Fratello Metallo: for serious You might not expect to see many *Men of God* at a heavy metal concert, but that doesn’t mean there are no monks rocking out -- on stage, no less. Take Fratello Metallo, or the Metal Friar, a 62-year-old Capuchin monk who’s based in Milan and fronts a metal group that just came out with their second album. This isn’t just Christian rock with a bit more grit. The Metal Friar sings about sex, drugs, and alcohol in his lyrics, and though he mentions faith and religion in some of his songs, he maintains that he’s not trying to convert anyone to Catholicism.

The Metal Friar, aka Brother Cesare Bonizzi, began his love affair with heavy metal at a Metallica concert fifteen years ago. 

He fell in love with metal energy, and has been making loud head-bashing music ever since, sharing stages with the like of Slayer, Iron Maiden, and (irony of ironies) Judas Priest.

There’s something so amazingly perverse about raging metalheads flashing the devil sign at a friar. See for yourself:

Nelson Mandela: the Nobel Peace Prize winner shakes his groove thangEver play that Six Degrees of Separation game where you pair two completely opposite people and try to link them together in six steps or less? Like for example, how do you get from Amy Winehouse to Nelson Mandela (without any anti-incarceration campaign jokes)? Thank goodness the people over at the HIV/AIDS awareness organization 46664 are giving us a good reason to tie these two very different celebs together.

That’s right: While the entire blogosphere was busy announcing that Amy Winehouse was to enter rehab at exclusive Israeli detox center, and then taking it back, the British pop star and tabloid favorite was making plans to sing at Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration and fundraiser in London next month, as 46664 announced today. This will be the singer’s first big-time concert appearance since November, and the world should be grateful that this particular Winehouse rumor is true.

Other performers scheduled for the event include Queen, Annie Lennox, Razorlight, and many more. Going to be in London around June 27? Tickets are still available.

The issues of our age are increasingly reissues. Many people would rather purchase their pasts than pay the price for a future worth living. We see it on the DVD shelves at the big-box stores, where television shows from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including ones that were deemed laughable when they were on the air, take up the space formerly reserved for new material. And we see it at Starbucks, where the CDs that move are the ones featuring the same old classic rock and pop that have crowded the radio dial over the past two decades. Even in stores devoted exclusively to the sale of cultural artifacts, a species seemingly destined for the status of endangered species, a good number of each week’s “new releases” are not new at all. It’s enough to make a person seek out a hobby resistant to mass-mediation, like needlepoint or falconry.

But all is not lost. With the loss of novelty as the prime mover in sales of records, films, and books – videogames being a signal exception to the trend – comes the opportunity to tell the truth of history with a different slant. We’re so conditioned to pay attention to repackaged culture, even items that we’ve previously owned ourselves, that we are likely to stumble upon work that we missed the first time around. It is now possible to fill in the gaps in our cultural upbringing with greater precision, redeeming the past that should have been ours if only we had known better.

Leaving aside the psychological implications of this self-refashioning, perfectly suited to the obsessive profile editing that takes place on social networking sites, it gives us the chance to transform our taste for the better. This is where Steinski’s two-CD collection What Does It All Mean? (Illegal Art, 2008) comes in. The work of advertising writer, DJ, and record collector Steve Stein and various collaborators, most notably Double Dee, it hints that, if we’re bent on purchasing the past anyway, we might as well purchase one that resists conventional notions of ownership.

Filled with highly influential cut-and-paste recordings that, because of their social and legal provenance, were difficult to obtain at the time of their creation and largely out of circulation since, the first disc in this two-CD retrospective provides a passage back to a mid-1980s in which the marriage of hip-hop and rock meant more than Run-DMC’s collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way”, and in which tracks tailor-made for dance clubs doubled as the cutting edge for a Pop Art avant-garde (listen to tracks here).

Painstakingly assembled from tape at a time when sampling had yet to become the prosthetic limb of hip-hop and remix producers, tracks like “The Payoff Mix” and “Lesson Three (History of Hip-Hop)” recall the heyday of postmodernism in the arts, when the abandonment of minimalist aesthetics led to a flowering of collage from the lofty peaks of the gallery scene all the way to the murky bottomlands of popular culture. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more succinct distillation of the anything-goes approach that gave us everything from breadth-requirement multiculturalism to David Letterman at his edgy best.

The real revelation on the first disc of What Does It All Mean?, though, is “The Motorcade Sped On,” Steinski’s recasting of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which archival audio is paired with synth beats to surprisingly musical effect. It’s one thing to mash up different pop songs, as “The Payoff Mix” did, and another entirely to push that aesthetic to its logical extreme, revealing the distinction between culture and politics to be a differentially regulated boundary that serves the powers that be. If the propaganda machine is going to cross that border, Steinski suggests, we might as well follow it across. That’s definitely the message of the second disc here, his 2002 “comeback” record, the album-length collage Nothing To Fear, which takes advantage of technological advances in music-making without sacrificing the lucid simplicity of his work from the 1980s.

In a sense, it’s ironic that Steinski’s achievement is coming to us in the form of a neatly contained retrospective, since he was so instrumental in helping his listeners hear past the arbitrariness of packaging. If the big-box stores were catering to his approach, the whole-season collections of The Rockford Files and Knight Rider they proffer would be replaced by a vast array of mash-ups, the experience of YouTube transferred to disc. That wouldn’t sell, though. Indeed, it couldn’t sell, given the way copyright law is enforced. The paradox of What Does It All Mean? is that we are being asked to buy something that makes us question the reactionary nature of white-market consumption. Then again, the same could be said for books like Capital or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. It’s a contradiction inherent to revolutionary practice in a world where property relations matter more than the human beings they bind together. But it’s a contradiction we’re better off recognizing for what it is, something Steinski teaches us with brevity, wit and a good deal of soul.

Tokio Hotel: wearing their hearts on their sleeves and their skulls on their t-shirtsEver feel like you just can’t fully appreciate the Song of Songs until you can read and understand it in Hebrew? Well, according to German-translating friend of Jewcy Jewlicious, an article that ran in the Jüdische Allgemeine recently reports that young Israeli girls feel the same way about their new favorite band, Tokio Hotel. Apparently, the teens are OMG-ing so much over the German emo-popsters and their trademark guyliner demand for German language instruction in Israeli schools has vastly increased.

Tokio Hotel first gained mega popularity in Israel last year, spending months at the top of the Israeli music charts. After the dedicated efforts of their young, Israeli fanbase (including extensive petition campaigns to the Israeli embassy in Berlin), Tokio Hotel played its first concert at the Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center in October of last year.

“The fact that our Israeli fans are singing our German lyrics shows how music can connect people emotionally. There are no prejudices, no boundaries or barriers,” says the feathered-haired teen heartthrob lead singer Bill Kaulitz. And that’s great. Except we sort of agree with Jewlicious that Israeli teens might have rather found their great passion for German language and culture in something other than the High School Musical of German emo.

Efrim Menuck fronts the band currently named Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band—a band whose appellation, along with its sound, changes and grows with each new release. Currently, the band is a seven-piece composed of (among other instruments) violins, guitars, and a cello—and group choral chanting. Their newest release, Thirteen Blues for Thirteen Moons, finds the band in a more aggressive, rock-edged mood than usual, supplanting their experimental punk backgrounds (Menuck, along with the band’s violinist and bassist, also play in the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor). Just landed from their European tour, Menuck graciously filled us in on the band’s philosophy, writing habits, and the Facebook invasion of Canada.Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band: chilling in a field

I can't make up my mind whether your music and the imagery of your lyrics and albums reminds me more of old Baptist church spirituals, or old Jewish ones. Is that intentional?

We grab water from both of those rivers, because faith is a lovely thing, even if you don't believe in God. It's partly why the band is named after Mt. Zion—it's the holy mountain in the awful desert that illuminates the choruses of Baptist hymns, dusty klezmer tunes, and 6-minute dubplates. Also, I spent grades one through nine at Hebrew day school, and came home every night to my atheist father, who would try to undo any little thing I’d happened to learn that day.

This means that, somewhere in my little pea-brain, there's a knotted scar where the secular and the godly have fused; means that I tend to see things in terms of good and evil, write large, and means that I believe in congregations, hymns and prayers but not in God, so when I try to put words together to sing on top of this music that we all write together, that jumble just pours out of me, worried and conflicted and messy as hell.

Critics keep talking about your music as protest music, but it seems less like specific issue-oriented protests than protesting the system in general—a nonspecific cry to start over, build anew.

Yeah, for us it's all a raucous blues or joyful punk-rock implosion, but if we had to semaphore our primary complaints and concerns, it'd probably go something like this: The world's a mess, and we're led by murderous thieves who keep dragging us unwillingly ever closer to the gaping precipice.

What's your writing process like? Does one person come up with an idea for a song, or do you all start jamming and then run with it?

Our writing process is slow and backwards. We start with a handful of riffs, and hammer at them for hours on end, until some sort of rough counterpoints start to bloom. Then we break it all into little pieces, strew ’em all over the floor of our jamspace and then put them back together again as best we can. When the whole teetering pile is almost structurally sound, I'll start throwing words at it, and tangles of melody too, to harmonize with us all singing at once.

Then we bring these songs with us on the road and dump them into the laps of whatever audience has blessed us with their kindness and grace on any given night, and repeat that narrative, like long laps on a dimly-lit track, until the song itself is weathered, dented and true.

Is the music scene in Montreal going through a real golden age, or is it just attracting more attention? What's it like up there?

No, it's no golden age in Montreal right now. Skyrocketing rents, an overabundance of Facebook-obsessed university students, and an oversaturation of self-promotional A&R types has led to a state of affairs whereby most gigs glow with the impermanence of a flash-mob instead of any sort of self-sustaining community.

There's still a bunch of tiny, crucial glimmering flames though, and, like in any large city, there's a constant surplus of good people doing good work in the lovely shadows.

Are there a lot of Jews involved in the scene? Is it a coincidence, or did you grow up with other people who were into the same influences as you were?

No more Jews than any other scene, I guess; Mt. Zion's got four Jews and three goys, but most of Montreal's Jews took off when the FLQ [the extremist Front de liberation du Québec] started planting mailbox bombs in the early seventies. I spent most of my punk-rock adolescence being the only Jew in the room, so it's nice to feel a little less isolated these days, especially ’round the high holidays.

In "Blindblindblind," you sing, "My the light of our striving still shine." It almost feels like a prayer for something beyond—beyond the album, beyond the band, a kind of creative immortality. How do you want your music to be remembered?

Bad endings can ruin even the best story, so the only thing I know for sure is how I don't want things to end—the world is not a kind place for musicians, and there are very few happy endings in the grand historia de la rock, means that I don't want die poor and alone, nor do I want to be the vain jerk in the diaper stinking up the stage at the retro-festival, and while I hope that our band's stubborn little discography still glimmers with its own hard-won internal logic 30 years from now, I’m more concerned with a more achievable type of permanence. Good friends, a healthy family, and a couple of crucial smudges and footprints across our collective histories sounds more than pretty good to me.

DeScribe: Jewish gangsta When hip-hop audiences talk about being born into the game, they don’t usually mean like this. DeScribe, a.k.a. Shneur Hasofer, is the son of Hasidic singer-songwriter Devorah Hasofer, whose music I’ve never heard—her albums specify that her singing is “for women and girls only”—but I’d be willing to bet they don’t sound much alike.

And when hip-hop audiences talk about getting made, they also don’t usually mean it this way. DeScribe was born in Australia, moved to Israel as a child, and served as a sharpshooter in the Israeli army. This, and other life experiences (everything from growing up in Israel to touring with Killah Priest and Remedy of the Wu-Tang Clan) informs his music—personal, unapologetic, and politically charged. He currently writes and records beats and lyrics out of a studio inside his Seagate, New York yeshiva.

Obviously, you’re going for a different audience than your mother—but are you targeting mostly observant people, mostly non-observant people, or both? What’s the ultimate goal of your music?

My crowd is definitely different to that of my mother's, though my mother’s music isn't limited to the religious world, either. Being Hassidic Jews, we both believe in reaching out to the world with a positive message. Using the medium of hip-hop, I want to reach all walks of life and cultures.

The last time I asked my mother's opinion on my music, she told me she was my number one fan. In general both, my parents are very supportive when I invest my energies in a positive manner.

What was it like to be a sharpshooter in the Israeli army?

Joining the army at the age of 17 was a very emotional experience, and a very spiritual one. As a soldier, I felt a sense of honor and love for Israel and realized that I was in a situation not that different from my ancestors, who gave their lives in battle to protect our land, our culture and our sacred way of life. It caused me to mature and realize some realities of life.

Did you discuss politics with Killah Priest?

From what I remember, Killah Priest was more interested in the spiritual and biblical significance of Israel and the Jewish people. He is more the spiritual type, having grown up in a devout Christian home.

It seems from your lyrics like you’re trying to be a voice of reason and to inspire your listeners, but you’re also working out your own issues. What’s it like to take stuff you’re thinking about or wrestling with and put it on display?

In the Hassidic way of life, we’re encouraged to continuously grow. Our leaders have taught us there’s no such thing as staying in one place. Like a ball on a hill—if it’s not propelled up, then it’s rolling down.

In your single "iSong," you work with a lot of violent imagery—“Blam blam in my brain/everybody going insane,” goes one lyric. Then later, you sing, “Why me/why you/is it cause I am a Jew?” over images of an Israeli flag burning and Palestinian sharpshooters.

Ego is the root of all evil and the driving force behind today’s modern culture. It’s all about “how big I am,” “how respected I am”—it’s all coming from “me.” “Blam blam” expresses my opposition to the root of violence, which is ego. It's not a call to arms. It’s a call to question the world we live in, and to realize that there’s a purpose and reality bigger than our immediate surroundings.

What about the message “May Hashem avenge their blood” at the end—is this an expression of rage? A call to arms? What do you think should be done about the whole situation?

During production, I learned of the brutal massacre at Yeshiva Merkaz Harav and, therefore, our emotions affected the music video. It’s an issue I'm sure the world relates to, since these attacks are one of the symptoms of the low state of today’s society. Virginia Tech is just one of the many cases worldwide.

I don’t claim to be able to accept or judge these evil people, being a limited human being. As a result of thought, not rage, I ask G-d to avenge the blood of the young victims.

It’s interesting that you use Holocaust imagery together with footage of terrorist attacks. These days, when the Holocaust’s brought up in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s mostly by Palestinian activists trying to draw parallels between concentration camps and Palestinian internment camps. What do you think of that?

As a combat infantry soldier in time of war, I happened upon a number of these Palestinian “internment” camps and it is a complete oxymoron for anyone to even jokingly compare a Nazi work camp to a Palestinian refugee camp. These so-called camps are towns with stores, roads and facilities—no different to any other town. They’re not surrounded by armed guards, the people are not worked to death, not confined to cells, not used as human experiments, not subject to mass genocide.

The camps serve as a refuge from the Arab countries from which the refugees fled in fear of their lives. There are some who suffer harsh conditions, as expected in war, but a comparison between the six million murdered in the Holocaust to a war between Israel and the Palestinians is totally inappropriate and misleading.

Who are the dudes in handkerchiefs near the end of the video?

The 'dudes' in handkerchiefs appear with the words "Lead a life of temptation, with no inspiration, it's the adaptation of this generation.” This gang footage and the child clutching the weapon epitomize our generation—stooped in the worship of self, money and criminal violence and murder.

If we can begin to ask "why," we’ll discover a deeper truth beyond the limits of human understanding, a reality of spiritual value beyond our immediate existence. Why turn to the ground when you can turn to the heavens?

With Purim now safely behind us (you're not too hungover to shop, are you?) and Passover a mere four weeks away, it's time to start getting in the seder mood. If we've learned anything from the big stories this week, it's that the lines between races and cultures can be very shifty. Hence, a collection of culturally and musically diverse tunes to serve as the soundtrack to your seder planning—or a good-humored gift for the person hosting you.

 

	The SoCalled Seder "A mini hip hop symphony filled with old Jewish samples centered around the theme of the Passover Seder."
	This is the Afro-Semitic Experience "A mix of Jewish and African-American music both sacred and secular...The Afro-Semitic Experience is an ensemble dedicated to preserving, promoting and expanding the rich cultural and musical heritage of the Jewish and African diaspora. Multi-cultural soul."
	Reggae Passover "Reggae and West African arrangements of traditional and original music for the exodus holiday of Passover, played by an international ensemble featuring reggae artists, cantors, and some of the finest drummers West Africa has to offer."
	Abayudaya: The Music of the Jews of Uganda "A unique collection of African-Jewish music in which the rhythms and harmonies of Africa blend with Jewish celebration and traditional Hebrew prayer. This compelling repertoire is rooted in local Ugandan music and infused with rich choral singing, Afro-pop, and traditional drumming."

 

Previously: Letters of Creation Necklace, Readymade Purim Baskets

 

Welcome to a semi-regular column by JDub Records founder Aaron Bisman. Since he spends his days immersed in new Jewish music, we asked him what he listens to on his time off.

She's so unusual: Kaki King"Pull Me Out Alive" – Kaki King
Kaki King was good friends with one of my roommates senior year of college, so she hung around our place sometimes. With the exception of a baal tshuva and a former frummie from Monsey, my other Alphabet City roommates were all musicians, and being surrounded by artists was by turns inspiring, maddening, and fun as hell. Kaki had a very unique air about her—quiet but obviously passionate. Mellow in conversation but aggressive on her guitar. We went to a few of her early shows, where she stood alone onstage using her guitar as a drum when she wasn’t fingerpicking the hell out it. It wasn't what I expected to see (or like) in a New York club, but she was totally captivating.

In the past year, Kaki's career has taken off. Sean Penn asked her to do music for Into the Wild and she worked with the Foo Fighters on their last album. She’s no longer a mute instrumentalist—last week, she put out Dreaming Of Revenge. You MUST watch this video. Yes, the light effect is similar to those annoying Sprint commercials. But this video was made from 5,000 still photographs. And the song has that perfect poppy edge while staying rooted in Kaki’s alternative/indie base. Love it.

"Cocaine" – Sly & the Revolutionaries & Jah Thomas Dreux
Dub is essentially reggae with the delay effects turned up and the vocals turned down—chill instrumental music. Adam Mansbach, the author of The End of the Jews, turned me onto this track. Adam’s book is about a multigenerational family of Jewish artists, including stoned bar mitzvah DJs and graffiti-bombing grandfathers When he made a “playlist” for the book, he included this and described it as solid music to write to. So I took his advice, bought it on iTunes, and put it on as I started to write this. I think it's a new essential in my collection.

"Big Mistake" – Tim Fite
Mark my words, Tim Fite is the new Beck. He's steeped in blues, country, and the hip hop art of sampling, but has a personality (and stage show) all his own. I bummed a ride with Tim to Bonnaroo last year in a van where we were only allowed to listen to books on tape and ‘80s hip also on tape—and we had to stop in the mountains of Tennessee to check out a gourd stand (where we convinced his brother, Greg Fite, to buy a hand-made raccoon-skin hat). Tim plays acoustic guitar onstage, and Greg runs sampler and projections, which often show Tim backing himself up on other instruments, and other times feature Tim’s illustrations and animations. Have I made the “personality all his own” point well enough yet?

This song is from his upcoming album, “Fair Ain’t Fair.” It’s a great leap forward in Tim's songwriting and style, but also a perfect introduction to his music: Catchy, melodic, easy to sing along with, but still with the bleeps and blips and weird moments I love him for. You can hear it here.

Rays of sunshine: DeVotchKa"Transliterator" – DeVotchKa
Heard this on Woxy.com, a great online radio station I recently got into. DeVotchKa waves the flag of “Gypsy rock” (the camp inhabited by Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box, Slavic Soul Party, Golem, etc), which I've never fully understood. Using an accordion is great, but it doesn’t make the music Gypsy (or Roma). I hear more David Byrne that Eugene Hutz.

This track is from DeVotchKa’s album, which came out this week. It's also the second song in today's list from Anti Records, which I guess makes me an Anti fan. I love the keyboard riff, the delicate sound of the music, the strings – I can almost imagine this being used in an extended cut of a van-chasing scene in Little Miss Sunshine (which they scored).

"Purim crunk"(from the Emory Hillel)
Thursday night is Purim, so we can’t miss the only opportunity I’ll have to showcase my favorite and only Purim Crunk song, called, appropriately, “Purim Crunk.” It was commissioned by Emory University's Hillel last year. I’m pretty sure the artists weren’t Jews, which makes their accurate retelling of the Purim story all the more impressive. Please download this song and play it loud and proud at your Masquerade balls this weekend.

Don’t have a Purim plan? JDub has five, in NY, Boston, Cleveland, SF, & LA and we’d love to see you at one of them.

Previously: Yeasayer and more

Welcome to a new semi-regular column by JDub Records founder Aaron Bisman. Since he spends his days immersed in new Jewish music,we asked him what he listens to on his time off. The answer: More Jewish music, plus some funk and indie rock.

What I’m listening to:

Bonnaroo, here we come: The hippie hipsters of Yeasayer"Wait for the Summer" – Yeasayer
I’m not as up on music as I’d like to be—probably not up enough to qualify as a true hipster. So maybe I’m late to jump on this bandwagon, but after spotting Yeasayer on many a “Best of 2007” list, I caught the young Brooklyn ensemble live at Bowery Ballroom and became an instant fan. They remind me of many things—Talking Heads, Toubab Krewe, 70s classic rock—without sounding like any of them. They do make me think “indie” and “alternative” might be turning into new euphemisms for “jam band,” but hey, I like the 2 AM set at Bonnaroo.

"P’sach Lanu Sha’ar (Open the Gates for Us)" – The Sway Machinery
Jeremiah Lockwood is a member of Balkan Beat Box and a recipient of the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. This unreleased recording is part of his fellowship project, Hidden Melodies Revealed. Cantorial solos, Afro-pop horn lines, and Jeremiah’s obsession with the blues meld into a sound that’s genuinely unlike any other on the scene today—Jewish or otherwise. Jeremiah performs like a man possessed. His shows, which feature members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Antibalas, and the Arcade Fire, are exciting and frightening all at once. How else would you want your Rosh Hashanah liturgy? I can’t wait for the full record.

"House by the Sea" – Iron & Wine
I thought Iron & Wine was a singer-songwriter, but after playing his new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, on repeat, I’m not so sure. He transcends the narrow boundaries of such genre classifications with songs like “House by the Sea," which begins with a swell of sounds that is mostly (entirely?) acoustic but could just as easily be an electronica intro to a Thievery Corporation song. A minute in, it turns into a beautifully melodic masterpiece. He doesn’t lose any of the textures but continues to build them up, keeping me interested in the story and the sound, and leaving me feeling like I want to live in this lush aesthetic.

No cough syrup necessary: Kid Cudi"Day 'N’ Nite" – Kid Cudi
This is my new jam, but I don’t know how to pronounce his name. (Cutie? Cuddy like what a cow chews?) Regardless, the newest signing to Fool’s Gold (the label from A-Trak, the turntable wiz who also happens to be Kanye’s DJ and a Polish-Canadian-Jew), turns out a slick electro backpacker banger. The half-time beat reminds me of a chopped and screwed remix, except this song is dance-floor–worthy without the two bottles of cough syrup.

"Kartzioy (Leeches)" – Sagol 59
I’ve known Sagol, the Godfather of Israeli hip hop, since 2000, when I met him performing at the now defunct Syndrome in Jerusalem. It was one of the first hip-hop shows in Israel, a low-key affair with Sha’anan Street of Hadag Nachash, a few hooting hippies, and a sax player who claimed to have been in one of Miles Davis’ bands. He’s come a long way since those days of covering NWA in Hebrew.

Sagol’s newest album, Make Room, which will be coming out on JDub later this spring, was produced by a 17-year-old prodigy named Johnny HaKattan (little Johnny). It brings his lyrical assault into a brighter, poppier palette of sounds that has challenged Sagol to update his flow and his lyrics. The first five times I heard the chorus to this song, I thought it was some African dialect; the distorted, high-pitched vocals blend together into an almost indistinguishable sound, and my Hebrew’s not that great. In reality, he’s telling the story of the constantly downtrodden—what Israelis call “a fryer.” (Basically, a sucker. If you’re Israeli, you probably live in fear of being classified as one because everyone’s trying to screw you.)

Blow Your Head – Fred Wesley & The JBs
Fred Wesley has played trombone with Parliament, with Bootsy Collins, and, most famously, in the JB’s (that would be James Brown’s band, both with and without the Godfather of Soul). I got this track on a cheesy-looking compilation from 1988 called “James Brown’s Funky People pt. 2.” Whenever I need a little pick-me-up in the office, I turn this on. It opens with a wicked synth line, and then the drums come in and you can see the Funky People getting down. I either want to dance with them or sample this in a hip hop beat (which I’m sure has already been done to death).

Guess what Fred’s newest project is? Playing with JDub’s own Socalled – you can hear him on a track from Ghettoblaster called “(These are the) Good Old Days.”

L'chaim: now can we please clear the floor for a hora? While playing a set at the opening of the new Fendi store in Paris, singer and oft-mentioned Jewcy celeb Amy Winehouse commented that she was glad to get the gig, and jokingly (?) added that she was also available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.

“Well, maybe not a wedding," Winehouse continued. My music's a little too heartbreak. For a wedding, you need something meeker."

Yeah, there's something about the idea of having your first dance to 'You Know I'm No Good' that seems sort of off. Kind of like inviting the worst dressed person of the year to play at a fashion week party.

Yeshiva pin-up: CataldoOne-woman band Emilia Cataldo’s e-mail signature says "I want to end up happy like everyone else." You have to wonder if it’s biting irony or an honest sentiment—after all, her music is chock full of both. Sincere, sweet, and sugary-voiced, Cataldo (who plays under the stage name Nehedar) is a product of that same New York singer-songwriter scene that produced Regina Spektor. Actually, she’s a byproduct of that scene and the uptown Washington Heights Jewish scene, having gone to Yeshiva University and been embraced by the Mima’amakim crowd of Orthodox experimental poets.

She was forced to drop out when her mother fell ill. In the years since, she’s lived on the street, cared for her teenage sister, and just happened to record like a maniac. After an uneven demo last year, Pick Your Battles (great songs, but the mixing is off), Nehedar returns with the just-released Dreamlike. It’s at once more mature and more playful, with weird folk-to-metal breakdowns that don’t only work but, astonishingly, soar.

What sort of Jew were you raised? What made you end up at Yeshiva University?

My upbringing was shamanistic/atheistic. I ended up at YU because of an experience at Rainbow Gathering after I ran away from home (with some permission)...I have been a poster child of the [religious] kiruv movement. Since then, I’ve felt a tremendous sense of empowerment over my religiosity.

There's been barely any time at all between the release of your first record and this album, and yet there's a world of thematic difference -- production values, lyrics, even the genres you sample from. What motivated the switch?

I had a big year after putting out the last album, and I'm addicted to recording. I went right back into the studio after Dreamlike came out. The style change is mostly based on my own ability to play guitar, which I didn't really have when Dreamlike came out. As far as different songs being in different genres, did I mention that my dad plays sax on ”Conspiratorium?” I was looking for a song to include him, so it had to be jazzy.

You've talked about being homeless and still playing concerts and keeping a steady creative output. What's that like? How do you balance the stuff that you need to do for life, and the stuff you need to do for your soul?

When I didn't really live anywhere I used to go to [guitarist] David Kesey’s on Monday nights and we would write new material on the spot. That was worth living for...”Dino” was a product of that kind of thing. As was "Subway Ratt." Otherwise I don't know how creative I really was. Being homeless is really about surviving.

Your parents are both formally trained musicians -- your father plays jazz sax, your mother is a classical pianist. Was music a big part of your household? Was there a period when you "broke away" -- stopped playing the music they wanted you to, started rocking out?

Music was a huge part of my house growing up. Since my parents were anti-establishment musicians, I think that my breaking out was a brief time between 13 and 16 when my parents didn't know what I was doing. Part of the fun of rebellion in my family was being a self-absorbed teen that didn't realize that their parents were cool.

You sing about some really depressing things, and yet, you never fail to sound chirpy when you're doing it. The first song on the new album springs to mind -- that chorus, "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out"? Where did that come from?

That song was REALLY FREAKING INTENSE. It was inspired by a combination of a friend jumping off of the Empire State Building and another intense experience ending with a family member in an institution in the same week.

Whoa.

That song ended up taking on multiple meanings—G-d talking to us, apologetically, about who He has to take out, and a main personality talking to a subordinate personality and claiming ownership over their body.

The chirpyness is because we are trapped in this reality and optimism translates. If someone spreads a pessimistic message, people will block it out. Negative messages are at least up for discussion.

What goes through your mind when you sing songs?

When I sing, I think about the song. There’s nothing else worth mentioning.

Portraits of the artists: Left, Celan; right, KaufmanAvant-garde musician Dan Kaufman fronts the band Barbez, who play a tangled and compelling web of experimental jazz, prog-rock, and Radiohead-and-Mogwai-influenced barely-pop. Force of Light, Kaufman’s breakaway solo debut, is surprising in several ways. For one thing, all the music is played by Barbez. For another, it’s a mostly-instrumental album composed of covers of poems.

The record’s subject is Paul Celan, a poet born in Romania who, after surviving the Holocaust, lived most of his life in France. While being held in a Romanian ghetto, he finished a major translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In later years, he turned his attention inward, both as an artist and an activist of the Holocaust. As a contemporary of Heidigger and Derrida, he looked at humanity with a mixture of despair and hope. Ultimately, though, despair won, and he drowned himself in the River Seine in spring 1970.

On the album, you quote a line from Celan’s "Conversation in the Mountains”: "What does a Jew have that is really his own/that is borrowed, taken, and never returned?" Why make a record about him?

I made the album about Celan primarily to honor him, to sort of place my stone of remembrance and love on his grave. The music is just one person's impression of his words, one way to hear them. I think this music, like his words, avoids dogmaticism. Music, by its nature, honors multiple points of view…and Celan had a fierce point of view.

I also wanted to introduce his work to people who might not know of it. One of the most satisfying parts of making this record has been people telling me that they went out and bought his books of poetry.

Was there a reason you released Force of Light under your own name and not the band’s?

It came out under my name because it was a very personal project of mine. I wanted my dear friends and closest collaborators working with me, and their contribution was phenomenal. But this record felt like a very personal document and it was realized and conceived in a different way than previous Barbez albums.

Something about Barbez's sound—a mix of old European folk music and ultra-modern droning guitars and waily ambient theremins and violins—really compliments Celan's balance between his experiences during WWII and his fairy tale-like imagery.

How much of your sound was laid out from the beginning, and how much of it was evolution?

It was pretty much all evolution. We knew it was going to be dark from the beginning. But our sound grew out of who was in the band and actually deliberately not having any predisposed idea of what we were going to do or sound like. There's such a wide spectrum of influence within us, from Schnittke to Black Sabbath, and that all filters into our sound.

How did you meet John Zorn? At what point did the album materialize?

John came to hear us one night performing music for a John Jesurun play at LaMaMa. The album came about rather beautifully and simply. He asked me if I'd like to make an album for the Jewish series on Tzadik. I had wanted to do something about Celan for years and it turned out he's a huge Celan fan as well.

How did you find Fiona Templeton to read Celan's lyrics? Was there any compulsion to do it yourself?

I used to go out with Fionaa—that's how I met her—and she's a wonderful poet and performance artist in her own right. I think she's one of the best poetry readers I've ever seen. I love how she lets the words speak for themselves. There's no special pleading. And yet there's real passion and a fierceness, like Celan's fierceness.

Like an 8th grade slow-dance: Except no one else is dancing but you One of my favorite things about wedding planning: fantasizing about the playlist. I’m borderline tone-deaf and haven’t played an instrument since I quit piano in sixth grade, but like pretty much everyone except Vladimir Nabokov, I’m insanely susceptible to the emotional appeal of music. In this week’s New York Review of Books, Colin McGinn argues that we’re all saps in the face of a good song because music plays a big part in our sexual selection:

Musical ability is like the peacock's tail: a trait that advertises fitness and health, without directly aiding in the serious business of survival—a luxury that only the most vital can afford to possess.

In other words, we’re a musical species because music for us is a form of erotic display. McGinn spells out the implications:

Why, after all, is the love song the most popular form of music in the world? Because love songs are about the very thing that the music instinct is designed for—the selection of mates.

I don’t know how directly this conforms to my own taste in love songs, since for me the pinnacle of romance is famously-celibate Morrissey warbling about being hit by a bus with his lover. (“To die by your side/ Is such a wonderful way to die” – Darwin would be so disgusted.) But if our brains are wired to get all gushy about music, then no wonder wedding music is such a big deal that the Knot has devoted an entire section to it.

Some of the Knot’s ideas are hilariously awful. For one thing, their list of “hipster” wedding songs is straight out of modern rock radio circa 1997: Alanis Morrisette, Sarah McLachlan, Savage Garden. Also, they seem to be strongly in favor of ironic first dances, whereas I tend to believe that if you're dancing to the Monkees' “I’m a Believer" for reasons other than pure sentiment, then you aren’t ready for the lifelong commitment of marriage.

Then again, my own ideas aren’t much better. If I can’t have my celibate death-by-bus gloom-ballad, then my second choice is Ryan Adams’ “New York,” a song my fiancé and I listened to a lot when we first moved in together. But “New York” is best known as the unofficial theme song of 9/11. Romantic! And while I’ve also always been a sucker for Cat Power’s “Sea of Love,” Juno pretty much killed that one forever. My fiancé, meanwhile, seems to think our song is “Punk Rock Girl” by the Philadelphia 80’s band the Dead Milkman, which is adorable until you try to imagine dancing to it -- romantically, no less! -- in front of all your relatives.

Judaism doesn’t give you many guidelines in picking out wedding music – it’s far less helpful than the Knot in that respect. There’s really only one rule: No “Here Comes the Bride.” The wedding march from Wagner’s opera Lohengrin is verboten because Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer and a sort of unofficial Nazi house band. It happens, by the way, that shortly after the heroine in Lohengrin marries her beloved, he leaves her and she dies of grief, so antisemitism aside, it’s a pretty lousy precedent.

Previously: DIY Weddings

We love her: even though we can't understand what she's singing aboutIt’s astonishing to think a 30 second commercial could lead to a song and an album becoming the most popular on iTunes, but that’s what’s happened to French-Israeli musician Yael Naim, whose single “New Soul” is featured in the new MacBook Air ads. The phenomenon is a testament not only to the catchiness of Naim’s song, but also to Apple’s growing influence as a pop music tastemaker. As Machinist’s Farhad Manjoo points out, “New Soul” has been getting better reviews than the MacBook Air.

But what sets Naim apart from other Apple success stories like Feist, Gorillaz, and the Fratellis, is that while her most well-known song is in English, much of her new album is in Hebrew. It’s not exactly a cross-over, but more of a mish-mash of cultures and languages that reflect Naim’s own diverse background. Born in Paris to Tunisian parents, Naim spent her childhood in Israel, and now lives and performs in France.

My Hebrew is far from fluent, but there’s still something appealing about the Hebrew songs that transcends the language barrier, thanks to their catchy melodies and Naim’s soulful, agile voice. It’s nice to see that she hasn’t compromised completely in order to appeal to the American audience, but maybe that’s part of her mystique; there’s the excitement of discovering an obscure artist from a far-away land (even though Apple has done the discovering).

While Naim’s album feels more European than American, it does include a tribute to our own pop princess, with a cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Naim’s version replaces the raunchy overtones of the original with a more subdued, quirky take on the song. Overall, Yael Naim is reminiscent of other popular female singers like Norah Jones and Corrine Bailey Rae, in the sense that all three women have proved themselves to be the anti-Britneys; they rely on their voices, songwriting, and musical ability to produce a likeable, grown-up brand of pop.

Check out Naim’s version of “Toxic.”

So punk rock, they publish their hate mail on their website: The ShondesThe Shondes are the newest product of Brooklyn’s cross-section of Jewish and hipster culture, merging punk sensibilities with queer identity, radical politics and—most importantly—flapper flamboyance. Their just-released debut album, The Red Sea, is noisy enough to be punk, but complex enough to rank with bands like Arcade Fire and Architecture in Helsinki. It’s a dazzling, velvety blend of half-shouted, half-harmonized three-part vocals, and a fierce and fragile balance between lead guitar and lead violin. The latter is played by Elijah Oberman, formerly of the Syndicate, and one of the foremost violinists in the punk scene today—admittedly not a huge pool to choose from, but still impressive.

Borrowing their name from the Yiddish word for disgrace, the Shondes—three of its four members are Jewish—have become known as much for their politics as their music, espousing groups like Jews Against the Occupation and Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. In their short existence, they’ve played with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, Joe Lally of Fugazi, and Erase Errata, among others.

Their record, The Red Sea, is available at shows, or on Insound.

Okay, so why "The Red Sea"?

One of my favorite moments at Passover is the part of the Exodus story right before the parting of the Red Sea. Nachshon jumps into the water and only after he’s gone as far he could on his own does the Red Sea part.

That sums up where we're coming from as a band. It's very personal, it's very political, pushing ourselves and living intensely, and making music.

Is your violin background classical?

Yeah, I studied classical for years. I realized that path wasn't for me, though at this point I wish for more of those kinds of skills. I definitely think I'm a rock violinist, but that's a major tradition that I come from.

I spent a whole lot of my childhood obsessed with R.E.M., and classical music is definitely an obvious one (especially the Romantics). I also really love punk rock and feminist punk, but that came a little later for me.

Band on the run: How cute are they?How did you manage to star in a Poison video [their recent remake of “What I Like about You”]?

We were at a photo shoot for Curve, and they were shooting the Poison video in the studio down the hall. This guy came in and was like, we're shooting a Poison video next door, no I'm not joking, yes Poison still exists, and we need extras. We were all cracking up, of course, and it was too hilarious an opportunity to pass up.

Do you ever write songs about each other?

Only silly ones that we make up in the van. One favorite is "What's Goin’ on with Eli" to make fun of me and sound like an after-school special. A lot of our songs are about relationships—romantic, familial, relationship to the world.

What's the story of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" [video below] Clearly, it's not a Carole King cover…

No, though we all like that song, and it's an obvious inspiration to ours. It's about what's hard for people in relationships. The more you've been hurt, the harder it is to let someone see you and know you, even if you love them and really want to let them. There's always that fear that they might love you now, but if you let them know you, will they still love you? Louisa wrote the words, so obviously she says it in a way that's particular to her experience, but it's a feeling that's pretty easy to relate to.

It's hugely cute that you all thank your families first on the record. Is your queerness still an issue for them (or, has it ever been)? Is your being punk-rock stars an issue?

I think all of us have been lucky enough to get support by our families. Personally, my family has been really supportive of me, which isn't to say that we haven't processed or had difficulties in our relationships (like most people do), but that's not the main thing. My mom came up to New York for our record release show, which was really wonderful.

I know at least some of you have jobs in the organized Jewish community. Has anyone said to you at your desk job, "Hey, aren't you the chyck/dude/other who I saw onstage going crazy last night?"

Actually, a bunch of my co-workers came to our record release party here in New York a couple weeks ago, which was really sweet!

About the politics of the record: it seems a little strange for a band with members who are queer and trans-identified to espouse the Palestinian cause, when the Palestinian government's been so resolutely anti-queer and even sentenced gay couples to death. What's your take?

We are social justice activists who oppose oppression of all kinds. This means fighting for queer rights, an end to the occupation of Palestine and justice for all people. As Jews (3 of us are Jewish), it is particularly important to stand with other people of conscience around the world and represent our opposition to Israeli state terror and the demonization of Palestinian culture.

Is "Your Monster" a concealed reference to the Muppets?

No, but we do love the Muppets! Temim really does an excellent Animal.

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

No, no, no: Maybe this time Amy will actually be rehabilitated! People reports that Amy Winehouse bowed to pressure from her record label and headed to a treatment facility yesterday. "She has come to understand that she requires specialist treatment to continue her ongoing recovery from drug addiction and prepare for her planned appearance at the Grammy Awards. She is nominated in an incredible six categories," Universal Music Group's statement reads. Accentuate the positive!  The recent video of her smoking what seemed like crack may have been a factor.

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

Christmas time is silly season in the newspapers; stories abound of politically-correct churchmen replacing nativity plays with right-on interfaith ceremonies, local councils banning advent calendars for fear of offending Muslims, and so on. Some of these stories are true, most are bullshit, and the world continues to turn.

 

But now they’re coming for the Finest Christmas Song Of All Time ™, and it’s time to draw a line in the sand. ¡No pasarán!

 

BBC Radio 1 has said it will allow the Pogues' Fairytale of New York to be played on the station uncut, after criticism of a decision to censor it.

The words "slut" and "faggot" had been dubbed out from the 20-year-old festive hit by station executives. But after a day of criticism from listeners, the band, and the mother of singer Kirsty MacColl, they changed their minds.

Sanity prevailed on this occasion, but for a while there it looked as if one of the festive season’s few pleasures had been emasculated. Radio 1, which is still Britain’s most popular chart music station, has courted controversy before; famously refusing to play “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood after twigging to the pretty thinly-veiled sexual references, their decision to ban it sent the song rocketing up the charts and into immortality (it even spawned a bizarre computer game).

 

Banning songs now seems like a throwback to a distant age, but the whole arsenal of dubbing, bleeping and ‘clean’ edits to avoid offending the oversensitive souls among us still rankles. I don’t really care that much when such soft censorship is applied to gangsta rap, or whatever the hell you call it, because there’s only so many times I can hear the word “motherfucka” before I start to get bored anyway – but when a great song like Fairytale is targeted, we’re crossing from mere silliness into full-on absurdity.

 

Sadly but unsurprisingly, it seems like Peter Tatchell, for whom I have a lot of time, doesn’t agree. In condemning the BBC’s U-turn he argues, slightly disingenuously, that he’s not calling for homophobic language to be banned, merely for some consistency between homophobic and racist abuse. He has a point, of course – most of us wouldn’t belt out Fairytale with quite the same drunken abandon if the word “nigger” appeared in the slot occupied by “faggot” – but ultimately Tatchell’s complaint falls because he doesn’t address context.

 

Even Peter doesn’t claim to find the lyric offensive; I’ve never met a gay man who does. Fairytale doesn’t call for gays to be murdered, for example, as the Jamaican dancehall artists targeted by Tatchell's Stop Murder Music campaign do. The lyrics depict a drunken domestic fight, and the song uses earthy, ‘offensive’ language, but - news flash - this is the way people in the real world talk. People are more sophisticated than usually given credit for, and they understand that they’re listening to two characters talk and squabble, not an attack by the singer on their way of life. Most gays are no more offended by the use of homophobic language, in this context, than I was when Tony Soprano mocked Uncle Junior for enjoying “eating pussy”.

 

It’s not uncommon, where I come from, to taunt a colleague who’s sticking to the soft drinks on a night out by calling them a “poof”. I plead guilty to doing it myself, quite frequently. No offence is ever meant, nor taken. Yet if, in the midst of a drunken argument, I deliberately insulted a gay friend by calling him a “faggot”, he would probably be an ex-friend by the time we sobered up. Context is all; the word has only the meaning we choose to attach to it.

 

Such is our terror of “causing offence” these days, though, that companies like the BBC employ whole teams of people to ensure that it never happens, pre-empting any possible complaint by neutering the sentiments in the original song. And, as Brendan O’Neill points out in his response to Tatchell, it’s funny to note how censorship has, slowly but surely, mutated from a tool of the intolerant right into a weapon that is more frequently used nowadays by the oh-so-tolerant left. In its painfully angst-ridden-liberal way, the BBC’s elitist sympathies are there for all to see; appalled at such uncouth language befouling the airwaves at a time of family celebration and determined, in their own narrow-minded, thin-lipped and very British way, to uphold a certain level of decorum and protect the fragile diversity of our society. If we don’t stand up for the faggots, the towelheads and the niggers against this sort of rough abuse, they fret, who will?

 

The idea that gay men might not need to be protected from Kirsty MacColl, or that we might not want to see all the rough edges in our culture smoothed out into a bland homogenous soup, clearly doesn’t occur to these guys. But that, finally, is why Fairytale is so enduringly popular. Christmas isn’t all about crackling fires and kissing under the mistletoe any more than life is a bowl of cherries, and if it takes an addle-brained old piss artist to remind us of it, so much the better. Censoring art is more offensive than the word “faggot”.

 

UPDATE: Video of the song below. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few years