been so sweeping that hipper youth are gravitating towards the quaint technology of the phonograph record as a way to rebel against the status quo. But that fetishization, while salutary from the perspective of vinyl fans, hasn’t yet restored cover art to functionality. There’s a significant difference between collecting something for its format and collecting something for its own sake. While the size and shape of LP covers is praised and specific albums are lauded for their gatefold packaging, most music these days is sold in a form where cover art is an afterthought, if it’s even sold at all.

Ultimately, that’s what makes Give Me Love such a curious undertaking. Deprived of the cover and liner notes, it comes off as a rather generic distillation of various musical styles that Western consumers identify with the Middle East and, in too many cases, as the Middle East. There’s nothing wrong with the music, all of which is good. But the record doesn’t give us the tools, as a single-artist collection might, to begin thinking about it deeply. Even the blind musician Salim Daoud, whose visage graces the cover, is only represented by three tracks. The songs here serve primarily as samples of something larger, a soundtrack for the effort to imagine the context that produced them. What makes this album special, in other words, is not something that the music itself can be counted on to convey. Without the long and highly specific title, without the liner notes, and without the complex visual information of the packaging, Give Me Love might well be regarded simply as a collection to get diners in the mood.

The irony in this, as the liner notes make clear, is that the songs collected here, whether of religious or secular origin, whether traditional or modern, were recorded and sold in part because there was a burgeoning market for background music in the 1920s. Although wealthier individuals had phonographs in their homes, record dealers counted on the proprietors of cafés for much of their business. Before radio broadcasting came to the region, this was the way people became acquainted with new music. Unlike in a concert setting, though, where music is the main focus, phonographs were not the principal attraction in cafés. They lured new customers, surely, and inspired old ones to stick around. But they did not testify to increasing interest in music per se so much as the realization that it could make the pressures of existence easier to bear.

It is an attitude towards music familiar in our own age. In fact, it is probably safe to say that the dream of seamlessly integrating music into everyday life has prevailed over the dream of being transported by music into another life. We so badly want songs that go together, without forcing us out of our mental groove, that we are willing to consign the task of sorting them to robots like Apple’s new “Genius” program for iTunes. Disorientation is not something we seek through music now, but a condition we want music, our music to soothe. While the decline of record-album packaging is first and foremost the result of the technological changes that have made copying music as easy as listening to music, it also corresponds to our desire to strip music of its otherness. Freed of the reminders that it comes from somewhere else, a song is more easily incorporated into the sense of self. From this perspective, the function of music is to confirm identity, not challenge it.

One of the more striking developments of the filesharing era, though, is that this attitude towards music has increased even as its appeal in the marketplace has slackened. Maybe there’s something about the act of purchasing goods that lingers in the consciousness long afterwards, reinforcing the distinction between what is ours through nature and what is only ours through labor. By contrast, the sort of possession that results from downloading or copying music that one has no intention of paying for appears more pure, paradoxically, free of the taint of commodity fetishism. If we claim a song as ours without having invested hard-earned cash, that move then seems autonomously motivated rather than compensatory.

Could it be that Give Me Love disorients listeners simply because it doesn’t make much sense when heard through an iPod? It’s a strange notion, surely. But the fact that the record’s packaging draws attention to itself while also destabilizing our understanding of the music it frames implies, at the very least, that its compilers were keen to have us ponder Give Me Love as a specific cultural artifact. As the CD sleeve persistently reminds us, this collection does not document traditional music, but what happens when tradition is transformed by technology. That’s why there are songs from places with a different heritage than Baghdad.

And it’s also why the fact that many of them are Arab songs performed by Jewish musicians is so important. Walter Benjamin’s astonishingly prescient analysis of mechanical reproduction, itself a product of the same era as the music collected here, insists that the loss we experience in forsaking authenticity is the price of admission to a world in which what matters is not where we have been but what we wish to become. The problem, as subsequent cultural history has made clear, is that most of us spend our time and money trying to just be who we are. There’s a rich discussion for another day in that topic, as well as many others that this fascinating record broaches. For now, it is sufficient to note that the performers documented on this record made a living by being who they weren’t.

Our daughter was strangely quiet. Her words usually flow like snowmelt slashing through a canyon. Was she getting sick? My wife kept looking in the rear-view mirror to see if she could figure out was wrong, in the way that parents who drive regularly learn to do.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Skylar suddenly blurted out. I turned around to look at her. Jaw set, teeth seeking into her lower lip, she looked determined. And angry.

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Ami ShalevThere’s this guy you keep seeing around. He favors muscle shirts and cut-offs, even when it’s chilly out. When he walks, he has a way of putting his weight on the balls of his feet, like he’s looking for something to pounce on. Sometimes, when’s passing a shop window, he makes a sidelong glance at himself and flexes his triceps until he can see them ripple. And he talks up attractive women at every opportunity. One day, though, he sits down next to you on the bus and starts up a conversation without any obvious agenda. You’re surprised at how articulate he is and notice that his whole appearance changes the longer you talk. The bravado you used to silently indict from afar now seems like a layer of clothing he wears to cope with emotional weather. So when he asks for your phone number, you give it and make sure to get his in return. A week later you go by his place for the first time. He shows you to a seat on the couch and returns to what he’d been doing. “ My grandmother taught me to knit. It’s a great way to relax. Plus, I can make my friends gifts instead of buying them something in the store.” You sit back, a little dumbfounded. The television is tuned to an old movie. He senses your question. “Fellini, before he went surreal.”

Monotonix’s Body Language is that guy. At first, this hearty EP produced by the trio of guitarist Yonatan Gat, drummer Ran Shimoni and front man Ami Shalev seems like a sinewy testament to the virtues of in-your-face metal funk, an able reconstitution of the formula made wildly popular by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers when George the First was President. Bridging the difference between “sanguine” and “sanguinary,” the rhythm’s happy-minded aggression sets you throbbing. If you go through life lamenting the lack of hardness in your rock, this record will redress the dysfunction with brutal efficiency. What gives Body Language real staying power, though, is that it stays firm without becoming simplistic. The Yonatan Gatlonger you listen, the more its taut climaxes seem like a cover story diverting attention from feelings not bound to the beat.

While Monotonix hits its 1970s reference points square, from Black Sabbath to Funkadelic, the overall effect is not simple nostalgia so much as longing for the sort of reconciliation that usually requires the perspective afforded by distance. They don’t sound like a band that actually existed in that decade. Body Language urges listeners to acknowledge the past rather than relive it.. This is where the fact that the band is from Tel Aviv rather than New York or London looms largest. In some ways, Israelis relate to that decade just like their American and European counterparts. The promise of the 1960s gave way to disillusionment in Israel, too. From the horror of Munich to the Yom Kippur War, to the widening ideological divide between liberal and conservative Israelis confirmed by the Likud party's rise to power, the 1970s were not an era that inspired much optimism.

And the rock music of that period that served as its soundtrack, most of it imported from the United States and the United Kingdom, was imbued with an aura of resignation, expressing a desire for rebellion without devotion to a cause. Its hardness, in other words, tended towards cynicism. That’s why the moments when Body Language temporarily foregoes the masculinist party line are so significant. The title track is a perfect example. After starting with a riff straight out of Guitar Hero and vocalist Shalev sing-speaking his lines like a man whose face is frozen in a sneer, the song veers into a chorus that turns that cocksure pose inside out. Recontextualized against a mournful figure that sounds like something from a Euro-Pop number of the 1980s, the very antithesis of classic rock swagger, Shalev's voice metamorphoses into an instrument of introspective regret. To be sure, that transformation is balanced by the irony that he never relinquishes. But the music prevents his words from coming off as insincere.

Much has been made of how widely Body Language diverges from Monotonix’s live shows, already legendary for breaking down every barrier between audience and performer even though they are a relatively new act from a place typically regarded as a rock music backwater. While it’s true that the record sounds a lot more polished and “rockist” than their anarchic concerts, however, it produces similar effects. In a live setting, the band encourages listeners to dispense with convention and the distance that helps to maintain it. And that’s what they do on Body Language as well, the difference being that breaking their audience free of mental chains in that context requires a different approach. Either way, Monotonix lure you into their work, inspiring trepidation, only to invite you to sit down on the sofa and watch them knit for a while. In a culture where men have long been trained to root all traces of softness out of their personality, that’s a message with more ideological import than the shouting of political slogans.

 

Check out a recent show by the band on WFMU.